We have been working away to get perms implemented in the release version of BuilderBot. It seems to work ok, but there are some session issues that are a bit tweaky. In fact we sent a copy of the pre-release application over to Jack at LL last night. We would like to be among the first to have registered status for SL. There have been a lot of tech issues getting this to run smoothly -- makes us wonder if LL isn't messing around with something somewhere to block 3rd party applications completely. 

LL's latest threat to kill accounts that use "unapproved" viewers has also stopped our testing on the SL grid for BuilderBot. No one, rightly so, wants to give LL a reason to delete their account (especially if they can copy their own stuff off the grid)

Linden Lab has always had lots of interesting ideas about many things. Many of these have been only partially implemented, many not implemented at all. You can look at this situation as opportunities or broken promises--Cyn's post about Content Management offers a mixed bag of both. The whole topic of intellectual property and digital content is complex and deep.

In fact just by using SL you have already copied other people's content to your computer which you only have limited rights to use. The existing SL TOS muddles a lot of this by actually taking ownership of everything you put into SL (see TOS 3.3). So probably LL which is a licence holder to your content and owner of the data would also have a claim on any outside SL usage of content (whether or not it is yours).  Linden probably could argue that while the textures you import are yours, the prims are in fact theirs and you are only modifying them.

I was on the Designing World inworld  Treet tv interview show last night talking about BuildberBot and IP and some other stuff. (I don't think I said anything too useless, but it was sorta late here in the UK, so probably I did. I did react a bit unkindly to what seemed like a snarky jab from Angelica--but I think I got that wrongly and we kinda virtually shook hands after the show.  No need to make debates personal. )  As the show ended, we noticed that LL posted a detailed err, roadmap/wishlist for what copying is about in their view. It is quite a long piece and raises lots of issues and opens doors to discussion with them, which is a good thing in general--but also a little late since so many sims have been wiped and content lost forever.

We would like to thank the people that left constructive comments and sent emails, notes regarding our request for feedback on our BuilderBot release plan.  Clearly people feel that releasing the code opensource is very troublesome and makes defending their content rights more difficult.  We can accept these concerns and will alter our plans. We did ask for feedback, we appreciate it and now will do something about it. 

COMMENTS CLOSED -- SEE UPDATED INFORMATION ON BUILDERBOT RELEASE HERE.

We made a set of tools to help us archive and move our content that is/was on the SL grid. We called it "BuilderBot" as it automates the process of finding objects on a region and converting them into OAR files that can be used offline and/or inside any OpenSim grid. We also made a tool to look at the OAR file offline and edit it. This is particularly useful to merge content from several OAR files. We think this is pretty handy stuff and thought it would make sense to release it for serious content creators. There are of course some issues relating to this and we would like to explain our approach to releasing it and invite some constructive comments. Please leave comments, suggestions here or drop us a line using our handy enuff contact form.