[sldev] Upcoming viewer releases?

[Hamncheese]

> Also, question for anyone: what are some examples of other commercial
> companies with open source projects with practices we should be trying
> to emulate? If there's anywhere where we're pretty much reinventing
> the wheel and we could be using existing wisdom, specifics would help
> tons.
Soft,

Although this is my first open source project so I don't have much existing 
wisdom, there are two things that I think would broaden contributions:
1) - Get rid of the "you don't have a signed contribution/legal agreement so 
we can't accept your fix" Maybe for features you could keep this, but drop 
it for bug fixes. It's unnecessary and cumbersome and the only reason I have 
an agreement on file was because I bored that week. By signing into jira I 
consider that my patch will be part of the source. I'd be curious to what 
others think on this but it seems to me that asking for a signature is 
nothing more than CYA and I don't see other open source projects doing this.

2) - Assign several developers whose primary job is to see that 
contributions are funneled through the system. One of the reasons that this 
is necessary is that contributions that are coming from the community are by 
their very nature what interests or bugs us. To see patches languish (mine 
or others) is a death knell for follow-on work. The community is currently 
at the mercy of whomever ("you", "them", "they", "Lindens", whatever word 
you want to use here) finally has enough time to look at the contribution.

cheers,

Ham