Ducking Rights

I've been sort of goggling at this huge, baggy, vacuous interview that Robert Bloomfield has done with Philip Rosedale (Philip Linden), whose content-free status he has earnestly sought to cover up by inviting some of his close friends to comment on various facets of this interview, taken at SLCC. I guess it's because Rob, not content to be an accounting professor in RL and a sort of Ed Sullivan for the Metaverse with his reallly big Metanomics sheeew, wants to play journalist and interviewer as well. Metanomics has gotten more and more hypey, however, and untethered from anything related to economics as time goes on (they are now deep into education, which I guess kinda sorta relates to the SL economy because edu types buy sims and that helps the Lindens' bottom line -- and the gown is supposed to trickle down to the town, too.

Philip was looking as cute as a button as usual at Picnic interviewed by Mixed Realities' Roland Legrand, in a white jacket with large black-bordered lapels that looked like it was made on that cartoon sim but probably cost a fortune in a RL boutique. But he didn't say anything new. I mean...not..a...thing. I almost felt embarrassed for the guy, except that he seems as enthusiastic as ever. If you were wondering what Philip does now all day, well, I thought he was working on the viewer, or on easing the interface. So it came as kind of a shock to learn from Dusan and the Blob that M Linden has farmed out that task to an outside design firm. Wow. Well, the Lindens couldn't get it right, I guess they had to do that but...wow.

We've all been over this ground, of course, and we all know what I think -- get rid of that ugly drop-down blue thing and put the search up in the middle and ditch "search all" which returns loads of junk anyway -- keep it all in tabs like amazon.com I shudder to think what a geeky nouveau VW design firm will do with this viewer. It's of course annoying to be working on an orientation infohub and know that anything I write about the viewer now will be OBE'd soon -- but then, we're used to that experience in SL all the time, Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football.

Still, I miss Philip, because Philip always seemed to me more approachable. AFAIK, M Linden has never come in world for any kind of town hall or office hour or anything, and I think that's wrong. All the other Lindens come. And, there's now to be a T Linden (not to be confused with that long-ago-canned T-bone Linden) who is going to be called grandly Senior Vice President of Product (does that leave Robin Linden Senior VP of Marketing of Product that she doesn't get to have a say in as much now? How does that work?)

Out of all the stuff Philip has been saying, one reiteration that -- not surprisingly -- Benjamin Duranske was assigned to comment -- is the most disturbing. Again, he's not saying anything new when he tells you that law will be decentralized, there won't be any Magic Law of the Metaverse, just local regulations that will govern servers that are in those countries. This is awful stuff, and of course -- again, not surprisingly -- Benjamin Duranske is acquiescing because I don't really think he has a very healthy respect for the concept of international law and the rule of law. Given his prosecutorial zeal about gambling and investments and his conservative and cautious commentary on IP law around SL, he's more about rule-by-laws than looking to push the envelope for any sort of more enlightened international norms. I find this more and more these days, and I wonder what they teach in law school...

Here's the relevant section:

PHILIP ROSEDALE: I would say our overall philosophy remains that, given that the system is global, so we have users from many countries, it’s likely to become more open and less locally regulated. That is to say, as people are running servers in their own countries, you’re going to have different regulatory regimes, and therefore, treatment of different content or experiences, whatever. What this suggests is that we need to really redouble our efforts to regulate and create central policies as little as possible, recognize that those policies will probably be fractured at international boundaries and by people who are running servers. Today we own and operate all the servers. We don’t believe that, long term, that’ll be the case. So as people are operating their own servers, they’re likely to have different policy and regulatory decisions. So I think our basic goal is what it’s always been. I think we’re staying pretty true to it. As the world gets bigger, there are things that we’ll do. It’s just to reasonably promote stability and the growth of the overall world while imposing as little policy or regulation as possible to do that. Every time we impose a policy of some kind, everybody’s going to say, “You’re taking away our freedom.” But—

Note how Philip does a real slight of hand here -- he talks about how Second Life will become "more open and less locally regulated." By that he means that Linden Lab will regulate less and "leave it to local authorities" -- as if that were progress everywhere! (Obviously it won't be in places like Russia or China).

This is an amazing card trick, because it enables Philip to make it sound like Second Life is this hugely flexible and free software that anyone can adapt...but in fact what it means is that some will adapt it to make something very restrictive (like that BDSM viewer, for example...).

Suddenly, he can make it sound like "liberalism" "to create central policies as little as possible" -- and thereby missing his historic opportunity to set norms, to push the envelope, to uphold certain universal values that in fact have been established in international law, basic notions of freedom of speech and assemble, freedom from discrimination, and due process.

SL could grow slower, growing out those universal norms. It could simply refuse to set down roots in places where an open society is not protected or encouraged. It could be pushing the outer limits. Instead, merely for the sake of marketing, branding, and of course access (and the eventual power that comes from access), Linden Lab will be spreading...something...some sort of culture...but not the universal rule of law.

Imagine, fearing that a policy that would permit freedom of speech and association, and not do authoritarian regimes' work for them, would be "fracturing" at international boundaries. What a lack of vision. And in fact, I don't think it's any *loss* of vision; I don't think Philip Linden ever *had* the idea of having Second Life represent universal values; I think like all Silicon Valley software and service providers he is agnostic at best or actually unmindful of authoritarian regimes at worst, following the school of thought some businessmen promote for China -- first, change the economy, first do business, first establish ties, and, oh, liberalization will come...later. Inevitably. Some day. Sure....

In fact, doing it that way, you merely create a very smug and well-fed new class around the regime that is reliant on the regime for its privileges and can play the role of the larger-than-life liberal to naive Westerners, even while they do nothing to stop oppression at home, getting out their magnifying glasses for when it occurs abroad.

It would be one thing if Linden Lab did nothing -- did not promote Chinese oppression of free speech, let's say, or Saudi oppression of women's rights -- but threw up its hands, like Yahoo, and said, "well, in order to be there, we have to let them impose their local laws."

But when Philip eerily talks about what they will do in the future, I wonder if they *will* do the authoritarian governments' dirty work for them and let them connect to what is still supposed to be an integrated world (isn't it) with their oppressive rules. Look at this twisty, self-contradictory sentence: "As the world gets bigger, there are things that we’ll do. It’s just to reasonably promote stability and the growth of the overall world while imposing as little policy or regulation as possible to do that. Every time we impose a policy of some kind, everybody’s going to say, “You’re taking away our freedom.”"

Rob butts in then to say, "Except for the people who are saying, “Finally!” (Ugh). And then later Philip says, again, filled with contradiction:

"There are types of content where, if you do it, we will go after you. We don’t want the economy or the general quality of people’s experience to be impaired, and we’ll fight a little bit to protect that, but we really do recognize that, especially again with the use cases growing and the business models and the server models and stuff, open grids, all this stuff growing, it means that we probably need to be even smarter about moving toward… We’ll have less opportunities to set policy in the future even than we do today."

So what does this really mean? That the Lindens will do the minimum, like ban gambling or child pornography, in order to keep compliant with local law and increase business with enterprises -- but they will not try to uphold freedom of speech or association or non-discrimination? (even in their dumbed-down TOS versions, more restrictive than U.S. law?) At what point will they abandon even the overly restrictive versions of these rights in their TOS to enable a China or a Saudi Arabia to put in something far worse?

Why should Linden Lab have "less opportunity" to set policy? *They could make it a condition of licensing to use their software or connecting to their grid* that countries have to abide by at least a TOS-type set of norms. That they not discriminate against women or minorities or religious believers outside the state religion, for example. That they not punish speech critical of leaders. Why *couldn't* Linden Lab have such a vision? After all, Raph Koster of Metaplace has installed a Bill of Rights in his virtual world platform -- what is Linden Lab afraid of?!

I suspect that what's at work here isn't even some craven business pragmatism, of the sort you see in foreigners in China or Russia or Saudi Arabia, pulling their punches and going along to get along. I think the California Ideology, the techlib stuff, *doesn't care* about human rights. It seems them as add-ons. It's enough for them to have human rights themselves -- let other people take care of their own struggle for them, and don't show them any solidarity. The idea of being *connected* take precedence over *the content in the pipeline when the connection is being made*. (Like Connectivism).

Linden Lab has never had to face the Yahoo-type human rights test. So far, when it has banned gambling under U.S law about online gaming, or when it has banned simulated child pornography under EU laws, most people see this as ending and preventing criminality, not cramping freedom of expression (it's very hard for the minority of geeky edge-casers to admit the difference between criminality and rights).

But when LL faces its first cases of women being expelled or not allowed access if they are not keeping to some code of dress or behaviour, or if minorities are expelled, or if dissidents criticize their government, or gays openly defy local oppressive laws and are banned or worse, even jailed in RL -- what will the Lindens do? It sounds to me as if they hope to do as little as possible, and blame it on local servers.

Comments

[Nacon]

Sorry... all it said was "blah blah blah blah blah." can't make out of it, Prok.

Time to put your keyboard away, Doctor's order.

[Cocoanut Koala]

"I suspect that what's at work here isn't even some craven business pragmatism, of the sort you see in foreigners in China or Russia or Saudi Arabia, pulling their punches and going along to get along. I think the California Ideology, the techlib stuff, *doesn't care* about human rights."

You nailed it.

coco

[Sean Williams]

I suspect that what fueled this entire rant was the desire to see a private company doing what it has no right, need, or power to do: Enforce Laws and 'Rights' on the scale of the UN acting in another oppressed country.

Enforcing Human Rights? Sorry, that's out of the jurisdiction of Linden Lab.They are a private sector company, not an extension of the United States Government or the United Nations.

Frankly, I'd put more of my trust into the US government or into the UN to enforce Human Rights properly than I would Linden Lab (and that is saying something, as I don't trust the government very much either).

[Robert Bloomfield/ Beyers Sellers]

I wouldn't say the interview was 'content-free,'but I would agree that there isn't a whole lot new to people who cover Linden Lab/Second Life closely. But I would *hope* that Philip wouldn't give a tremendously newsworthy interview...that is hardly his job in this context. So I took the material, got some smart and informed people to give their thoughts, and now we have a useful resource for people who are just starting to study Linden Lab and Second Life.

The most interesting part of the interview to me was when he talked about making 'small bets' on investment and development. On the one hand, it lets Linden Lab minor adjustments without breaking the bank. On the other hand, it keeps them from making the sweeping changes that would dramatically improve the user experience. This strategy has worked reasonably well, but could well prevent them from achieving enterprise or mainstram consumer quality.

http://metanomics.net/19-sep-2008/capital-investment-profit-and-small-bets

As far as the focus of Metanomics itself, I have definitely been getting much more interested in enterprise use (and educators are among the most active enterprise users), while the inworld economy hasn't exactly been thriving. There isn't much to say about inworld finance these days.

But there is more than enough other material to cover on Social Research Foundation's survey of SL residents, SLExchange and fatfoogoo on monetization in VWs and games, Electric Sheep's new direction, Dmitri Williams' research on gamer behavior and demographics...

I dunno, Prokofy...those all seem like economics (or "business and policy in the metaverse") to me.

[Prokofy Neva]

Universities as enterprises? Since when do you call a university "an enterprise"? Universities are non-profits, Robert. They get the non-profit rate from Linden Lab and much else in life. They're supported by foundations and governments; tuition doesn't cover all their costs. This seems to me to really be stretching the notion of business -- and the economy. The economy of non-profits is mildly interesting, but no more interesting than inworld business.

So, just because inworld business is suffering due to land glut or other bad company town policies, we're to declare it no longer of merit to discuss? If anything, it's a wonderful petri dish to study and discover why those policies fail and how they could be changed. But of course, you were never interested in inworld business except for a few of your pet gadget makers.

This statement doesn't even need commentary: " But I would *hope* that Philip wouldn't give a tremendously newsworthy interview...that is hardly his job in this context."

Maybe he didn't get asked very good questions.

The "small bets" idea sounds to me like it's merely driven by lack of sufficient profit or angel money to be able to invest in bold new expensive development.

>Social Research Foundation's survey of SL residents

So now we're studying sociology, not economics. Just to be clear.

>SLExchange and fatfoogoo on monetization in VWs and games

SL isn't a game. It has a synthetic, although still real economy. Why are we studying games?

>Electric Sheep's new direction

They aren't in SL any more, and while Metanomics surely doesn't have to study only SL, what hasn't happened is a realization by all the opensource lifers and punters hanging around Metanomics who haven't drawn the conclusions needed about proprietary sofware -- and in fact there has been precious little commentary about the Sheep chosing deliberately to make walled gardens and proprietary worlds in the face of the difficulties spawned by all the script kiddies.

SL is not a game. Why are we studying games?

These do not at all seem like business or policy to me but...passtimes.

[Dusan Writer]

Maybe I've been drinking the "M" Koolaid or whatever but I do see progress beyond just small bets - I see small bets being made in the context of a fairly focused mission with stated priorities and consistent (although often vapid) communication through the Blob and other venues.

As far as Philip, I don't go back as far maybe, the world is still young to me, and the innovation was already here so I didn't take that wild ride as his vision came to life....but where I'm left today is parsing the many seeming contradictions in his "vision". And maybe that's leadership - being able to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time kind of thing. But I often have the feeling that Philip slips between, say, talking about techy stuff like how big the Lively download is (as a way of refuting "browser-based worlds") and then talking about the future with virtual worlds as one of the default access points to information and people as if it will replace the Web. He switches tenses, changes hats (from visionary to garage-based coder; from community-focused to talking up business collaboration).

Philip again, as you point out, pulls off a sleight of hand, just as he does when he talks about browser-based worlds and getting grandma a job - he talks about "now" and then he slips into other tenses, whatever...where he begins and where he ends can be different thing.

And yeah, I covered this already:

http://dusanwriter.com/?p=941

And if I hear the words "use cases" one more time from someone who's supposed to be an evangelist for Second Life I'll, hmmm...dunno what, blog even more pointlessly than usual I guess. An evangelist is supposed to paint a picture about why this matters, what it means...to translate all that code talk into something I can send to my grandmother (his target demographic according to the interview hehe). And my grandmother does NOT know what a "use case" is.

But what disturbs me is that I believe that virtual worlds are about more than "use cases". And maybe I've reformed over time, because as much as I see value in the innovation in openSim (now that it's slipped past being merely a reverse engineer, but I won't debate the point, one person's innovation is another's copybot I guess) and getting this technology "out there" I think that one of the values of Second Life is that it is a WORLD, and as such is governed not just by technology that facilitates those damned use cases, but also by policy and governance and community relations and economics all of which makes it a place to be, feel, create, and explore.

So now Philip is also pointedly advocating that the role of the Lab is NOT in policy. And the OpenSim crowd heads for the Apache chopper whenever policy is brought up....so who IS the advocate for policy?

The potential of virtual worlds lies as much in seeming intangibles as it does in whether I can hold a telephone call with someone from Japan with an avatar between us.

"Intangibles" are things like how we manage identity, privacy, anonymity, sociality, content protection. These things are coupled with code and trying to make a Grid that everyone will love.

But now I'm hearing that these issues of policy, like on OpenSim, are in the hands of all those hosts out there - and I'm going to have to read the TOS for every one of these mini Grids?

This is going to create a vacuum and chaos. With everyone headed for the policy exits who's left tending to the stuff that matters because we "feel it" rather than because it makes us more productive or saves the ozone layer or whatever?

Raph at least has the guts to say that although Metaplace will be made up with not only "islands" but 100,000 different game mechanics, graphics, expressions, clients and 'use cases' - that there's a role for an overarching philosophy and structure around issues relating to rights, identity, theft - the whole lot.

For all the people headed for the exits, Philip included, it will be interesting to see how they feel when the devolution of policy to the granular "host" level results in people OUTSIDE virtual worlds, like national governments or whoever, come in and tell us that they know better how these worlds should be managed.

[Gareth Nelson]

"But now I'm hearing that these issues of policy, like on OpenSim, are in the hands of all those hosts out there - and I'm going to have to read the TOS for every one of these mini Grids?"

Apache don't tell you the TOS of every website hosted by an apache instance, why should opensim tell you the policies of every single opensim-based grid?

[Prokofy Neva]

Dusan,

I think Philip has just been forced into a marketing role for his product, and forced out to do all the roadshows at conferences, that it's almost second nature to him now to just shill about SL thoughtlessly, without hearing the contradictions. Maybe they are too uncomfortable for him to bear.

One of the ways the California ideologues function is to "stay positive". They brush away negativity, they shy away from it, they pretend it doesn't exist. The skate on the surface of life gladly because that gives them forward momentum. They don't look at the depths. Philip is like that.

Of course Second Life isn't just a bunch of use cases. Once you reduce it to use cases, you inevitably leave some out, and you lose the "world visision thing". You have to hand it to Philip, he still talks about it as "a world".

The Lindens are ducking their historical imperative and opportunity and pretending they can dissolve rights or policies into a zillion warring fiefdoms and principalities. They stand at the edge of a historical precipice when they could encourage the universality that brought us hope out of the wreckage of the last two centuries, and are now actively ceding that once universalist world and global vision to Balkanization and atomization that far from bringing freedom and flexibility in fact weakens civil society and makes it vulnerable to totalitarianism. (The Wikipedia essay on Hitler actually explains that problem of too many clubs in too many beer halls being a weakening of civil society making it ripe for the Big Lie instead of a necessary factory to challenge the state -- if the state is weakened too, they go down together.)

I think it's great Raph did have the guts to outline what's right. You can see from the frenzied fiskers on there trying to uphold child predator's rights in the name of saving freedom of expression how tough it is. He is getting edgecased to death -- or rather, people are trying to edgecase him to death but he's not budging so far, thank God, just saying "thanks, my lawyers are working on it" lol.

Imagine, the nits there claiming that Raph's stipulation that you "cannot simulate harm to minors" means you cannot enact Romeo and Juliet or Harry Potter. Well, um, crowd the theater with that, and we'll see if we need to shout "fire".

This is very well said: "when the devolution of policy to the granular "host" level results in people OUTSIDE virtual worlds, like national governments or whoever, come in and tell us that they know better how these worlds should be managed". That's part of the problem, but it's actually worse than that: when people INSIDE the virtual worlds shill for those governments who wish to control them, and do it handily from within. It's like the problem of the Herald's Jessica and China. When you have people actively promoting the party line from within, it's easy to make it look like "spontaneous residents" and "what the community wishes" blah blah.

[Dusan Writer]

Gareth - I don't think I argued that Apache NEEDS to, did I? What I'd argue is for, at the least, as much innovation, evangelism, advocacy, and thought on policy as 'code', just as Mozilla, say (to use the first example at hand) has policy and values as a way of articulating an underlying and coherent philosophy to guide code (or run parallel to code as the OpenSim folks like to say).

I think that a historic opportunity will be missed if all we end up with are protocols, frankly. I still go back to the e-mail example: sure, it works as code, but if there had been a parallel policy around identity, for example, then maybe spam never would have over run my in-box.

[Gareth Nelson]

"I still go back to the e-mail example: sure, it works as code, but if there had been a parallel policy around identity, for example, then maybe spam never would have over run my in-box."

There'd always be some spammer out there who would install their own smtpd and begin spamming. Just as there'll always be opensim installations run by griefers. I don't think it's the job of developers to tell you what you should put into your TOS.

[Gareth Nelson]

Oh, and mozilla never tell me what kind of policy I should have towards my kid's internet access (I don't run an internet cafe, so this is the best example I have practical experience with). They might have policies guiding their development, but it would be out of line for them to tell end users of their code what kind of policies to implement.

[Prokofy Neva]

Dusan, when E.M. Forster said "Only Connect" in 1910, he didn't mean "Only Protocols" or "Only Connectivism".

And yes, I love how OpenSim can conceive of a kind of "lore" that springs up along code, even as they say code is law, and then want code status for their lore. It's exactly that lore or culture of the geek making code not law that I object to. Then they cap it off with tribalist imperative in the form of parallel lore to code.

[ichabod Antfarm]

Gareth,

What is wrong with the concept of people (be they citizens, be they developers, be they just regular everyday people) deciding how they ought to interact with each other in any social situation, yes, even a virtual one?

I have never seen anything wrong with being overtly political in whatever I do and, let's face it, this is politics we are talking about.

What we don't trust about certain developers is their outspoken refusal to consider politics above and beyond "the code." I don't trust it because we humans are inherently political creatures and those who deny they are engaging in it are really just masking their politics as "common sense", as "force of nature", as "code". It's
anti-democratic, it's anti-social, it's unscientific.

It's funny how you claim that it isn't up to developers to tell people how to use the technology they develop and yet you told Prok that you would develop something for him but only under the condition that it could be GPL'ed. Uh, politics much?

[Gareth Nelson]

"What is wrong with the concept of people (be they citizens, be they developers, be they just regular everyday people) deciding how they ought to interact with each other in any social situation, yes, even a virtual one?"

Nothing, but it's not the job of software developers to make laws and social rules.... and it shouldn't be.

"It's funny how you claim that it isn't up to developers to tell people how to use the technology they develop and yet you told Prok that you would develop something for him but only under the condition that it could be GPL'ed. Uh, politics much?"

Of course once the code was released under the GPL my input would end there. The GPL states nothing on issues of policy in the services you use GPLed code for - the only political aspect to free software licenses are related to the politics of free software, and the politics of free software have no bearing on how the software is used. Put simply, I don't care how you use my code, but I won't willingly develop propritary software. Feel free to use my code for anything - but you can't buy the right to make it propritary.

You'll note that my exact statement was "I don't think it's the job of developers to tell you what you should put into your TOS" - your TOS should be written directly by yourself, or by your legal counsel under guidance from yourself and stakeholders. It should not be dictated by the developers of the software you use to run the service.

[ichabod Antfarm]

Gareth, the point people are trying to make is that the developed code is always already ideologically determined by the politics of its developers. It isn't this neutral thing you think it is. If it was I might concede your point that it is up to the user to determine how it is used; however, many of those usage decisions were already made by those who developed it. Do we enforce c/m/t or not? Do we encrypt IM or not? Do we allow admins to hijack accounts or not? These are all technical considerations and they are all political decisions. How these questions are answered determines the kinds of worlds people can create with your software.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, ichabod, the politics are there anyway, so why not make them explicit? Why not say, "Yes, we have politics" and be participatory and democratic about it, instead of saying "code is law but so is this tribal imperative." Gareth reaching out his long claw to tell you how to use his fake so-called "free software" -- that you can't adapt and resell or make proprietary so you can go on feeding his his tentacled technocommunism -- what is that if not a mafia directive?
If you are so magnanimous and helping The People then give, give, give, even if it is resold. Spread the wealth -- the real wealth. If you are too stupid to sell it, at least let somebody else sell it and not tier your ego for free...

[Gareth Nelson]

"Gareth reaching out his long claw to tell you how to use his fake so-called "free software" -- that you can't adapt and resell"

Being able to adapt and resell it are 2 very important core freedoms. Making it propritary is different however, that's not a freedom at all, but rather the power to restrict other people's freedom.

[Prokofy Neva]

http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/resources/duallicence.xml

[Gareth Nelson]

"With dual licensing, businesses are able to distribute their software as open source under one licence while generating revenue from commercial clients for it under the another licence. Many companies need the non-open source licence because they want to modify the software for competitive reasons and keep the source code of the modifications secret."

Emphasis on "and keep the source code of the modifications secret". The GPL does not prevent you from adapting the code (that's the whole point) or from reselling it. You just can't resell it without providing copies of your modifications alongside it.

[Gareth Nelson]

Oh, and for more emphasis:
"Dual licensing is not the only option for vendors looking to profit from open source. Many generate revenue from installation, customisation, support and on-going mantainance of open source software. Some also generate revenue from the sale of the hardware to run the software on or from training those who use it. Some vendors, typically large existing computer companies such as Sun Microsystems and IBM, do all of these as well as dual licensing."

Generally, doing only dual-licensing is a failing model - I can make all the changes I want in MySQL (for example) without paying a penny, but to hire a real expert would rightly cost quite a bit more.

[Prokofy Neva]

Gareth and other extremist script kiddies have been overtaken by history. Even ths OS movement will tell them that.

Communist doesn't work, doesn't pay, doesn't last.

http://useopensource.blogspot.com/2008/01/dual-license-model-future-of-open.html

and no, the Electric Sheep didn't place their modifications alongside the open code when they redistributed. Did they resell it? Well, of course they did! To CBS and others.

http://www.your2ndplace.com/node/723

This practice of taking people's voluntary work on the code, then enabling big "solutions providers" to modify it and selling them licenses to use their modified code -- and resell that -- has gotten people like Nobody to kvetch, and many more. I have to say I don't get it myself -- sounds like a shell game, at root. But if people are stupid enough to give away their labour for free and demand that ever after, anybody else modifying their work product will keep giving back to them, it's their funeral. They need to get a life; a second one would do.

Tateru has nosed around this too, trying to push the Sheep up against the wall, but they remain unflappable:

http://www.massively.com/2007/11/08/electric-sheep-looking-to-contribute-portions-of-onrez-viewer/

Basically, the moral of the story is, when you play stone soup, bring a big cup, if you can't bring a big turnip.

[Gareth Nelson]

"Communist doesn't work, doesn't pay, doesn't last."
As much as you accuse me and others who share my views of being communists, I wholeheartedly agree. Real communists i've met (i.e people actually in socialist political parties) I absolutely despise.

Oh, and none of my code will find it's way into a closed-source viewer, I never signed LL's contributor agreement for that very reason. If anyone wants to pay me to develop code for them or to host stuff for them though, they're more than welcome.

"if people are stupid enough to give away their labour for free"

I give my code away in exchange for more code and I give my other labour away for money.