[opensource-dev] oh give me a break

[Marine Kelley]

I'm sorry Kent, I didn't want to upset you. Yes you are getting a lot of
flak, and you are not alone in this case. This TPV does add heavy
requirements upon us developers, and I'm not even talking about the Viewer
Directory which requires us to publish our RL names out to the open. Which
is not going to happen for most like me, which will still be seen as dodgy
devs who "explicitly declined the agreement".

The TPV and the closed-source beta 2.0 have been out the same day. That is a
fact. Viewer 2.0 is closed-source for now, and since I don't read the
future, I have no grounds to say whether it is going to stay closed-source
or not. Seems, by reading what you say, that it is going to be released as
open-source. This is good news. Having the source of SG 2.0 released the
same day was a partial relief, even if I wasn't sure about the differences
between SG 2.0 and Viewer 2.0. Merov did an awesome work I'm sure.

I think I can sense that the TPV didn't really serve the techies at LL, by
getting out the same day as Beta. In fact it kinda played against you. I
don't know anything, but I'm not really sure why the TPV had to be published
the same day in the first place. It could have waited, or it could have been
published before, I don't know. To me if the two are separate, then they
should have been published separately, with some time in between.

I am not questioning LL's plans here. I am merely observing facts and making
my own interpretation over how every one of the moves at LL impacts me and
the people I work with/for.

Marine


On 14 March 2010 20:09, Kent Quirk (Q Linden) <q at lindenlab.com> wrote:

>
> 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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