[opensource-dev] Client-side scripting in Snowglobe

[Carlo Wood]

On Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 01:31:43PM -0500, kow wrote:
> I for one agree with Q.

You're not really stating what you agree with here... but lets assume
you mean that:

- It's ok that nothing was communicated on this list about anything
  prior to some decisions made by LL about client-side scripting.

- People shouldn't whine or flame about not being taken seriously
  when we tell them what has been decided behind closed doors.

> The biggest complaints come from the most insignificant people.

That is a flame, and pretty personal one too.
But I'll try to read between the lines and make something of it;
you probably mean that you didn't see any comments yet from the
most active opensource coders of snowglobe yet.

Those people are intelligent, of course, and have had close(r)
communication with a handful of Lindens than the others, getting
to know them a lot better than the average office hour visitor.
Those people understand that the decisions being communicated
by THOSE Lindens are not the decision of those Lindens personally
(at least, I hope not, or they DO deserve the flames). Most
snowglobe assigned Lindens have very little influence in the whole.
They are just coders with a big boss that demands apparently
pretty stricty that they cannot talk about things.

I'm sure that most Lindens that we have contact with are just
like you and me, they just got hired by LL and are now being
frustrated by the tension that LL policy as a whole is creating
between the entity Linden Lab and the "open source community"
that they attracted to work on snowglobe.

I think that most of the really active coders think that their
personal relationship with their fellow hackers inside Linden
Lab is more important than venting their frustration on a public
mailinglist KNOWING that it is going to be useless, since that
decision has indeed already been made (they ARE going to use
mono) and even the Lindens that we CAN communicate with can't
do anything about it.

If anything, I admite Q for not falling back to "Sorry, but
it's not my decision to make", but despite the pressure from
the opensource community keeps acting as-if Linden Lab has
one single mind and direction (which no doubt is the policy
of LL management).

> If LL prioritized development based on the 
> complaints in this mailing list, they would be rewriting SL for Linux 
> using GTK and maintaining a dozen branches for ever popular flavour of 
> unix. But then we'd just be playing a thinly veiled OpenCroquet.

When I read such proposals I didn't take them seriously either. 
And perhaps it IS necessary to play parent and take the decision
yourself in order to protect your kid; but it can be done better
by at least first have an open discussion (on this mailinglist)
about the pros and cons of whatever BIG decision (like using
mono). And then I mean ***NOT*** to ask for "feedback" and then
sit back and read everything and then make your decision, Babbage.
I mean, to actively participate in the discussion and try to
convince people with logical arguments and having an open mind
for ideas that are not your own. Then, in the end, I guess someone
"authoritive" has to make the final decision (because in most
cases not everyone will agree with the same), which could be done
in a form like:

- We had a meeting today with u, v, w, x, y, z and q Linden, and
  after careful consideration we decided to go for mono for
  the following reasons:
  * point 1
  * point 2
  * it's the only thing we really have the expertise for in-house
  * Foobar had the argument this and that, but blah blah.
  * Carlo was right, but we felt that over all the advantages of
    mono weight more heavily than his proposal, as we already
    discussed on the list
  * and so on.

> Instead of making accusations and generating pages upon pages of 
> arguments based on hearsay, why not ask a well thought out question that 
> a developer can answer with a simple yes or no? I'd much rather Q and 
> his coworkers spent time developing cool things than entertaining your 
> pointless nerd rage about Mono.

I applaud your speech, and again, I agree that not any of these
Lindens is personally responsible, so they don't deserve any flames.

However, on this route that LL as a whole is taking now, the only
logical result would be that Snowglobe splits off and becomes a
TRUE opensource community driven project. And that would mean,
at least in the eyes of Linden Lab, that the whole opensource
project has failed.

-- 
Carlo Wood <carlo at alinoe.com>