[sldev] Upcoming viewer releases?

[Lawson English]

Hamncheese wrote:
>
>> 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.
>

aAs far as I know, there's a legal requirement for this. Perhaps they're 
only being excessive in their dotting of i's, etc., but I'm sure that 
their lawyers have told them better safe than sorry.

> 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.
There's,as I understand it, about 35  official developers working at 
Linden Labs. You're suggesting that they devote 5-10%  of their 
available manpower to handling submissions. I don't see the traffic to 
warrant this.