Nyx, it's excellent news that you're starting this open development project. Well done!
There's one thing to keep in mind though, so that it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone at the Lab (no surprise to yourself of course). When development is open and many community teams are involved, some teams will implement features before other teams do. This is great, as everyone can take code from everyone else, and the net result is that individual developers do less work. Yay! Unfortunately, LL has a Contributor's Agreement, and as a result of that appalling document, everyone can take freely from LL's code while LL cannot take freely from other teams' code, BY YOUR OWN CHOICE. This means that Lindens will end up reinventing wheels and doing much more work than need be, and your viewer will lag behind that of other teams. The above situation is extremely bad for Linden Lab, and for wear and tear on your tiny robot. Before you reply with the usual hints that "Developers are powerless about policy in LL", I would offer that your *Tao of Linden* gives you the freedom to question everything and everyone in the Lab. If you wished to do so, it would allow you to highlight that the benefits of that Contrib Agreement are extremely small or non-existent, while its cost to LL and to yourself is extremely high. You have the power to make your lawyers work *for* you, rather than against you, if you wish to exercise it. Well done on taking this strong step towards open development! Morgaine. ======================================== On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 5:45 PM, Nyx Linden <n...@lindenlab.com> wrote: > Greetings Opensource-dev! > > This tiny robot is going to be working over the next few weeks to > begin working on the next iteration of avatar features, and needs your > help! > We're hoping to continue our overhaul of how you manage your appearance. > Since we're shooting for moving towards quarterly releases, there's a > lot of work to be done! > > I'll be setting up a sub-form for collaboration and discussion of > designs, as well as working on cleaning up some initial design concepts > for how the user interface will be presented - I'll follow up on this > list with links to the documents when they're online. > > Some of the features we want to implement: > 1) A new panel to edit what is stored in your saved outfit without > creating a new one. > This will include both an inventory view and a view of your outfit > itself, so you can drag items from your inventory to your outfit without > having an extra floater open > 2) Editing of wearable items (body parts and/or clothing objects) in the > sidebar, selectable from the outfit editor > 3) Removal of the appearance floater > 4) Order-specific outfits with the ability to re-order wearables as desired > 5) Ability to wear multiple wearables of the same type (multiple shirts, > multiple jackets and yes, multiple alpha masks!). > > I look forward to working with everyone and getting a lot of feedback > throughout the development process. I'll be releasing a lot more > detailed information as I can get it formatted and out the door. There > are just a handful of things to keep in mind. > > First, this is still a featureset developed by Linden Lab, which has a > few implications. If there is a dispute, we will hold final say on what > goes into the client we ship. There will not always be perfect consensus > on every decision made, but I will try to be more transparent about what > decisions we make and why, where appropriate. Also, since the code for > this feature will be in the main second-life viewer, we do still require > a signed CLA before we can integrate your patches into our codebase. > > Second, I ask that we all do what we can to keep the discussion civil > and collaborative. The tiny robot cloning machine still isn't working > right yet, so there is only one of me and I'll make the time to > collaborate with everyone who wants to help with creating a more robust > featureset that will ship in the time we have to develop it. Posts for > ideas that we don't have the time or resource to implement, rants, or > non-constructive feedback will receive significantly less attention. > > Once the forums are up, I'll post there with details of what > infrastructure is currently in place, what our initial designs are, and > how best to give feedback. Once we get our new branch structure in > place, I'll be doing all of my checkins in the open and will be pulling > in community contributions on a regular basis. I look forward to working > with the community on this project and providing a positive examples to > encourage other internal projects to work more directly with the community! > > -Nyx > _______________________________________________ > 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 >
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