January 25th, 2009
Adobe Atmosphere
#2,060
Revisiting Atmosphere
Longtime readers of this blog – again, all two of you – will recall that I’m still a fan of Adobe Atmosphere, that brilliant online virtual reality platform, even though Adobe killed it off shortly after version 1.0, more than five years ago. But even though Atmosphere has gone virtually unused in the years since, I’m on a quest to preserve its memory:
- Shortly after Adobe pulled their support, I asked the user community for help in establishing an “abandonware” website specifically for Atmosphere, similar to websites that memorialize other long-gone software. That led to the article on Wikipedia. The article still lacks numerous details and contains scant citations, but it’s a start.
- A few months ago, I updated MingerWorld – which I painstakingly developed during my freshman year in high school – for compatibility with Atmosphere 1.0. Finally.
- My latest project is “Dialup”, an avatar that Atmosphere’s beta testers will instantly recognize. It imitates the placeholder avatar that other users would appear to wear as Atmosphere downloaded their real avatars.
The breakthrough came when I found Joe De Costa, who’s been running a working copy of Atmosphere’s chat server all these years. With his permission, I hooked MingerWorld up to his server, allowing you to explore the world as it was meant.
Atmosphere’s powerful chat functionality allowed users to see and converse with each other in-world, setting the software apart from countless other 3D offerings, including Adobe’s later ventures in 3D modeling.
In a fit of irony, Adobe released the chat server under an “Atmosphere Open Source License” but neglected to publicize the fact. In fact, the only way to obtain a copy of the source code was to contact Adobe directly. So even at the height of Atmosphere’s popularity, there were only a few chat servers in operation, apart from the official Adobe server. The vast majority of worlds were connected to the official server. After 2004, these worlds went silent: even in the worlds that saw dozens of visitors at a time, each user would appear to be alone. For the many thousands of meticulously-built worlds, the “killer app” was gone.
I want to fix that. I have a copy of the Adobe Community Server software, which I’m planning to run on my own computer in the future. I’d love to make the software publicly available, the way it should be, but first I have some legal questions about it. The key passage in the server’s license agreement reads:
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Adobe grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free license to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, and sublicense the Software for any purpose provided that the copyright notice below appears in a conspicuous location within the source code of the distributed Software and this license is distributed in the supporting documentation of the version of the Software you distribute.
That’s all well and good, but contained in the source code are two references to patent applications held by Adobe. The first was granted as patent 6,842,786 and seems to describe a server-side dynamic language runtime. The second is still pending after all these years and covers the way worlds “cloned” when full. (An overflow copy of the world was created automatically, so that worlds wouldn’t fill up so severely and users wouldn’t have to load 150 avatars on their dialup connections. Most of us found the feature annoying but dreaded the alternative.)
So my question is: would I be legally permitted to distribute and even modify the server software, as provisioned in the license, even though Adobe holds a patent on certain parts of the server? Note that the license never mentions patents, but rather grants sweeping rights. If not for the patent question, the license would even let me relicense the server under something very much like the MIT license.
Any help appreciated.
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Comments
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Hi Minger, LTNS :)
My plan, is to get Atmos back into the limelight, I have some very talented people working with me, sculpty, scriptors, modellers, animators etc. What is missing is the way to link users who visit the worlds. The worlds are up and running on my servers, but we all walk about alone lol.. no chat, no avatars showing...
My understanding is, Adobe gave out the yacp server software to those that emailed them before dropping the whole thing. I was in time to get the copy of Builder etc, but missed the chat server software :( I was hoping to get a copy to use.
If anyone has a copy, please email me at a_world_maker@yahoo.co.uk Oh and Webby shouts a BIG HI to everyone :) -
Hi Minger,
I looked at the wiki site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Atmosphere and noticed a section under the "History" paragraph that reads:
***************************************************************
Adobe Atmosphere began as 3D Anarchy by Attitude Software. It originally relied on IRC for chat functionality. The original user interface was rather eccentric, featuring two ever-present eyeballs that would occasionally blink.[6] Later versions adopted a more conventional interface, although one of the pre-supplied avatars was based on the eyes. Adobe bought the technology from Attitude in November 1999 and announced the first public beta version under the new name on March 26, 2001.[7]Atmosphere came as two stand-alone applications: the Builder, which was used to build online "worlds", and the Player, which allowed users to explore these worlds. (In 3D Anarchy, these components were called Editor and Chat, respectively.) In addition to these applications, Adobe provided a browser plugin, to explore these worlds within a web browser, and a companion chat server called Adobe Community Server, which ran on an IRC-like protocol known as Yet Another Chat Protocol (YACP). During beta-testing, all three components of Atmosphere were available free of charge. Adobe distributed the server software under the "Atmosphere Open Source License", a permissive open source license.[8]
*****************************************************************I clicked on "permissive" and found the following:
A permissive free software licence is a free software licence for a copyrighted work that offers many of the same freedoms as releasing a work to the public domain.[1] In contrast, copyleft (reciprocal) licences like the GNU General Public License require copies and derivatives of the source code to be made available on terms no more restrictive than those of the original licence.
Well-known examples of permissive licences include the MIT License and the BSD licenses.
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Could this be what you were looking for? The example above does mention several well-known examples... and makes reference to the MIT License.
From what I read in the Licensing Agreement to the Collaboration Server, it appears that as long as the Copyright information is included on every file in a cospicuous location in the code (meaning every file) it fulfills the Licensing Agreement -- along with the rest of the requirements of course.
"Subject to the terms of this Agreement, Adobe grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty free license to use, reproduce, prepare derivative works, publicly display, publicly perform, distribute, and sublicense the Software for any purpose provided that the copyright notice below appears in a conspicuous location within the source code of the distributed Software and this license is distributed in the supporting documentation of the version of the Software you distribute. Copyright (Date Here) Adobe Systems Incorporated and others. All rights reserved."
Hope this helps.
Joe De Costa
(jodec) -
Hi Joe,
What I’m concerned about is that these licenses typically concern copyright, but patents are a part of the law separate from copyright. Sometimes licenses mention patents explicitly, but in this case the license didn’t, so I don’t know if that “license to … distribute” is enough.
I suppose I shouldn’t worry too much about Adobe’s legal claims on the software, unless by some fluke the Community Server suddenly becomes wildly popular again. They did, after all, intend the Server software to be distributed widely.
5/16/2012 @ 10:54 AM
Minh’s Notes
Fixing the past
Now you can download the open source Atmosphere Community Server, which powered real-time, multi-user chat inside the 3D “worlds” of Adobe Atmosphere.