On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 7:42 AM, Morgaine <morgaine.din...@googlemail.com> wrote: > I referred recently to Linden's internal project "Firefly" to add > client-side scripting to SL viewers. This has been the topic of open > discussion at several Office Hours with Lindens in SL, but that openness has > not extended to many design details --- the Firefly design process is not > open to the community...
Personally, I find it difficult to escape the conclusion that the preposterous amount of secrecy now surrounding viewer development has any legitimate purpose. The argument that it is to preserve some commercial competitive advantage for Linden Research is silly. Competing solutions are constrained by their own architectures in the functions they can deliver. (I suppose it might be possible that this stealth systems design might be intended to sabotage efforts by other users of the Second Life Viewer codebase. If so, I'd be interested in the legal implications of that relative to antitrust and unfair trade practices law. But IANAL.) Most charitably, I'm left to conclude that -- like so many other activities conducted by Linden Research -- it is being done in secret with the intention of maximizing spin control of reactions of the user community until such initiatives are fait accompli. Whatever the motivation for this, I think soliciting and exploiting developer involvement and contributions from the open-source community and then turning around and treating them like mushrooms is reprehensible. Trade press reporting of statements made by Joe Linden about restrictions to be placed on third-party viewers (including implementation of mandatory technical standards that enable servers to discriminate against various viewer implementations) call for an immediate response from Linden Research that goes beyond simple ad-hominem attacks on their source to authoritative clarification, denial or confirmation. "You'l find out when it's most advantageous to us to tell you" is a deep expression of contempt for your customers and business partners. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
