On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 11:33 PM, Soft Linden <s...@lindenlab.com> wrote:
> Some things will happen in the dark, but the current plan is *not* to
> do another monolithic Viewer 2 quiet cycle. We want to get
> intermittent code dropping regularly again - expect to hear more on
> that soon. Once that's covered, I know some teams are actively
> campaigning to get their source out regularly again, and that the
> graphics guys are in that camp. The company might think other features
> are better held. I don't know all the reasons there, but I can see
> where some early announcements haven't helped anyone. AO was one good
> example. Look back on the amount of damaging FUD about AO and LL, as
> well as the constant harassment of Lindens before it was finalized,
> and then look at its real impact on resis' daily lives...? One could
> write a book on that gap. I'd bet that kind of response is going to be
> raised as a counterpoint to open development* at the Lab for years.

Soft, while I agree that there has been a lot of FUD and trolling
recently on opensource-dev, and that we could all use more
constructive attitude, I think that you picked a very bad example for
a bad experiences LL had with open development model. First of all the
Adult Content changes (lets called them AC not to confuse it with
animation overriders) had very little to to with actual development,
and everything to do with the policy. There was no FUD or harassment
of Lindens based on something that was SVN synced in the public
repository. And that policy change had to be pre-announced anyway to
get people ready to be moved from their parcels on the mainland etc.
It could not have been done from one day to the next in any case. I'll
not go into the details of AC policy's  impact on residents, that's a
whole different discussion (for me and my friends, the impact was
big).

Moving forward, I can see a lot of encouraging signs. Merov doing the
necessary work to get the external SVN sync working again. We can all
look forward to interesting and amazing new viewer mashups, such as
that Kirsten provided combining render pipeline (shadow) branch with
snowglobe and others. At least that part of confusion and
misunderstanding is over. What would be particularly beneficial for LL
if there was some sort of mechanism for merging SG patches back to the
main viewer trunk. That way you get the benefits of excellent work OS
devs have put into fixing bugs in SG. Plus you encourage the OS devs
to provide even more great work (I know many of them felt disappointed
to see that you could crash viewer2 in many ways that were fixed in
SG).

I'm hoping that we get robla's replacement soon, who could facilitate
such two-way and mutually beneficial flow of fixes and new features.
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