On Mar 14, 2010, at 2:41 PM, Marine Kelley wrote:
> However it is true that LL has delivered a bad message recently, by
> publishing the TPV and the closed-source SL 2.0 the SAME day. The TPV burdens
> us developers while freeing LL's hands, and the viewer 2.0 is going to be
> adopted by newcomers, so it will eventually get a broader audience than the
> rest. It could very easily be seen as competition. It looks very close to
> some "fire-and-motion" technique. They suppress open-source development by
> laying unbelievably heavy requirements upon the devs, while moving forward
> and releasing their own viewer which is not subject to said requirements. I
> do hope I'm wrong and this is not the message that LL wanted to send to us.
> But one can understand why so many teeth are gritting now.
>
What's frustrating about this for many of the Lindens is that we as an
organization pushed hard -- and Merov in particular worked nights and weekends
-- to get the Snowglobe source out on the same day that beta was released,
rather than waiting for our usual export process to work itself out while we
figure out how to make a new source control system (mercurial) work for export.
We actually believed we were doing something the community would really
appreciate -- getting the source out there the same day as beta. And yet
somehow that became something bad. People keep repeating that "it's closed
source".
Despite the negative reaction, we're still working on the export process, as
Soft indicated, so that we can publish without the snowglobe patches added.
I'll also soon be posting our branching strategy we've been working out for
some weeks now. Sorry if it's not fast enough for some, but we've kind of been
focused on getting viewer 2 out.
The TPV, as has been repeatedly stated, is about protecting our servers and
establishing the framework within which we can protect user content. I simply
don't see what the "heavy" requirements are. We ask viewer developers for
little more than good citizenship. That doesn't seem particularly burdensome.
So yes, I think you're wrong about our motivations and intent. If we wanted to
kill our open source market we'd simply stop publishing it, rather than
creating a TPV that allows us to promote it. And considering the amount of flak
we've been getting, it would be easier. And yet, we're still here.
Q
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