[sldev] Voice=Proprietary

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Mon Mar 12 16:17:24 PDT 2007


On Mon, 2007-03-12 at 12:08 -0700, Soft Noel wrote:
> SLDev hasn't a long enough track record to allow LL to rationally rely on
> the open source community for a voice solution -- that's the case now, and
> was certainly more so whenever LL pulled the trigger on Vivox. Vivox was a
> sure thing, while LL couldn't even guess whether the open source community
> would have delivered.

Wait wait wait wait. Why does LL need to rely on the open source
community? We're not their crutch. Besides, thinking of LL as being
something separate from the open source community is *exactly* where
most of our problems currently lie.

Join your own community, Linden Lab. Use the same public SCM, and the
same public bugtracker as the rest of us. Make decisions in public.

> To take over the voice project, the best way to go about that isn't to
> waste a lot of cycles angrily shooting down LL's solution. The best way is
> to learn the considerations for LL's choice and demonstrate that you can
> cover the same bases.

Which should have been done before a proprietary solution was committed
to. We (the community) only just learned of any of this. "Shooting down
their solution" is the only option that's been made available to us.

BIG DISCLAIMER: Yes, the reality is development on voice support
probably began before there were plans to open source the client. Yes,
its a tough situation for Linden Lab to be in. The question now is, how
will it be handled?

And no one is looking to take over anything. What everyone needs to
understand is, as long as you keep Linden Lab's developers walled off
from the community, as long as you treat the community as second class
citizens, the community is going to resent it.

Trust me, the Fedora Project has been there and done that. The history
of Red Hat and the Fedora Project could very well be highly instructive
in how not to transition a commercial project into a community project.

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