Memorandum

Here is the story in short:

• contributions were initially made by placing our SecondLife creations on the SecondLife Wiki @ Linden Lab,
• the Wizardry and Steamworks wiki was created and we decided that our content is best placed here in order to make connections with the other projects; similarly, a lot of the content contained stuff (ie: porting the MySQL database to iOS, we were the pioneers) that had little to do with SecondLife, in general, such that it made no sense for that content to be on the SecondLife Wiki,
• we opened a ticket and got to talk with Maggie Linden, asking for our content on the SecondLife Wiki to be deleted,
• Maggie Linden accepted and told us to mark the articles for deletion ourselves, such that Fritz Linden would then purge the content on the wiki marked for deletion,
• we started marking the content for deletion but a bunch of third-party individuals reverted the mark and even opened up a Jira bug request where they essentially requested from Linden Lab to just hold onto our IP on the basis that once the content is pasted on the SecondLife Wiki, for some reason, the people opening up the Jira bug request, falsely believe that the content magically gets re-licensed to Linden Lab (ie: following the reasoning, posting Das Kapital on the SecondLife Wiki would remove the license from Karl Marx and Das Kapital then becomes the property of Linden Lab),
• after several days, Maggie Linden answered to the ticket again and mentioned that Fritz Linden and her decided that our content is in a "managed state" such that it cannot be deleted from the SecondLife Wiki,
• our content gets held hostage for a decade and half on the SecondLife Wiki,
  • we keep opening tickets but the content is still not removed, sometimes it is justified that we must file a DMCA request, sometimes the ticket is outright ignored,
• in 2023, we open a ticket again and get to speak with a different Linden employee else that agrees to remove the content; we get told to list all the URLs leading to the content, as well as file a DMCA request with the Linden Lab "IP Team",
• several weeks pass by,
• the Linden Lab "IP Team" fails to give due course to the request, such that we need to go back to the new Linden Lab employee and let them know that the "IP Team" is, well, essentially not doing their job,
• the Linden answering to the ticket starts to delete the content themselves whilst bypassing the "IP Team"

Even though, not as essential, there are many IP violations that can be accounted for related to the SecondLife domain that represent a point of curiosity against Open Source licensing. Some of the highlights are listed here, for historical purposes.

It puts things into perspective, because these violations do not show "a need for free stuff", nor do they show people taking shortcuts by reusing other people's code, nor do they show people trying to learn to code, but they imply the intent of theft of authorship as well. In other words, these are barely just DMCA violations, these are directly intents to violate the Berne convention on authorship and original work.

Lastly, it should be mentioned that the original dispute with Linden Lab, when summing up the actions and statements, might not have been a dispute with some evil corporation Linden Lab on its own, yet it was the result of some "popular action" where some clique built around the SecondLife Wiki directly opposed the removal of our IP from the SecondLife Wiki and might have swayed the option of Maggie, Fritz and other Lindens that might have been involved. Many of these people have been fairly hostile to us over the years, with nasty statements rumors, etc. For the former reasons, this page gets the ghetto-style "You made this, I made this" meme variation sticker.

We created several tipjars (such as the ones in the tipjar section or the multifunction tipjar), with various technological levels and, due to reusing code, we devised and maintained the phrase "Donate if you are so inclined!" for all tipjars created. This makes tracking the tipjars created by Wizardry and Steamworks on the SecondLife marketplace very easy because the phrase "Donate if you are so inclined!" is easily identified.

None-except-a very few people using the scripts ever respected the Open Source license to give credit; in fact, there have been several funny incidents where a customer of a person plagiarizing our work, contacted us instead, because the person plagiarizing our work did not even bother to change the object, such that one of our avatar names showed up as the "object creator". It was even difficult to convince the customer that we did not sell the item to them and that someone just took our script and object and just resold it on the market.

We were essentially put in a position of having to offer "technical support" for a product that we created but we did not sell and made no money off.

RADIONNE was a device that was ripped from the the Intercom project and then presented by John Lester (a Linden employee) on his blog as a novelty and obtaining a prize on the MOSES grid. The author(s) seem to claim that they were in touch with us, that we are mentioned on the Radionne project, and … generally shows a lack of knowledge in both SecondLife / OS terms. None of the claims made by Tahuti are true; there is nobody working for or with us going by the name of "Wizardry" (nor do we have any avatar registered that would have "Wizardry" in their name), we never met or talked to the creator, we never contributed to Radionne nor were we involved with its "development", we never "ported Radionne" to other grids, we are not mentioned anywhere by the Radionne creator except on Lester's blog by some individual recognizing that Radionne is just a rip off the Intercom project (an individual that we DO know), and as far as both Radionne AND Intercom work, SL and OS grids use the very same protocol. It is all a lie from start to end:

We are the inventors of PrimFS and PrimDrive, that use primitives to store data persistently in SecondLife, thereby surpassing the volatility of script memory and the memory limitations of LSL scripts.

The project has been fairly successful and has been used by the developer of Virtual Fishing and Virtual Farming, a popular SecondLife mini-game with a large amount of users, as a backup system. We also presented the PrimFS and PrimDrive to Oz Linden, a few years back, that commented that the project would impose a large amount of stress on the asset server and dismissed the project as a candidate for some developer competition.

At some point, after the release of the storage device, some other "author" popped up that did not release the code and claimed that their creation had no relation to ours even though it did the exact same thing and had an API with functions being just renamed a little to seem inconspicuous. Several of these items were sold on the Secondlife marketplace at the time.

In the meanwhile, it seems that there is even a proposal to add the functionality to SecondLife, "pioneered" by people such as Gwyneth Llewelyn (with comments on how their contributions are granted to Linden Lab, implying a very good knowledge of our dispute with Linden Lab and perhaps one of the people behind the debacle) without providing any credit for the idea and presenting it as an original idea. Ironically, neither Gwyneth Llewelyn nor the mob governing the SecondLife Wiki that pitch the "linkset data" project, do not bother to change the key-value pair micro-language that we came up with a few decades ago that is also instrumental to Corrade, such that the LSL methods suggested are eerily close to Wizardry and Steamworks code.

The SecondLife crowd does not provide any credit either to us, nor the other person that claimed their idea was original, even though both were very popular. To top it off, you can now find "blogs" littered allover the Internet, such as https://bluesfantasy.com/persistent-storage/ (https://archive.is/wip/9KisY) that even go as far as to use a "hard drive" icon for this brilliant new "linkset data" even though the feature proposed by Gwyneth Llewelyn takes extra care to avoid any mention of "hard-drives" due to the symbolsim being too close to our project "PrimFS and PrimDrive". Others such as Inara Pey, that present this novel idea on their blog (https://archive.is/wip/dUWvK) even go as far as complementing the authors of the "linkset data" idea on the key-value pair language. It is even tough to believe that all these blogs are an organic manifestation instead of being coordinated.

Even though completely unrelated, here is a counter-example of how to credit work from a Chinese user on GitHub (https://archive.is/wip/dPD6s) that credits Wizardry and Steamorks for our work on the mmonit crack, even though no copyright could even be claimed by us (ok, marginally, given that binaries are not all deterministic) and cracking itself having various shades of grey concerning the law, making it seem like there is more honor amongst thieves!