Although many of us are disappointed with Linden Lab’s refusal to sell the IP and codebase of Versu to Emily Short it should be pointed out that Linden Lab are following a well trodden path. When titles shut down there is often a clamour for it to be saved or for the code to be made Open Source but this does not happen very often. There is no Open Source version of Cloud Party for example, it just vanished without much of a trace.
When City Of Heroes closed down there were campaigns to keep it alive and calls for it to be open sourced, but alas those calls fell on deaf ears. However Open Sourcing a project isn’t as straight forward as some may think, as Shava Suntzu points out in the comments of a previous post of mine about Versu :
There are lots of reasons applications can’t be open sourced. They may include proprietary libraries, or work by people who won’t release rights.
On top of this Linden Lab most definitely spent money on Versu, as Emily herself explained :
To be clear, Versu benefitted a lot from Linden’s early support, and I’m grateful for that. Without external support, what we would have now is not a well-developed open source project; what we would have is nothing in particular, because I would have needed to get a job doing something else.
Emily was of course a paid employee of Linden Lab so it’s not as if Linden Lab have taken her work away without recompense. In situations like this it’s all too easy to paint the company as the baddie … much too easy and whereas it does seem silly to spend money on a project and then shelve it when others are willing to take it off a company’s hands, this is generally the norm, rather than the exception.
However exceptions do exist, Glitch is a glaring example. The developers of Glitch released the code and art into the public domain, to be used for any purpose :
The collaborative, web-based, massively multiplayer game Glitch began its initial private testing in 2009, opened to the public in 2010, and was shut down in 2012. It was played by more than 150,000 people and was widely hailed for its original and highly creative visual style.
The entire library of art assets from the game, has been made freely available, dedicated to the public domain. Code from the game client is included to help developers work with the assets. All of it can be downloaded and used by anyone, for any purpose. (But: use it for good.)
Tiny Speck, Inc., the game’s developer, has relinquished its ownership of copyright over these 10,000+ assets in the hopes that they help others in their creative endeavours and build on Glitch’s legacy of simple fun, creativity and an appreciation for the preposterous. Go and make beautiful things.
Quake, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D have all entered the Open Source arena but in the main this does not happen. Whereas it remains deeply disappointing that Linden Lab have taken the decision to shelve Versu and prevent others from developing it further, they have done so because they think it’s in their best interests. Personally I think they’re wrong, but they are the people who have to make this decision, not me.
In many ways it’s disappointing there’s not a model whereby the company who invest in a product that they later see no future in can’t license the product and therefore earn royalties for their early initial work. I think companies may be more open to keeping projects alive if they felt their development would be rewarded later on.
I suspect LL said “No” by default, without thinking much about how things *could* be worked out. It’s the easy and safe thing to do for a company, and it doesn’t cost them any resources.
(And it also fits well with the overly-defensive ToS, which seems to be written to make sure that no matter what happens ever, LL has all the rights).
Good point, rather than trying to work edge cases and potential pitfalls it is much easier to stick with the agreed terms.