I just got notice from Charlene Linden (remember her! she's still there!) that my appeal to have my JIRA permaban lifted has failed and the original ruling upheld.
I have been attempting this appeal *for two long years* -- even more if you count the time spent fighting the first "disciplinary action".
Anyone who reads this JIRA will marvel that you can be BANNED for persistence in trying to solve *a bug* -- the infamous VWR 5491 that the Lindens and their fanboyz simply closed rather than admit there was a bug causing property loss -- although even Andrew Linden did admit it was a bug:
From Andrew Linden's office hour:
[11:29] Angela Talamasca: Andrew, have you had any time to look into VWR-5491? Although that was originally posted as a viewer bug, i hold that the problem spans both server and client side.
[11:30] Andrew Linden: Angela, I was talking about that bug earlier. I did try to read it
[11:30] Andrew Linden: It looks like there is a real bug or design flaw there. Yes it would require a server-side fix.
[11:30] Angela Talamasca: i did try to outline the issue to better clarify it.
[11:31] Andrew Linden: Ah yes Angela, actually thank you very much for your comments. Yours were the ones I was reading that helped me actually understand what was being talked about.
Full transcript: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Andrew_Linden/Office_Hours/2009_05_26
The other JIRA that evidently served as grounds for my dismissal was VWR-8049, or the Copyleftists' Trojan Horse, as I called it.
Similar technocommunist/technocapitalist issues surface in that JIRA too.
At first, Andrew Linden, for purely political reasons (he objected to my opposition) said he would do it.
Then he withdrew, pleading a change in the structuring of the staff work assignments, blah blah.
Unfortunately, one of the newer JIRA bullies, , has put her furry paws on this now and is pushing for a patch made for it by the original copyleftist booster, Catherine Pfeffer, to be rammed in during a triage.
Cummere is an AWGroupies regular; a complainer about privacy (all open source geeks are, they want anonymous unaccountability) an open source geek and frequent-flyer annoyance to other people busy-bodying on the JIRA.
"Catherine, Ive been asked by oz to pre-triage this, so if you can update this patch to work with viewer 2.x, I can discuss with him the possibility of getting your patch brought in. I for one would be very interested in seeing it done."
Ugh, the smug hall monitors' tone of "being asked by a Linden to do something" and showing off with it.
Oz, the ardent Stallmanite opensource goon that heads up the OS team, of course loves this sort of "feature".
It paves the way to a regime beloved by Infinity Linden/Meadh Oh which involves stripping property rights as a default and decoupling commerce from permissions.
If you read the discussion, you'll get the issue. The motivation was abundantly clear. The copyleftists, agitated by Mitch Kapor's Electric Frontier Foundation lawyers and journalist groupies, agitated to have this "fix" put in. It was not builders or designers that agitated it, but open source cultists.
It involves being able to set permissions to open permanently.
The person who wrote this JIRA originally -- Seshat Czeret, an NCI operative -- worded it in such a way very cunningly and politically to make it sound like it was a means of "getting rid of defaults that lead people to make mistakes and give away freebies accidently".
But...that's not a problem -- he artificially created it. People don't accidently give away freebies -- they have to consciously do this. While mistakes are possible, the fact is: prims don't default to all perms. Duh! They don't default to copy/transfer when you rez them out. "Mod" and "copy" DO NOT check off automatically -- the boxes on ever rezzed prim are left blank and the user must decide whether to join the Leninist sandboxers and liberate his content, or be a normal person and put it on "no copy" but "resell/transfer" to sell it -- or visa versa, uncheck the resell and make "copy" so that a buyer can make himself copies but not transfer to others.
Here's what Catherine Pfeffer said immediately, however, so that you could see the real agenda:
This would simply be a huge relief for every category of contents creators:
- The Open Source objects could become much more common. Currently it is a pain to "liberalize" the rights for every prim and script you create, and this is discouraging Open Source creation.
- The sellers could win time by applying their preferred Copy/No trans or No copy/Trans model from the very beginning.
- The professional builders could work in teams much more easily by having the "shared with group" flag activated as a default
I intend to work on a patch. As I only worked on easier patches so far and I lack experience, every good will to work on this project is welcome. One big question is also if it is possible to code that without having access to the server code.
In fact, some builders said it wasn't a relief; in fact there weren't any builders agitating for this. It's just the usual OS clique. But it "had" to be put in -- because of...whatever. Somebody's Linden friend? The Stallmanites getting the upper hand for a time? Who knows.
To be sure, this does not involve revamping SL so that each prim that is rezzed out now defaults to all perms. That would be horrible. It would be horrible because it would go against the Bern Convention metaphor that is achieved with SL hitherto, which is that copyright is INHERENT. It default-rezzes WITH permissions, with copy turned OFF. That's how it should be.
If it defaults the other way, it would be due to the Creative Communism lobby succeeding.
But this particular so-called "builders' boon" enabling each individual to set permanently his positions on "all perms" (or ostensibly, other variants) would be the first step in *eroding the barrier* to having the default all-perms prim. That's why I oppose it vociferously. I knew EXACTLY what they are up to. I could see it from the conversation on Tech Dirt.
Just in case you think I'm daft, and think that these people ARE NOT doing this, and that somehow I'm being prejudiced, and "reading into" what their agenda is, fortunately, there's their own petition in which they spell out the real agenda:
Right now any author (builder, scripter) in Second Life, whether he makes objects, scripts, textures or animations, can chose for himself which copy restrictions he wants to put on his work, and we want it to stay this way. What we do not want, and that's what this petition is about, are the following 4 restrictions that come by default on every prim that you rez:
1) Allow nobody to copy
2) Next owner can not copy
3) Next owner can not modify
4) Next owner can not resell/give away
This causes new builders to unintentionally build proprietary objects. Experienced builders know very well how to put copy restrictions on their objects, so if they want to make their objects proprietary they can do so anytime. For newbies however things are different. Newbies often have no intention at all to put restrictions on the simple objects they build, they just want to find out how things work, so therefore we think it is more logical not to put copy restrictions on every prim by default.
In order to not build proprietary objects by default, we would like to ask the Lindens headquarters to let residents make an active choice about restrictions. To make this not annoying, we propose to add the option that people can set the rights in the way they want as their default choice.
This is of course arrant, politicized bullshit. It implies that every newbie is a Stallmanite share-bear like themselves. That every newbie doesn't want to go into business with his creations, but wants to be an opensource goon. That every newbie wants to join the big communist collective in the sky.
But this couldn't be MORE FAKE.
The proof of that is that MOST PEOPLE put the permissions on -- they leave them, and don't change them to all perms.
On Flickr, MOST PEOPLE keep the "all rights reserved" default. They don't change them
Second Life, Flickr, other platforms where people create things are not about the big collective farm. They are about keeping value and encouraging commerce by having IP manifest as a choice like this.
The cunning manipulativeness comes straight out of the EFF playbook, which is always trying to hide what it's doing under "choice" and "rights" language. Why, everyone will have a "choice" here -- even though the entire environment then is clouded and then eroded if everything defaults to all perms -- the pressure of the default will force more freebies.
Right now, the default to proprietary objects is a default that acknowledges that most people want normalcy -- they want commerce, capitalism, copyright, value. They don't want abnormalcy -- artificially induced collectivism.
The Lindens may be copyleftists, but they didn't put the default to that worldview because they likely instinctively knew that they had to observe the norms of real life in some fashion.
That this isn't really about "a builder's boon" to "help the economy" but really about the free software agenda can be seen in the comments of some of the 135 signers:
Name: Toby Whaymand on Jul 5, 2008
Comments: To losen Microsoft hold on the market this is an important issue. Free software drives forward the market. Anyone who use Linux in the last 3 years would know that with passion every time they turn on a Windows Vista Machine. I wonder how Novell feel about Microsoft using there ideas and inovations that were atttended on free software being used on Vista. The Public should feel ripped off by Microsoft because they are using outdated ideas that were and are free on Linux
Gosh, ambitious, eh? Get SL to change, and you will loosen MSFT's hold on the marketplace!
Well guess what, dumbfuck. The public doesn't mind Microsoft. And your notion that OS somehow helped the Vista product likely needs a second opinion, given your obvious Stallmanite politics, but even if it did somehow become useful to this PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE company, then...so what? That merely reveals to us what a hustle the entire OS movement is, really.
The public does not feel ripped off.This is an affectation of a politicized opensource-cult geek.
Well, you get the idea.
What's interesting is...why now? Why an answer to this NOW?
Back in 2009, I objected that Harry Linden -- the person who warned me and put in the disciplinary infraction and then the permaban -- was the person who denied my appeal. I insisted that a separate more impartial Linden be found (i.e. not a furry partial to Soft Linden and co.)
Jack Linden looked at it but what I wanted him to do was to assign this to be reviewed formally, by another Linden, to recognize that it was unfair to have the same Linden who put in a punishment also be the one to look at the appeal.
So it languished for a while longer. I was asked to be a beta reviewer of Viewer 2. I said yes -- if you remove my JIRA permaban. Amanda Linden took a look at it, she "got back to her people," and they said...no. During that time I saw a WorkingOnIt notice on my ticket but nothing came of it.
So much time had gone by that I couldn't even pull up the ticket anymore. I have so many hundreds of them from sim restarts and encroachment and all the rest on my rentals that it was buried. So I started a new one.
And now, this response:
A comment has been added to your Case..
Case: 01045844
Avatar: Prokofy Neva
Type: Reactivate an old Account
Status: Waiting for Customer Acceptance
Hello Prokofy,
Linden Lab has reviewed, at your request, your appeal of our decision to permanently terminate your access to the public issue tracker.
Upon further examination of your case, we have determined that the permanent removal of your access to the public issue tracker was justified and correctly applied.
This concludes our investigation of your appeal. Please consider the matter resolved, as no further communications will be sent.
Best regards,
Charlene Linden
Concierge Support Supervisor
To reply to this case, either Reply to this email, or visit : https://secondlife.com/my/support/?caseID=01045844
(To view the Case online, you will need to log into Secondlife.com with this Avatar: Prokofy Neva)
This is not a good sign.
It means the furry Stallmanite Lindens are winning and prevailing. Maybe interop was beaten back, although I see a lot of noise on that line lately.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if suddenly, we heard the Lindens were opensourcing the server code, inviting open sims back into the fold, spinning off the various big continents like Anshe's into separate licensed holding companies, and flattening and cratering the value of land -- and content on it -- for the rest of us.
And this will have been the first sign: that you could not fight the "liberation" of the prim permissions without being silenced.
