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The guys behind the Emerald viewer have filed a copyright violation against the "neillife" viewer blog, for what they claim are breaches of the terms of service of the GNU and FLOSS licensing. Basically they are claiming that source code and binaries are not being made available in full, as those licenses dictate they should be. The announcement, on the Modular Systems site, can be found here. The announcement reads:

"Just as a reminder to all of those of you who compile forks of the Emerald Viewer: You are bound by the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2 along with Linden Labs FLOSS exception, and the terms of the FLOSS compatible licensing attached to our files.

We do encourage and support developers who wish to modify our work, as this is the nature of open source work that has enabled the Emerald Viewer to become what it is.  However, this work is licensed and there are restrictions upon its use.

It has come to our attention that some developers are distributing binaries that are in violation of our licensing. If you do not provide the complete source code to all binaries you distribute, or if you include incompatible binaries in your distribution(s), you will be in violation of the licensing, and thusly, as stated in section 4.2 of the GPLv2, you will have terminated your rights under it, and will no longer be able to legally produce works based upon our code.

We just submitted a copyright violation claim to Google regarding a "neillife" viewer blog on their blog service. This is one of several clients that have been brought to our attention that are in violation of our copyright.

We intend to file similar claims at our discretion against any derivatives of our work which are in violation of our copyright.

We are at the end of our patience in regards to these programs.

PS: In case you didn't catch it above: "neil", and other violators, your actions have resulted in the termination of your rights under the licensing provided, and you no longer have the legal right to produce works based upon the Emerald Viewer. You cannot regain these rights, even if you altered your behavior to comply with the licensing."

Whether this has any effect will be interesting to see. One of my bugbears lately has been that Linden Lab flex their muscles when it comes to education sites using "SL" in their domain names, but appear to claim to be toothless about rogue viewers. If the Emerald devs really do have a case here then I'll see it as a slap in the face to Linden Lab for their lack of action.

However we'll have to wait and see what happens here, the claim may not be valid, only time will tell.