Today the Open Simulator group announced the formation of Overte Foundation, a 501c(3) entity that allows tax free donations from the USA. The foundation will hold the rights to the code that makes up the simulator, the server side of many virtual worlds. It appears the main purpose is to clean up licensing issues and head off future problems. But, what does this do for the OpenSim user? To understand we need to know a bit about the Open Simulator Project and what is changing.
One change is a uniform license is being created for those contributing code to the project labeled; Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA). Quoting the Foundation, “Under this agreement, each OpenSimulator developer, including the core developers, will continue to retain copyright over their code but will also grant an explicit copyright license over their contributions to the Overte Foundation.”
The current licensing is BSD, which does not require an author to state they have all necessary rights to contribute code to the Open Simulator Project. The CLA changes that. Nor does BSD grant a right to distribute the code to an explicit entity. The new licensing will deal with that too.
