Okay, so Arabella Steadham resigned from the Emerald team last night, and was then not going to appear on Paisley Beebe’s show. Fractured Crystal, the perpetrator of the Emerald Viewer based distributed denial of service attack was then also not going to appear either.
Then a resignation from Crystal popped up for a few minutes, and then was deleted. Then it came back again somewhat later in the day, and the word was going around that Steadham would not be revoking her resignation. While all of this was going on, the Emerald viewer disappeared from Linden Lab’s third-party viewer directory.
It’s like Schrödinger’s Resignation. Resigned, unresigned, who the heck knew? That’s all recapped here. Now there’s more detail, thanks to Paisley Beebe.
Steadham says her resignation as the Emerald team’s Communications Manager was because she was “asked to lie”, but Steadham doesn’t say what it was that she was actually asked to lie about.
Steadham reaffirms Fractured Crystal’s resignation, and that neither Crystal nor Modular Systems “will ever be associated with the Emerald viewer again, in any form, as an alt or anything. Will not happen.” Crystal apparently was asked or pressured to resign by Steadham.
So, a massive restructure “to prevent anything like this from ever happening again” with no one person in control, and the whole project migrated to emeraldviewer.net (which is not yet live at the time of writing).
Domain and hosting ownership will belong to Steadham.
Emerald’s Jessica Lyon said (during the interview with Beebe) that Linden Lab was responsible for the removal of the Emerald viewer from its third-party viewer directory.
“We did expect that this might happen, and we have since provided the Lab with information regarding our new changes, structure, and goals. We are reapplying and hope to be back on the third-party viewer directory soon,” said Lyon.
“Our two biggest regrets are first and foremost that these incidents ever took place; and second, that we failed to take this radical action sooner.”
Lyon finished her statement with the hope that Emerald users and Linden Lab could bring themselves to trust the team and the project again in future.
Steadham asserts that she was misled about the nature of the DDoS attack by multiple people, and thus unintentionally misreported the nature of the incident.
Steadham does not, however, mention the names of any of the people on the team who deceived her as to the nature of the attack, but says that “not everyone will be invited to the new team.” A finalised list of developer and team-members on the new Emerald project will be published when it is available.
The full session should be available at treet.tv soon, and the audio can be found here.
I differ from Steadham’s view that inclusion in Linden Lab’s viewer directory would constitute “a vote of confidence” since even Linden Lab insists that inclusion in that directory is not an endorsement, or indicates any quality, confidence or trust.
To the best of my knowledge, the Emerald viewer, despite its presence on the directory has not ever actually been entirely compliant with Linden Lab’s third-party viewer policies.
For some little time, I have had growing concern with the low level of privacy awareness in the Emerald Development team, and the lack of respect that members of that team seem to have for thier users.
Admitedly, we don’t pay for the service, and as such it might not be valid to expect that the developers will be both privacy-aware and respectful.
The most recent beta release of the viewer (which was pulled for privacy concerns) had some interesting features that had privacy-revealing side-effects. One such feature enabled a member of the “Emerald Support Team” to request that your client supply a large volume of personal system information information apparently without your knowledge or consent.
Regardless of any other factor, the thing that started me thinking about Emerald’s suitability/safety as a client was this support-reporting function.
Then, in rapid succession we get two developers leave, (much) more information about emerald information embedded in texture layer (and the dishonesty/secrecy involved in this process), and then this…
The Emerald team has quite a lot of work to do to recover end-user confidence and thus thier position as a Viewer-of-choice for a large minority of the SL users.
It will be interesting to see how the KirstenLee and Imprudence viewers fair during this phase.
“Admitedly, we don’t pay for the service, and as such it might not be valid to expect that the developers will be both privacy-aware and respectful.”
But we can always shop somewhere else where that expectation holds true, so to speak. Maybe the project will turn around. Maybe it won’t. Acta non verba, yes?
Hrm.
“Radical action.” I’m just… no. No. This isn’t “radical”. This is what they should have been… what they should have done in the first place. That sort of oversight and transparency is the *norm* for open source projects.
Look. Any open source project worth its salt has controls in place. Open source is not equal to anarchy. Somebody, or some group of trusted people have the role as a trusted gatekeeper to the code base. Ask Linus of Linux, or the Apache Foundation, or the less formal OpenSim core development team. Ask any reputable open source project. Up to this point, Emerald has been the very worst example of how an open source project should be maintained in this respect.
Don’t get me wrong. Coding should be a joy. But skill and lolz are no substitute for maturity and responsibility. Emerald often had the first two. It lacked the rest.
Maybe they’ve finally realized this. Maybe the ex-Lindens who have signed on to Emerald have exerted pressure on them to wake up and smell the coffee. I’m willing to remain open minded, but they have a real battle ahead of them to prove that they’ve awakened and realized their organizational weaknesses. I’ll wait and see. Time will tell.
In the meantime, I’ll stick to the Imprudence viewer. Since November of 2009, I’ve seen first-hand how the Imprudence developers regard serious oversight of their viewer. Although Imprudence has many features from other TPVs, this oversight can result in fewer features than Emerald, and this is a *good* thing. They don’t let anybody toss any code into it willy-nilly. They carefully examine contributions and the ramifications, tailoring them to make the best fit rather than snatching them up as is. Imprudence developers transparently discuss viewer matters with users on their blog and forums (without heavy moderation!), on their IRC channel, and in regular public meetings on the 3rd Rock Grid. Perhaps most importantly, the viewer is not their personal playground. If you make a feature request, you can bet on a response to it, and an earnest effort to make popular suggestions happen.
Let Emerald meet that standard, and I’ll reconsider installing it again.
@Tat, yes exactly.
I have been over to the emerald blog to make more specific/pointed commentary, but basically I challenge the Emerald team to show us why they should be trusted.
“I would argue that the most effective (and long-term productive) method of doing this is to bring things into the open.
Apply transparency to the rest of the process, just like LGPL requires you to have transparency in the code.”
We have lost trust in you. You can, however regain it.
– Publish the new development structure.
– Publish the development/project goals.
– Demonstrate that we can trust emkdu.
(I don’t care – find a way!)
The emerald development team do have an opportunity to shine from this.
It is commonly taught a crisis is not just about limiting damage. A crisis is also an opportunity. Those that grasp the opportunity can come out far in advance of thier starting position.
This is increased publicity for Emerald.
People will be hearing the name that had never heard it before. This will include comments about the unique features, followed by disappointment that it cannot be trusted.
Well, if you can prove/demonstrate that you CAN be trusted, then you gain several ways:
– Improved development procedures
– Improved quality control
– Improved team structures
– Improved publicity
Sell these benefits, and Emerald will reap the rewards.
For me, the problem is that I am unsure who I can trust on this.
Linden Lab: other recent activities give me the strong feeling that they don’t care. On compliance with the TPV policy, when I wanted to do a check on texture-rezzing speeds, I found several non-listed viewers, including a notorious copyboy viewer, which were not banned.
Assorted News Sites: there have been a lot of allegations about Emerald, all but the last one lacking in accessible evidence. Is it a pattern of abuse by Emerald Developers, or a pattern of lies? It could easily be a mixture.
Emerald Developers: I’m uncomfortable about trusting them. I find it hard to believe that the survivors are innocent. There was a failure to act, and they were the people in a position to know what was in the code. It wasn’t until somebody on the outside could examine the evidence that they acted. That doesn’t look good.
Another Viewer Developer: How can we decide who to trust?
Few of us have an easy understanding of cource code. I might stand a chance with Turbo Pascal. And, in the Emerald case, there was a chunk of private code, the notorious emkdu.dll, which nobody could check. I find it suggestive that Emerald was plagued with texture-rezzing sluggishness for so long. Just before Viewer 2 was released, the Emerald rezzing speed plummeted.
And if somebody came up to me, said they’d taken over responsibility for Emerald, and would, on a stack of bibles, swear the code was now clean, I’d wonder how they could have read the source that quickly.
Where there is smoke, there’s fire.
I don’t care whether emerald wisens up or not. I just don’t trust them.
So emerald has a couple more features than imprudence.
So what. Imprudence has almost all the features of emerald and some it doesn’t have.
And the Imprudence team is disciplined and H O N E S T.
Don’t go green. Go purple.
Ever occur to anyone that the so-called “ex” Lindens were placed on the team by LL as moles? Perhaps LL grew sick of the drama and thought it might be best to reign in the Emerald staff a bit so “made available” two Lindens who’s creds and experience would be a real feather in Emerald’s cap.
Yeah, conspiracy paranoia but certainly possible. Especially since all this crap became public and the shakeup happened after Q. Linden joined them and progressed even faster after D. Linden came aboard.
Today, Emerald totally knuckled under to LL and allowed them to call the shots on developement BUT said they couldn’t tell us what changes LL asked for. Transparent, huh? So much for honesty from Emerald and LL.
http://blog.modularsystems.sl/2010/08/25/ll-requirements-for-emerald/
LordGregGreg Back took a lot of heat for calling Emerald down and quitting the team. But since every damned thing he talked about (and a few things he didn’t) came out in the wash as true, think it might be best if Emerald team invited him back. At least we’d know one of the team has integrity
But what with Emerald crawling in bed with LL, I wouldn’t blame him if he point-blank refused.
BTW if you have not tried LGG’s EMERGENCE viewer, you might give it a peek. Could be handy to have online as a alternative to Emerald and Imprudence..