I've compared Linden Lab more often with an abusive husband. You take the beating and then believe the stories and hope that it all will become better. It's hard to leave such a husband usually, because you invested in that life and one lose a lot when one leaves.
Nevertheless, I have come to the conclusion that I've been a fool in the past. I've been mad, over and over and over again. I've told myself every time: this is unacceptable; but still I believed things would change for the better and came back... not really full force (in the end the number of patches that I actually wrote are a fraction of what I'd have done when I hadn't been beaten up on a regular basis). Today, still with a black eye of my homestead being taken offline, I have been kicked in the face by the hard cut off of snowglobe. Yes, it was inevitable that in the end all viewers would be derived from the official viewer (aka, 2.x), but NOT by force! It should have been as a result of new features. Open source should be the evolution of ideas (and code) and not being enforced and dictated. Slowly I have began to realize that Linden Lab is a control freak. They try to control EVERYTHING, from what you do in-world to the what name your viewer can have, or what you run on your PC to connect to their servers. They have never listened to the users before making important decisions (and seldom afterwards) and I have seen no recent change in that. I do think that the snowstorm change was a good change, but in the end it is just abuse of open source volunteers by giving them the exact same treatment as paid Linden Lab employees: all the hard work, *exactly* following the rules dictated by Linden Lab but no room to do it your way. No voice in any decision making, and certainly no room to experience, or freedom. Open source, however, is about FREEDOM: The freedom to CHANGE the code and to USE it as you see fit. The Best Ideas then survive as a result of "evolution". Bad ideas aren't used, popular ideas are copied by everyone. Linden Lab makes this natural process impossible. The only thing that is left is working for a company, without freedom, without a vote and without being paid. I'm sorry that this how they run their business. I'm a lot more sorry that I saw too late that I really shouldn't volunteer to work for them under those conditions. THIIS NOT OPEN SOURCE For now I have joined "imprudence" (http://imprudenceviewer.org/). This is a true open source project. Surely Linden Lab can still block it from their servers, and they WILL do so when they start to disallow 1.23, but at least I won't be working anymore for them. Patches contributed to Imprudence will be pure GPL and not fall under the Contribution Agreement. Because this project is really, purely GPL it will be possible to use OTHER GPL-ed code, from other third party viewers for example, or anywhere else from the net. THAT is what open source is about. I'm pleased to have noticed that all the important open source people that I have learned to appreciate and respect are already there. If you are not, please join us! This doesn't have to a goodbye: I hope to see you join us on the other side! Thank you for your time, Aleric Inglewood. PS CC to imprudence mailinglist _______________________________________________ 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
