Silver Eagle
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Silver Eagle is a web developer and member of the Brony and Furry communities. In the Brony community, he built and directed the Ponyville Live media network from early 2013 to late 2015. He briefly worked with Fur Affinity in late 2015 and early 2016, and his departure and subsequent launch of the short-lived site FurryDigital sparked controversy.
His OC is a bald eagle in a suit, often holding a microphone or wearing headphones.
Contents
History[edit]
AzuraCast[edit]
Silver Eagle is the creator and maintainer of the AzuraCast open-source web radio suite. AzuraCast's source code was originally forked from the open-source code of Ponyville Live in spring 2016.
Ponyville Live![edit]
From February 2013 to December 2015, Silver Eagle served as the webmaster and director of the Ponyville Live! (or "PVL") media network.
At the end of 2015, Poniverse took over maintenance of Ponyville Live, keeping it online for many years afterward, but without any substantial code updates of any sort. Poniverse opted to keep running Ponyville Live without Silver Eagle's assistance.
Fur Affinity Controversy[edit]
Silver Eagle began working with Fur Affinity in October 2015, as one of the first developers to be brought on as a paid independent contractor, due to IMVU's acquisition of FurAffinity.
In January 2016, IMVU mistakenly indicated that Silver Eagle wasn't in their records at all. Silver Eagle went public with the situation, creating a series of YouTube videos outlining the organization's culture problems and their failure to compensate him for his work. IMVU scrambled to pay him within the following week, but Silver Eagle stopped working with FurAffinity entirely at this point.
As the situation unfolded, Silver Eagle made the open-source version of the FurAffinity codebase he had been working on (called "FAOpen") public on GitHub. The source code was always licensed under the Apache open-source license during its development (particularly because it had mostly descended from Ponyville Live's source code, which itself was open-source), but FurAffinity claimed that certain portions of the code (like their Terms of Service) were copyrighted and proprietary.
FurryDigital Launch and Shutdown[edit]
After he stopped working entirely with FurAffinity, Silver Eagle forked the open-source FAOpen repository and completed the basic implementation steps needed to operate the site as a standalone entity. He rebranded the entire site, removing FurAffinity's name and graphics and replacing them with a new name, "FurryDigital". The site's user interface bore resemblance to FA's, and some static page content (such as the Terms of Service and Code of Conduct) were left unchanged from the FAOpen code. He launched the new FurryDigital web site into an "early alpha" on February 15, 2016, releasing the code to GitHub alongside the project's launch.
On Friday, February 19 (four days after the site's launch), Silver Eagle was contacted by an IMVU Vice President, who informed him that the company took issue with the resemblance of the site's UI to FurAffinity's beta style, and the direct use of the FA terms and conditions, suggesting that legal may be contacting him as soon as the following Monday. Citing the legal threats and a lack of clear support from the furry public and his developer peers, Silver Eagle closed down FurryDigital and removed both its codebase and the "FAOpen" repository from the web.
IMVU never pursued further legal action, but FurAffinity permabanned his account, citing "plagiarism and theft of FurAffinity assets". Silver Eagle was briefly hospitalized during the incident for suicidal ideation.