[sldev] 3rd party viewer policy post on blogs.secondlife.com

[Mike Dickson]

The problem is its fixing the wrong place.  Either the viewer is
opensource or its not.  If there are issues with the viewer exploiting
content they need to be fixed at the protocol level. And yes, that's a
hard, maybe even impossible problem to fix since the client sort of
needs access to assets to render them. 

I suppose you could require some kind of code signing and use that to
prove you're a sanctioned viewer.  It wouldn't mean that viewer couldn't
be used on OpenSim for example. But really, if you opensource a project 
you sort of lose the ability to dictate how its used.  You don't get the
benefits of the community development model without the loss of some
control.

Mike


On Tue, 2009-10-20 at 23:44 +0000, Stickman wrote: 
> > This is likely to have a negative impact on interest in supporting the
> > viewer at dev level.  There is little point in working on something that you
> > cannot use and test because access is denied.
> >
> > It's equivalent to a website allowing only specific builds of web browser to
> > connect.  With this move, you will drop right off the main open source
> > highway and into a backwater.
> 
> There's been a lot of discussion on this issue, about what should be
> done and what makes sense, and what's uncontrollable.
> 
> From what I read, LL's making a very smart move here.
> 
> 1) They're going to be officially listing the legit third party viewers.
> 2) They're going to ban those residents who create harmful viewers
> that break the ToS.
> 
> I mean, where's the problem? Did I read something wrong?
> 
> -Stickman
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