[opensource-dev] Open Viewer Development Announcement

[Oz Linden (Scott Lawrence)]

  On 2010-08-16 14:23, Henri Beauchamp wrote:
> Well, the first improvement to do is to actually revert 80% of the UI
> to the way v1.23's one was working, especially getting rid of that
> moronic side bar is its modal tools which impair productivity and
> user-friendliness... The question is: will LL finally admit that the
> viewer 2 UI is a failure and widely rejected by 80% of its regular user
> base, and accept a move in the way of "going back" (actually repairing)
> UI-wise ?...

I've said this before, and I'll repeat it again here:

Don't waste everyones time suggesting that we throw away Viewer 2, or 
that we revert the UI to Viewer 1.   It is absolutely not going to 
happen, and any suggestion to that effect will be ignored.

That does not mean that we don't recognize that some choices in V2 were 
not optimal, and that some probably need to be revisited, and we're open 
to doing that.  But we will do it in the context of calm discussions of 
what problems exist and creative ideas for how to solve them.  We are 
not moving backwards, we are moving forwards.

Think about it for a minute - there are an infinite number of possible 
solutions for how to build a UI for a virtual world viewer - what are 
the odds that the first or second attempt produced the best possible 
UI?  We need new and creative ideas focused on specific problem 
descriptions.
>> How Snowstorm Works
>>
>> Viewer development has moved to a single open source model
>> There are no longer internal ‘private’ and external ‘public’ versions.
>> Viewer source (with the exception of one wrapper library we cannot
>> legally release), is now in public Mercurial source repositories. All
>> viewer integration is happening in the Development repository at
>> ‘http://hg.secondlife.com/viewer-development’. It is used by all Linden
>> Lab viewer development teams, and open source developers are encouraged
>> to pull from that repository and submit changes for integration to it.
> How the submission will be done ? Commits to the repository, or some
> filtering process where LL will have the final word about what goes in
> or stays out ?...

That is all described on our process documentation pages on the wiki, 
but I'll hit the high points here:

    * Submissions are done by creating a public repo base on and synced
      to viewer-development, and requesting that a change be pulled from
      it to viewer-development

    * Linden Lab will absolutely have the final word about what goes
      into the viewer.

    We're a multi-million dollar business with hundreds of thousands of
    customers, and we need to deploy a coherent and reliable software
    product to them.  If anyone thinks they can do that without some
    kind of product management and quality control, they are welcome to
    go build a business the size and complexity of ours and demonstrate it.

>> Code in the Development repository is now released under version 2 of
>> the GNU LGPL. This allows community developers greater freedom to use
>> the viewer code, including incorporating it into products that also
>> include closed source.
> Does it mean we don't need anymore the privacy-threatening "contribution
> agreement" form ?... I do hope so, unless you want to keep segregating
> developers like myself, who value more their privacy than helping LL to
> make a better viewer.

Again, this is described in the public documentation...

The Contribution Agreement is unchanged and still required.

Note: if we did not have the CA, we would not have been able to make 
this license change.

> Will try to come, hoping it's not going to be one of those voice meetings
> where non-English people like me can't speak well enough neither understand
> what is being said...

This meeting will include voice because it's so time consuming to do 
everything in chat.  We will have someone putting the important points 
into chat as much as possible, and will certainly respond to questions 
in chat.

For anyone who wants to have a separate chat-only meeting at another 
time, I'll be glad to set that up.

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