Eye on the Blog: Enforcing the New Third-Party Viewer Policy

On March 31, 2010, M Linden announced an updated Second Life Terms of Service (TOS) that becomes effective on Friday, April 30th. We have incorporated our new Policy on Third-Party Viewers into the updated TOS. This Policy governs access to Second Life and our technical platform that supports Second Life by any third-party viewer, by which we mean any third-party software client, regardless of its source code, that logs into our servers. This includes software for viewing Second Life, any chat clients, utilities, bots, and proxies as well as applications that may not be listed in our Third-Party Viewer Directory. This policy does not place any restriction on modification or use of our viewer source code that we make available under the GPL. Rather, the policy sets out requirements for connecting to the Second Life service using a Third-Party Viewer, regardless of the viewer source code used, and for participating in our Third-Party Viewer Directory.

On Friday, we will begin enforcing the new Policy on Third Party Viewers. The steps we will take may include blocking viewers that do not comply with the new conditions for access to Second Life. We know that there are many compliant viewers in use -- beyond the seven that are currently listed on the Third-Party Viewer Directory -- and we will not interrupt their access to Second Life. The Third-Party Viewer Directory is the best place to find out whether the developer of the viewer that you are using has self-certified that the software complies with the new Policy.

We hope that this step will provide a safer and more secure Second Life environment for all Residents.

And, if you haven't yet tried Second Life Viewer 2, the official Second Life Viewer, then we encourage you to try it, now updated with additional performance and stability enhancements.

To view the blog post, Click Here.