[sldev] Voice=Proprietary

[Dave Parks]

If you're asking for a formal, company wide policy as to how every 
Linden Lab developer should approach the open source community, you're 
not going to get one.  Linden isn't that kind of company.  While we 
strive for transparency, we're not going to force internal developers to 
communicate everything they're working on to the community, but every 
developer has the option of doing so.  For every Linden developer I know 
of, the choice has nothing to do with control or a lack of respect, but 
in getting the job done with as little overhead as possible.  By 
overhead, I mean time spent writing communications like this e-mail that 
could be spent writing code.  It's just that simple.  Most developers 
would rather write code than e-mail messages.  I'm sure as the developer 
community around Second Life matures we'll see the lines between the 
public jira and the private jira fade and eventually disappear 
altogether for the purposes of bug and feature tracking.

If you get the feeling there's a cohort of developers at Linden secretly 
working on code you never see and largely ignoring your efforts to make 
changes to the viewer, you're right.  Most of our internal developers 
are working on server side scaling issues, and it would be silly to have 
them use the public jira for such things.  Worse, destructive, as many 
of the tasks they're working on outline critical security flaws that 
exist on the grid today. 

We're very serious about keeping Second Life open, not just in source 
form, but as a platform.  We have not to this date and never will do 
anything that prevents a class of people from accessing Second Life.  
Any outside service we rely on, any proprietary library that we license, 
any hardware that we interface with will all adhere to an open 
standard.  No exclusive deals, no monopolistic endeavors, no artificial 
limitations.

Which brings me to this: taking the stance of only adopting open source 
technologies creates an artificial limitation to advancing Second Life 
as a platform.  If a system exists that improves Second Life, whether or 
not that system is open plays a limited role in our decision making 
process when choosing whether or not to use it.  Second Life is a truly 
open platform, even for closed technologies.

Faulting us every time we use a non-GPL or LGPL technology amounts to 
political zealotry and will only retard progress.  You, the open source 
developer, have two good options:
A) Do nothing, happily use the technology that's been given to you, for 
it is good.
B) Decide that the technology you've been given is not good, and try to 
compete with it.

The point of keeping Second Life open is to encourage competition.  The 
point of competition is to encourage innovation.  If you think you can 
do better than any proprietary technology we use, do it.  You have my 
full support and attention.

Boroondas Gupte wrote:
> Callum Lerwick schrieb:
*snip*
> That would be the old question of the cathedral and the bazaar 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar>. Linden 
> Lab will have to make clear where they see their open source efforts 
> on the scale between those extreme paradigms. They are of course free 
> to redefine that for every single part of the project. I has not to be 
> the same for the entire thing and also might change over time. Anyhow 
> I think it would help community developers a lot if the status quo 
> concerning this was known as well as LL's plans about where to go from 
> there.
>
> I don't know if LL has worked this out for themselves, yet. If not 
> they should now ;-)
>
> Boroondas