[sldev] sljirastats.com Linden Metrics Report & Public Perception

[Matthew Dowd]

> The lack or fear of communication due to what seems to be some kind of > "culture clash" problem (open source vs. commercial development) is one > of the things that need to be tackled or a lot of good developers will > simply turn away because they feel their efforts going nowhere.
At the beginning, I think the OS-ers expected this (moving from a closed source shop to an open source shop is a difficult cultural change), and LL, I suspect, underestimated the work needed to properly OS the source code, and build an OS community (on the basis that thinking you just tidy and publish the code under an OS license is a common mistake), and so people were patient and sympathetic to LL. However, that patience and sympathy is now beginning to wear thin - with some high profile OS committers moving on (some I suspect to work on OpenSim or LibSL projects or even non-SL based open source projects such as croquet and wonderland).
 
There also seems to be a disconnect between what the SL customers are asking for in terms of problems and features and what LL implement - whilst there are things in jira with 100s of votes ignored. 1.20, for example, introduces a number of changes which don't seem to be in any of the public forums for feature discussions (e.g. jira, blog, LL forums) such as double click run, removing friends from the map, etc. (which have either been rolled back due to user demand, or have large number of votes in jira to roll back), but these are not isolated examples.
 
The result of the latter is that customers are being pushed to third party viewers which seem better connected to user demand that LL, and the former is pushing those developers away from committing back to LL's source base.
 
Rob's e-mail says that LL does not want to go the same way as Netscape - but I predict that if LL does not change direction soon, it will do precisely that. On its current course, I predict that within 5 years, if SL still exists in some form, it will be OpenSim grids and LibSL based viewers that will have the lead in both popularity and (community driven) innovation, and LL will be fondly remembered as an early pioneer only...
 
Matthew (hoping that 1.20 RC2 might provide a source code drop which actually compiles *AND* runs under Windows....)
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