[opensource-dev] oh give me a break

[Argent Stonecutter]

On 2010-03-15, at 03:42, Kevin Woolley wrote:
> A. Have the guts to stop apologising for Linden Lab's decisions. You  
> own the
> ballpark. Apple has a great developer program but that doesn't mean  
> that it
> squirmed to its users because XCode 3.2 beta (iPad capable) wasn't  
> available
> the moment Steve Jobs announced the iPad.

Even Apple knows when to let the users drive. If Apple didn't listen  
to the users and developers back in the '90s when Steve Jobs wanted to  
cut the old Mac OS off cold, and Adobe told them they would NOT be  
porting Photoshop to NeXTStep (Yellow Box), they'd be out of business  
by now. Instead Apple deferred the release of Rhapsody for three  
years, produced Carbon as an interim framework for transitioning from  
Mac OS to Mac OS X, and ended up with a better product.

Microsoft has been through this as well. When they initially released  
Visual Studio .NET with crippled legacy support the developers  
rebelled en mass and kept using Visual Studio 6. They eventually r- 
released VS6 and brought back legacy support in later versions.

As for the applet store, look at the competition. None of the  
companies who have tried to replicate it have succeeded, because  
nobody else has the economies of scale. The idea that Linden Lab could  
make it work where Google's struggling is nuts.