Linden Lab’s new Third-Party Viewer policy update pushes the existing policy that extra few inches, taking Linden Lab’s power of veto over third-party viewer features just a half step further. A half step that many people may find distinctly unpalatable.
Formerly, of course, the Lab was able to bar any viewer from the Second Life grid if it contained a feature or features that they did not approve of.
The new wording goes like this:
2.k: You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.
What does that mean? It means that the UI and HUD are still more or less free to play around with. You can add, subtract, or otherwise mangle that as you please. That’s not a part of “the shared experience of the virtual world.”
But other features such as, oh, different light/shadow models, or parametric deformers, or anything that alters the way that Second Life is rendered and the way content is displayed – well, you can’t have that in a third-party viewer that connects to the Second Life grid, unless Linden Lab have already incorporated it into the official viewer and released it in production.
That’s the power of veto multiplied by the amount of time Linden Lab takes to incorporate, test and release – assuming it is accepted at all.
If Linden Lab doesn’t like your feature, then people aren’t permitted to use your viewer to connect to Second Life. That’s not new.
If Linden Lab likes your feature, but hasn’t yet gotten around to releasing it in a non-beta viewer, well, people still aren’t allowed to use your viewer to connect to Second Life until Linden Lab gets through the process. Now, that’s new.
Corollary: If Linden Lab changes your feature during implementation and testing, you’ve got to change yours the same way for your viewer to be allowed to access Second Life.
It’s a small change to the policy, but it makes Linden Lab’s development priorities and development timelines your own – however you still don’t know what they are.
So, say you want to develop a new feature such as a parametric deformer. You couldn’t put it in a viewer and distribute it for testing because it violates the TPV policy?
@SecondLie from Twitter sums it up the best in this post:
“BREAKING NEWS: Linden Lab changes Third Party Viewer Policy to ensure that all viewers suck as much as their own.”
And with the regard to LL communication: they post the announcement on “forum” part of their website, but disable comments on it. Go figure.
@Micheil That is correct, or at least you can’t test it on the Second Life grid, the way this the policy is worded. You’d have to go to OpenSim.
Any ideas what TPV feature they’re targeting in particular with this? Unless we’re assuming prohibitive policy is preceding cause for it, but that’d be pretty random. Are they seeing something they don’t like right now?
@Ezra The smart assumption is that there is a specific feature that the Lab wants to get rid of in one or more third-party viewers right now, and that this is what triggered the change. What that might be, however, I have no idea.
So LL continues to try to undo their decision to opensource the client? Or do they just wanna piss their customers again?
Be honest: the TPV list is pretty meaningless anyway. There’s Cool VL Viewer which isn’t on the list, and which people use without trouble, and the “Experimental” version has Qarl’s deformer, and I don’t see how anything changes.
As for “the shared experience of the virtual world”, I have no idea why that shouldn’t include the UI.
Best case, it kills the TPV list.
Worst case, they have an open source viewer which is pointless, because nobody can do open source things with the code and use the results.
Polite words fail me on this.
You can listen to the full 1 hour 45 min meeting with Oz Linden and TPV devs at:
http://lecs.opensource.secondlife.com/tpvd/meeting/2012-02-24.mp3
heh…
the ONLY thing that can come from this, i think, is the acceleration of people switching to opensim.
i mean seriously – what can possibly happen? some cool feature that people love in a TPV gets banned. people can understand banning for abuse – but banning because you’ve got a better product than linden lab?
someone at the lab is really, really not smart.
They say “shared experience”, could they mean that you have a client that alters what other people see, somthing like clients that create megaprims, or prim torture that is beyond the reach of the official client, those tricks to mess with the pointing particles of other avatars, non-standard attachment points etc?
Oz said that features like parcel windlight and breast physics would not be permitted if the new policy was in place. But he’s sort of grandfathering parcel windlight and will not require it to be removed since they are going to officially support it at some point.
Features like that would have never been developed or accepted if this policy was in place.
It is really iffy. My favorite viewer for my first couple of years in SL was Imprudence, and the original TPV policy discouraged them from targeting Second Life first and foremost. I’d hate to see Linden Lab now discourage TPVs all over again when so many interesting ones are cropping up like Exodus, Catznip and all the crazy advancements Henri keeps making with Cool.
And you know, the policy change coupled with a suggestion to TPV devs to suggest new features via Snowstorm seems a bit like strongarming. If they weren’t funneling code and ideas through Snowstorm before it doesn’t seem like inviting this way will get the job done. Maybe ‘strongarming’ is too strong an accusation but it might come off that way.
Thanks for that link Latif.
2.i seems to be targeted at the functionality for detecting what clients other people are logged with; 2.j is kinda useless, since even if you sent those type of information since by 2.i no one would be allowed to display it anyway…
@Tigro I think 2.k covers things more like… Well, say you got the custom mirror-shader code, and built it into the viewer so that any surface that had a shiny setting of ‘medium’ and a specific minimal value of glow shunted to the mirror-shader instead of the glow/shiny shaders, creating true mirrors for anyone who used your viewer.
That would break the “shared experience” because the official viewer doesn’t do that, and users of it would see a cube-mapped glowy surface instead.
Tigro, I totally agree that viewers should not circumvent user’s privacy settings. But the way Linden Lab decided to implement this restriction is totally crazy:
They decided to break LSL scripting call that returns online status. For *everybody* except the script *creator* and object owner. This means that a ton of legit content is broken. All those AdBoards you see around in clubs are dead from the next week. Even for the people that don’t chose to hide their online status. The only people exempt from this “security policy” are opensource script developers that have full permission scripts floating around since it is allowed to lookup online status of the script creator, but not for someone who explicitly sets his online status to public.
Can it get more mindbogglingly crazy than this?
Alterations of the experience that aren’t shared don’t alter the shared experience, it creates a whole new experience; it doesn’t make sense to include client side features as part of the shared experience, client side things are only shared if someone is looking over your shoulder…
One thing it kills, one of the clauses you didn’t quote, is the display of which viewer another user is using. No exceptions. The immediate subsequent clause does let a viewer send that data to another viewer, with user permission. I’m not sure how that would be interpreted by a lawyer, there are rules on that sort of thing, but that looks aimed very directly at Phoenix/Firestorm, which can display that info, and which, in the in-world support group, uses that info.
If there is a resolution of that apparent contradiction, somewhere in legal practice and precedent, it is not apparent to me.
Looking at the post, they essentially have it outside the TOS that “shared user experience” is not being taken to include the UI. And one of the obvious potential clashes, the RLV viewer, has apparently been declared, by one Linden, in an in-world meeting, to be OK.
They’re using Dr. Gatling’s Patent Toenail Clipper again.
It also stifles innovation. What good is developing a new feature (remember avatar physics) that just might be much liked by the residents when all you can do is describe it to them and hope LL implements it someday.
I have always felt there is an “our world, our way” faction at LL who really do not think resident or 3rd party viewer initiatives have any place on THEIR PLATFORM.
I’ve not seen the policy yet, only your quote above. I would interpret the term ‘shared experience’ as meaning ‘stuff that effects other people’. So graphical stuff is fine but something that impacts another user is outlawed. Doesn’t seem all that unreasonable on that basis.
Emma, this is a direct quote from Oz Linden (about 45 min into recording I linked above):
“If parcel windlight didn’t already exist, this parcel windlight that you guys are doing, and have been doing for a while now, would be a good example of violating this rule.”
So allowing parcel owners that specify windlight settings would not be allowed since Linden Lab viewer would not show those same settings.
The complete policy is available in the usual place, as required part of the Second Life terms of service.
My first thought was that it has to do with the self-attaching HUDs and features that some viewers might add that misuse that feature for griefing.
Stuff like the breast physics, multiple attachment points, parcel windlight anything that pushed the boundaries are off limits now this is a bad move stifling innovation,not all those ideas were successful. but they have pushed ll design, i dislike this intensily, a less specific we resevrve the right to ban any viewer we dislike would be a lot less restrictive than this you.
well that is the end of my “I think Rodvik gets it” phase
After listening to the interview Latif posted, I gotta say I agree 100% with the outcome Oz seems to want. Every viewer have the same “shared experience”, TPVs offering customized “shared experiences”, any big features that’d break “shared experience” having to make it through Snowstorm first.
I think we’d all prefer if Snowstorm was a success and all the great things TPV devs do for their individual viewers, were melded together in 1 viewer. I can understand though that half or less will agree such a forceful policy and posture change was the best way to go about accomplishing this.Assuming it does accomplish it.
I support the changes and new stance, but if I was a TPV dev heavily invested in doing something that goes against it, I wouldn’t.
Ezra, in theory there is nothing wrong with what Oz’s stated goal is. In practice Linden Lab has a very poor track record of working with opensource developers. Just a month ago or so Linden Lab rejected Qarl’s prim alignment tool. The work on mesh deformer, while officially supported, is progressing at snail’s pace. Before this policy a TPV dev could say, right, you don’t want feature X, I’ll make a viewer that has it (say parcel windlight, breast physics etc.)
I’m afraid that the new policy will mean that the innovation made by TPV’s is going to be severely limited.
As Oz said in the Q&A, “give us the benefit of the doubt”.
You’re right, Oz and his team have fumbled in their time even though he guarded himself in the Q&A by blaming a lot of bad experiences in the past on Linden Lab’s behavior before himself and Rod.
The ball is entirely in their court and I don’t think they’re going to please every TPV dev. How could they? At present, TPV devs get 100% of what they want and adding big features via Snowstorm means jumping Oz’s hurdles or outright being refused at least some of the time..
I sympathize fully and understand every doubt TPV devs have, and I seriously question whether Oz can be as understanding and facilitating a maintainer as he seems to want to be, but we’ll see.
What I found very interesting was him saying Linden Lab is interested in client features that’d require server side work. It seems he’s suggesting that say, in the case of parcel-based Windlight settings, it could’ve been done via region database entries instead of hacked around as it is. It’d be awesome if devs could really push Linden Lab to follow through on developing server components to client features they dream of.
I’m not a TPV dev so I can only dream, but I hope this opens as many avenues for innovation as it closes.
We have the Full TPV Policy
We also have Oz saying there are exceptions, in a voice chat session.
And the TPV Policy is being implemented by “breaking” some existing scripting language and other features: I’ve only seen this stated at http://www.phoenixviewer.com/ with some changes taking effect with the server code roll-out next week.
Oh, wonderful, here come the bugs again.
Ezra, how long does “benefit of the doubt” take? How many years? Oz has been there for almost two years, Rod a year. As I said just a few weeks ago Qarls prim alignment tool gets rejected. Nothing got better while Oz was there. On the contrary.
I’ve been hearing him say those words since week two of his employment. But it never actually happens.
I remember, before any of the automatic tricks appeared in Viewers, visiting places that requested you use particular Windlight settings. So parcel-based Windlight is such an obvious idea that I am surprised the Lindens don’t have it in their viewer.
The original breast physics was a “just in my viewer” feature. It only affected what I saw. A creepy aspect was that I could give anyone bouncy breasts, to suit my particular desires, but nobody else would see it. I doubt that would trigger the “shared experience” rule. Similarly with Prim Alignment: it does something in my viewer. It doesn’t change how another user sees the world.
The old multiple-attachment system in Emerald would be an example of breaking “shared experience”.
The recent multiple textures in a clothing layer, because of the texture baking system that should only send out the end result of all the overlapping clothing layers, doesn’t depend on the onlooker’s viewer, so it doesn’t affect the “shared experience” but I’m not sure I’d want to explain that to a lawyer.
So far I don’t think the Lindens have explained anything. Using Voice Chat for their communication with TPV developers seems almost like an attempt to keep things deniable. We have a recording, but it’s not anything like as convenient as a log of a text session.
“Benefit of the doubt” lasts ’til first screw up. Which is why I think its very brave of Oz to speak so confidently about how he plans to handle things given Linden Lab’s track record before and after him.
We’ll see how it goes..and probably very quickly if another prim alignment tool rejection type fiasco happens.
I like Qarl’s critique of Charlar when he said in a sense Linden Lab has to become a lot more hospitable and kind to devs, and not speak to you all like machines when barking QA objections. They behave like different people on the JIRA vs. user group meetings. I think whatever it takes to make the likes of Qarl and yourself (Latif) comfortable with all this has to be done. Obviously that isn’t the case right now so maybe its already failed.
I hope Oz and all manage to be really kind and somehow make this better than working apart from one another on big features via TPVs. If they don’t, then its LL’s fault if Snowstorm continues to fail to attract big contributions, and worse due to this new policy TPVs stagnate and we the users suffer.
here’s a question:
for years, Kirsten’s let us see shadows that weren’t available elsewhere. would Kirsten’s be allowed under the new policy?
@qarl, I’d say it isn’t “shared experience”. It’s only in your viewer, it isn’t affecting other people. Even with shadows in the Linden Viewer, not eveyone uses them. It’s a passive feature.
But, from what the Lindens have put out as text, I can’t be certain.
@wolf -
but he also said that breast physics would NOT have been allowed.
what’s the distinction between shadows and jiggly boobs? they’re both client-side no effect on others… ? ditto parcel windlight settings… ?
@Ezra,
I think there might be a deep piece of social behaviour in that difference between JIRA and user-groups. Read the logs, and a user-group meeting is a genuine, live, multi-way, conversation. Even some of the same people in a JIRA are behaving differently.
It’s tempting to consider it as an instance of the same sort of reaction to being in a position of authority that was shown in the Stanford Prison Experiment, but it would be dreadfully easy to over-stress that. Lord Acton said it a long time ago: power tends to corrupt. Being assigned to deal with a JIRA entry is only a small power, but…
@qarl
Judging by Oz’s answers in the Q&A, it doesn’t seem like Kirsten’s shadow feature would’ve been allowed. Breast physics were just enabling a feature Linden Lab already had developed, right? A lot of Kirsten’s rendering features including shadows were similar I believe.
That’s kind of interesting. It prohibits TPVs from enabling, improving and even completing features Linden Lab isn’t ready to turn on yet. At least through TPVs, it’ll have to come through Snowstorm now.
What makes me uncomfortable here is that it is a legal document in writing. But the exceptions seem to be entirely verbal and undocumented. That ain’t no way to run a railroad, as my father used to say.
[...] Dwell On It [...]
Do parcel windlight settings alter the shared experience? If someone can’t see them, what’s the problem?
Re: “give us the benefit of the doubt.”
Surely you jest.
Linden Lab has been running Second Life for years. The fact that Oz can claim that those running the show now are different than those a couple of years ago isn’t a claim in his favor; it’s symptomatic of the dysfunctions we have come to know all too well.
LL’s single biggest problem is a general failure to follow through on anything. Coding projects and business models are both announced with great fanfare, then abandoned, or released in half-assed beta forms which are left as-is thereafter, or gutted in the next change-in-direction. There is no reason to assume that the current regime will be any different. Quite the contrary.
If Linden Lab truly wants to get the benefit of the doubt back, they’re going to have to earn it first. Let’s have a few years of stability and then we’ll talk.
@Ezra
No, Emerald breast physics were an original hack on their part. (And as Qarl points out, their version was strictly client-side.) Linden Lab later developed body physics in a much better way, rendering said hack both unnecessary and obsolete. It’s a safe bet that LL never would have bothered doing so if Emerald hadn’t illustrated the demand for it. Much the same goes for multiple attachments.
I agree that Emerald’s “solutions” to both were problematic, and I can understand that the Lab doesn’t want to be forced to find better ways of doing things its users want. But as a user, I rather like the results of the issue being forced, flawed though the process may be.
And they let the story break on a Friday, leaving all weekend for the panic and uncertainty to brew.
Well, Henri Beauchamp has been outside the official TPV list, for other reasons, for as long at it has been around. Maybe the TPV is worthless after all. Maybe the Lindens will start playing hardball on enforcement.
They go on about “shared user experience”, and then pull something like this which seems to say “f**k your user experience”
(And I am not talking about the well-known High Street brand of “French Connection UK”)
We’re not given examples from which we can infer consistent rules. We cannot, therefore, rely on any rational interpretation of the published policy. If I were to make a tool that would improve my personal experience, whether it is building, or helping other users, or taking better images of what exists and happens in SL, however passive it might be in its effects, I cannot predict the Linden reaction.
So it’s a choice between innovation and stagnation. It’s a choice between the TPV, or betting on Linden apathy to non-compliance.
I saw the buzz about it, went the ” calm down” route, thinking they were focusing narrowly on the *shared* aspect, gunning for something like the hacky early multiple attachment spot, which did specifically push a breaking effect onto other viewers, with attachments floating randomly in the air.
-And that was pretty much the only example I could think of which, in my mind, would run up against the new clause.
With Oz’ clarifications cited here, I am shocked, and entirely jumping on the outrage bandwagon. That just doesn’t make sense. If a purely client-side effect like shadows and avatar physics would be denied, then so would radars, inventory sorting, practically anything people use the TPVs for.
[...] on this issue: Linden Lab’s Official Announcement Inara Prey’s Living in a Modem World Dwell On It The Tigress’ Second Den Phoenix Viewer Second Life News Nalates’ Things & [...]
At the moment, the thing really skewing shared experience is that some people are staying with 1.23 based viewers because the mesh-enabled ones are proving unstable for them (I can sympathise – Iwas unable to use one for longer than five minutes at a time before the latest upgrades).
But it means that a sizable number on the grid is definitely getting a rather different user experience – and that’s not down to third party viewers.
“Do parcel windlight settings alter the shared experience?” Officially, yes. That’s the sort of thing that the policy is intended to cover, we are told.
Basically, you’re giving users delicious candy that users of the official viewer aren’t able to eat. They can not share in your experience of the candy. Or something.
[...] at Prim Perfect Inara Pey Tonya Natales Will Burns Tateru Jessica of Phoenix Metareality… just bleep Reed on this [...]
tl;dr 2K is divisive and will in a practical sense not work as intended, it gives the advantage for innovation to open sims and will constitute a brain drain away from SL.
Simple example. A TPV developer has an idea, they poke Oz about it and then start to mess about with some code. We’re coders, that’s what we do. The developer gets a rough prototype done, polishes it a bit and tests, it’s not lab quality production code, but it works well enough and doesn’t kill any chickens.
The TPV now has a problem, they just can’t test and debug properly, can’t try out the new shiny on enough different machines with enough different people poking it. It works for the developer, it might be unusable for someone else, it might crash horribly for the next person.
Poke the lab .. they like the idea but your code isn’t up to linden spec / they don’t really like the idea of it much / they say great we can have this in testing in 3 months, whatever they say the effect for the developer will be the same. A brick wall to the face. Even if the lab bites the TPV’s hand off, it could still be a long time before this proof of concept code ever see’s the light of day. And of course the lab can and will want changes, they have to do thing’s properly you see, can’t just mash up something.
The TPV now has a new trick that it can’t even show, a developer who was happily coding away sat on their hands frustrated because the lab can never move fast enough. It doesn’t matter how wonderful their intentions.
This get worse .. politics get involved .. people start talking about how it should be done properly, the developers feature gets mauled by committee and being passed back and forth, the developer starts to feel like this isn’t a hobby any more .. this is a job .. this is like doing real development for an employer, except there isn’t any money to seen. We’re doing this in our spare time for enjoyment, we’re not really up for this.
The TPV has a bright idea, they ship the feature as coded, they wrap the code up so it just wont work on the Linden grid. TPV policy is honoured to the letter, developer gets to do the needed testing and gather user feedback in the wild on non Linden grids.
At this point it doesn’t matter what the Lab do, Opensim just got the biggest gift they could ever hope. The rarest metaverse animal of them all. A skilled developer.
This isn’t a slippery slope, it’s simple human nature. The Lab will never be able to turn a trick as fast as TPV staffed by developers who do what they do for fun, and right now Opensim is the only place developers can show their style and flair.
What happens when your viewer of choice has more tricks in progress than Lab’s shared experiences.
To be plain, I am passionate about the SL grid, I am VERY pro Lab.
I’ve assembled a list of the most burning and frequently asked questions that I’ve been seeing, and sent them off to the Lab for responses.
@Trinity I agree. This looks like the biggest single boost to OpenSim in the last 12 months.
For some reason my first guess was that somebody’s got a TPV out there that fails to observe the parcel privacy flag, and renders avatars in a parcel with the flag set even when the agent is outside the parcel.
I don’t have any evidence for this…
@Maggie Not a bad thought, but I don’t believe so. I believe that if the parcel flag is set, the information is simply not sent to the viewer.
oh my.
i sent Oz a question last night about my deformer project:
> > about a million and one people have asked me: where does the deformer fall w/r/t the new policy.
> >
> > what should i tell them?
he replied:
> The best answer would be that they should ask us, not you.
can someone else ask them for me, please?
@Qarl I will add it as a supplemental question to the list that I sent to the Lab.
Frankly, at this point I wish LL would simply slam the TPV door and go on about doing whatever TF they want to do anyway, and bring this whole prolonged, painful charade to an end. It’s an endless source of drama, a distraction from the by now largely vanished possibility of a genuinely new improved viewer and a pointless waste of far too many people’s time and energy.
LL never really wanted to do open source in the first place, backed into it as a clumsy response to the inevitable reverse engineering of their wire protocol, bought into the idea that by pretending to play along they’d get free QA and bugfixes, and their pick of new features, but were never really willing to surrender any control over the platform.
By trying to do the new UI design for V2 on-the-cheap with engineering talent that clearly had no concept of real use cases, a balkanization of the viewer installed base was created that was utterly toxic to the introduction of deparately needed new functionality such as MOAP and mesh. That debacle sends a message to paying customers like me that neither the will nor the resources exist at Linden Research to move the platform forward other than in unimportant incremental ways, and that it is doomed remain mired in deep default on its technical debt for the foreseeable future.
Apparently, it’s no soup for Qarl… ¬.¬
@qarl I’m speechless, I really am. If anything the way they are working with you is the only example of the bright new future of collaborative viewer development the lab is after. Someone has replaced the office coffee with decaf … and tripped the circuit breaker for the lights.
“Qarl can’t be allowed to answer questions on this because we can’t
rely on him to spin it the way we want to. He’s also in a position to
call BS in a way that makes it difficult for us to pull our usual ‘we
know better than you so STFU’ act.”
@qarl
Was Oz going out of his way to look stupid?
Yeah, sure, all the people with queries about this should be asking the Lindens directly, rather than through a third party. But you’re the Developer. You’re the examplar of the people they’ve said they want to work with.
They’re not making it easy to believe their claims. I really don’t need to believe your story to be sceptical about their good intentions (road to Hell for the paving of). So, while I hope there’s been a misunderstanding, I’m not optimistic. If a Linden told it was sunrise, I would, after making due allowance for timezones, check an Almanac.
Does this mean that all the TPVs have to shrink their selection of Windlight presets to the same pathetic list that the Official Viewer uses?
SecondLie: “BREAKING NEWS: Linden Lab changes Third Party Viewer Policy to ensure that all viewers suck as much as their own.”
SecondLie never fails to amuse. Gotta luv his stuff.
Qarl: heh… the ONLY thing that can come from this, i think, is the acceleration of people switching to opensim.
Tateru: This looks like the biggest single boost to OpenSim in the last 12 months.
Bingo. That was the very first thought that crossed my mind as I read this article.
Simeon: well that is the end of my “I think Rodvik gets it” phase
Yeah, I hate to say it, but I haven’t seen anything come out of the Rodvik group that has impressed me at all. It’s totally “business as usual” and predictable… but it shows he really doesn’t “get” Second Life or its customers any better than Kingdon or Rosedale.
Ezra: After listening to the interview Latif posted, I gotta say I agree 100% with the outcome Oz seems to want. Every viewer have the same “shared experience”
Yeah, the basic policy itself makes sense. From a purely business and corporate standpoint, a lot of the things LL is doing “makes sense”. But the problem with business and corporate “business as usual”… is that it is anti-Second Life. This is not a normal product, and they aren’t dealing with “gamers”. This is a society they have created, that we helped create, and LL has governed it very badly.
Samantha: LL’s single biggest problem is a general failure to follow through on anything.
Or alternately… to follow through very, very badly. Neither option is the way to go. But they have such a history of bad decisions, the typical reaction to any new LL announcement is panic. That’s a very bad atmosphere to be hovering over Second Life– and LL is totally responsible for it.
We can say this though: there’s no doubt that fixing seriously malfunctioning client-side cache definitely should take a back seat to development of say… bouncing boobies. That was a good call, eh?
Latif: Ezra, in theory there is nothing wrong with what Oz’s stated goal is. In practice Linden Lab has a very poor track record of working with opensource developers.
They have a very poor track record of working with everyone… including their customers.
Latif: how long does “benefit of the doubt” take? How many years?
More than 8, apparently.
Maggie: Frankly, at this point I wish LL would simply slam the TPV door and go on about doing whatever TF they want to do anyway, and bring this whole prolonged, painful charade to an end.
As much as I hate to agree with you on this one Maggie, once again you’re spot-on. That would be the business-sensible thing to do. It would also be waking a sleeping beast that would tear out their throat… maybe. Hard to tell. Maybe they can poke it and see what happens.
Maggie: Qarl can’t be allowed to answer questions on this because we can’t
rely on him to spin it the way we want to. He’s also in a position to
call BS in a way that makes it difficult for us to pull our usual ‘we
know better than you so STFU’ act.
You know what I find interesting Maggie, is that a whole lot of stuff we see Qarl saying now… is exactly the same thing we customers have been saying for years. And now LL is trying to ignore Qarl like they ignored us all these years. Problem is that just as you pointed out, Qarl’s voice carries a bit more impact. I just wish for everyone’s sake, LL had listened when we were telling them these things way back in 2005 (and earlier). Since they didn’t… GO QARL! To be honest… it’s kind of nicely validating.
Tigro: So LL continues to try to undo their decision to opensource the client? Or do they just wanna piss their customers again?
We do have to wonder, don’t we Tigro?
What all this mainly means is that any viewer that doesn’t implement MESH or goose-step to the LL philosphy is going to be canned. But as Tateru points out, it’s apparent LL likely has one particular viewer in mind right now that is in their target sights. Or maybe as you say, they’re trying to regain total viewer control.
This makes sense from a corporate standpoint. The viewer has always been the achilles heel of VR. From a business standpoint, LL made a serious mistake in open-sourcing the viewer. Now they’re trying to get all the animals back in the pen when someone left the gate open years ago.
I have to be honest, if I’d have been LL I would have prevented any external viewer (including Copybot) from running on SL from the very beginning (claims they couldn’t do anything about Copybot are total BS. That’s admitting they don’t have the skillz to handle corporate security and protect themselves against hackers).
I’d have never opensourced anything. That was a self-destructive move that did nothing more than empower their competition. It was a really dumb decision (one of many).
TPVs… as much as I apprecite them, have been a security nightmare from day one (which we warned LL about from day one)… and have made it far more difficult to maintain SL from a technical standpoint.
What we’re seeing here is a very predictable and very obvious life cycle: Linden Lab feels the populace has too much freedom, that freedom is impacting their ability to govern in a “we say so” manner (or even maintain standard security measures), so they’re instituting Iron Curtain measures to wall in their city. Frankly, that’s what they should have done in the first place (if they’d had any sense). But as Qarl astutely points out– at this time it’s just one more nail in the coffin in pushing people toward their competition.
I can tell Linden Lab this: our group left SL in November 2011. Now I hardly ever visit SL, and we’re having just as much fun on their competitor’s grids (moreso in fact) as we’ve ever had on Second Life. We just set up a new archery range this week (works spiffy). While we were stagnating on SL and down to one lousy sim at $350 a month… we’re up to 23 regions on our new home (and growing). That growth happened in a little under 2 years.
So while I am very empathetic toward users of SL, people who have invested heavily, people who earn their livings there and people who still have strong social structures there… I now view SL as a “little engine that couldn’t”, a company that threw away their ultimate dream of creating a 3D web and instead went for $immediate $gratification. Even in that, compared to other online communities, they’ve failed to generate profit levels that would be expected from such a venture.
That’s what happens when a company refuses to give customers what they want.
ps-Anyone notice the huge number of comments this bog has received. Linden Lab… you people really need to start paying attention before your competition eats your lunch. Oops… too late! They’ve just finished the salad and are about to start on the main course.
I have to agree with Emma. What they are addressing are the things that impact the more-or-less common experience of all users. The Emerald attach points were a good example – unless you were using Emerald, you were seeing people walking around with attachments hovering over their heads.
Oz brought up parcel windlight as another example, accusing the TPV creators of hijacking parcel info to insert code that only worked on some TPVs, and so not everyone was experience the same environment at the same time, necessarily. LL is giving Firestorm, et. al. a pass on this though, until they can implement it properly. Just like they did with avatar physics and attach points.
Also, TPV client tags and colors will be going away as well. I can see a good side to the tags disappearing – as many people have been harangued for using a “copybutting griffer” client that is actually no such thing.
I’m also guessing that the axe is about to finally fall on the 1.23 viewers.
On one key point i disagree with Wayfinder; in my opinion, if LL kept pushing towards turning Second Life into what i like to call Web 3.D, and transforming themselves into just another hosting company (though one with a massive distributed server farm and years of experience ahead of the competition), i would expect both SL and the Lab itself to be in much better shape today.
I’m sort of thinking that the first that Rod will know about the policy is when he looks at his blogs, twitter and email this-morning.
I found the following link to detail what LL has in mind. I haven’t had time to examine everything, but up front it seems like this is more to prevent customer abuse than to limit other viewers.
https://modemworld.wordpress.com/2012/02/25/ll-update-their-tpv-policy/
If it seems like everyone panicked too quickly, well, I’d have to say LL has only themselves to blame for that. Their decisions over the last 3+ years have everyone in auto-OMG! mode.
@Wayfinder From Inara’s article…
“There is a very real risk that this policy change will completely stifle Viewer innovation – or even drive it away from Second Life entirely. One can well understand developers no longer wishing to invest their unpaid time into code and functions that LL might ultimately decide is unsuitable for the Viewer and SL as a whole.”
I think that sentiment alone is enough to inspire the panic you are seeing. It’s not knee jerk.
Tigro: On one key point i disagree with Wayfinder; in my opinion, if LL kept pushing towards turning Second Life into what i like to call Web 3.D, and transforming themselves into just another hosting company (though one with a massive distributed server farm and years of experience ahead of the competition), i would expect both SL and the Lab itself to be in much better shape today.
Actually, I don’t think we disagree there. They should have done exactly that: pushed more toward being a 3D web and being a hosting company, giving their customers more autonomy at a far more affordable price (that’s semi-what OSgrid is trying to do). Had they done so, as you say they would have been far better off. Less headaches, less hassles, more customers, happier customers and far more profit overall.
Alternately, they could have taken the Inworldz route and simply offered far lower prices and listened more to what customers wanted. They could have simplified the product, added more in-world tools, and made the system easier to use. That would have worked too.
Expensive, totalitarian and difficult-to-use hasn’t served them well, and certainly has not served their customers or built Linden Lab a good reputation.
Tateru: I’m sort of thinking that the first that Rod will know about the policy is when he looks at his blogs, twitter and email this-morning.
LOL… and that would just be sad. Unfortunately, you may be right.
Trinity: I think that sentiment alone is enough to inspire the panic you are seeing. It’s not knee jerk.
I agree on that point. Not defending LL at all.
In truth, I think it’s interesting that we have to go to an external blog to find out why they made such decisions. Whether we agree with the decisions or not, whether they’re wise or not, we get back to the age old LL bane of lack of communication.
The whole point of having an organisational structure, after all, is so that only those decisions that can be made by the person at the top actually get to her, and everything else is handled at lower levels.
However, the principle of “the buck stops here” always applies. Blame and responsibility travel upwards – until it can rise no further.
Also, I cannot speak to the intent of any given policy. What is written is ultimately the whole of the thing, as they say. The four great sins of civil contract law are: Breach of terms, selective enforcement, setting out terms that you don’t intend to comply with (all three being forms of bad faith) and not reading what you agreed to before you agree to it (idiocy).
@Wayfinder : Those two approaches aren’t mutually exclusive. Opening up the platform standards and becoming a hosting company is not necessarily a deterrent to providing better tools to work with the platform; much to the contrary, making it easier for people to enjoy the services you offer is somthing a service provider should have amongst their top priorities.
I think a lot of people have been laboring under the impression that the viewer is an open source project. It is not, and it never has been. The code is open source, the project is not. This is an important distinction.
The way LL handles viewer development (i.e. the project) is largely analogous to the way Google handles Android. They see it as their prerogative to dictate the direction, to work on features behind closed doors, or to mandate requirements that will conform to a predictable platform. And they’re right. Their ownership of the copyright, use of contributor agreements, and control of the SL service enable them to do this.
Personally, I think it’s a bit futile to rail against this. Without a full fork of the viewer accompanied by a service not controlled by LL, we’re stuck riding on LL’s coat-tails. I am not advocating a full fork, as the reality is that many of the more complex and essential features of the viewer are better handled by an entity with the sort of resources that LL has. I think TPVs have resisted working within LL’s sphere of control, and with good reason due to LL’s historical resistance to provide timely or clear communication in relation to outside contributions or when and how they’d be welcome and not a waste of a TPVs time. At the same time, a recognition of the reality that LL is in the driver’s seat and that working with them is going to be more productive than peeing into the wind, is maybe in order so long as SL remains the primary viewer target.
Having said that, I’m glad to see that a few people have pointed out OpenSim as an alternative platform for innovation without the restrictions TPVs face on the SL platform. I’d love to see TPVs provide more robust support for features that are OpenSim specific while retaining SL compatibility.
If this new rule means that “show LookAt” revealing avatar names and similar privacy-invading stuff has to disappear from TPVs, I’m all for it. I more than once received angry IMs from strangers just because I dared to look at them at a public place.
Masami, I asked that specific question during the meeting, and was told no, that feature is fine.
I wish it was prohibited. Creates unnecessary drama, then people turn off sending viewer effects which makes everyone look like a zombie with fixed eyes and accessibility applications lose valuable data point.
@qarl
Nice precedence he’s setting there given this already shaky start.
You know what’d alleviate a lot of worry about this? If Oz didn’t have 100% control over every feature that goes into Second Life on the open source end of things. There’s 0 democracy in how Oz is proposing handling this thus far. No one has time to figure out how to pet his personality well enough to get him to understand the importance of a feature he’s looming over at the chopping block constantly.
Something has to be reinstated, like JIRA voting and every feature request that crosses a certain threshold should be fair game for a contributor to start working on regardless of Oz’s tastes in what’s a good feature and what isn’t vs. the thousands of users that will undoubtedly know better. Plus, if its too outrageous and undoable a feature no contributor will pick it up anyway.
The aim of this new policy is great; a unified experience for all Second Life users, but its not going to work with Oz having 100% control over what new features happen or don’t. And its not about Oz being Oz; qarl could have his position and it still won’t work because 1 person deciding is always worse than 1,000.
Some form of concrete democracy has to complement this that the Lindens are bound to respect and be held accountable to regardless of personal opinions. Right now their personal opinions reigns over all even though they aren’t invested and active participants in the grid beyond their daily job duties as Lindens.
@Latif
That’s weird…I find that feature much more privacy invasive than someone knowing my viewer tag. It’s alright to know where my camera is but not my viewer version? That’s like this blog having a feed displaying which page I’m on but it’d be out of line to say that I’m using Firefox.
Part of the trouble of 1 person seeming to have ultimate power in deciding what runs afoul of the new policy and what doesn’t. Are we really going to have a dictator? Can’t we learn from ANY big open source project out there? How about a ‘core’ team consisting of Lindens and non-Lindens that vote amongst themselves before closing a JIRA? It can’t just be Oz.
Does this policy mean text-only viewers that allow you to connect to SL over some cell phones or low powered netbook computers are disallowed?
I wonder if they’re hoping that not being able to see tags showing how few people are using their crappy official viewer will convince new users that TPVs aren’t anything important. It’s a sign of bad design when a company tries to hide how poorly they’re doing by suppressing competition rather than actually fixing the broken product.
I wonder how SL would be if LL got out of the Viewer business entirely, except for providing a basic framework that developers could use, instead of trying to force everyone into using their horrible viewer. I want to yell at LL, “The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers.”
I’ve been trying to listen to the voice recording of the meeting where some of this stuff is explained. I know my ears are not good.
I’m struggling sometimes to hear what exactly is being said, and this sounds like a decent recording. It’s much the same sort of problem as I have with live voice.
And they say they want to work with users. Yeah, right. Are the incompetent or are they trying to hide something?
We are the Lindens – You will be assimilated – Resistance is futile!
There’s nothing wrong with your ears, Wolf. It’s always difficult to understand Linden Lab. ;D
Well I can see one side to this:
a while back, a certain third party viewer that got popular due to its features that were not in the main viewer (and easy task, LL barely puts in any features the users want) they started using the fact that a huge percentage of users used their client, to blackmail Linden Lab into doing whatever they wished. If they wanted a group of people banned, fine. if they wanted to not have to obey the ToS, ad even steal from people, fine. Because if anything happened to them, they would make sure those people would stop playing SL.
Then of course those assholes got their shit wrecked once it became public that they steal info from users and use it against users they dont like, they also were notorious for hacking people. So that killed their client.
LL is likely doing this for this reason as well as another: they want a walled garden approach to their service, and are trying to make another there.com now.
But from their perspective: making sure everyone falls into line with their viewer will put an end to a third party ever trying to hijack their services again. Though the other reasons are the typical bs you get from Linden Labs… Oh I’m sorry, Linden research.
I’m with Samantha Poindexter on this. Would we have had LL bring us the automatic loading of windlight settings upon entering a sim or parcel had Emerald viewer not added that hackish (that is, jerry-rigged) stick-it-in-the-parcel-name approach? Would we have gotten extra attachment points, or the ability to wear more than one item on the same attachment point, if Emerald hadn’t invented their own Blahblah 2 attachment points? The latter… maybe, the former… probably not.
And yes, there are a lot of good ideas that would never see the light of day if it was purely up to LL to bring them out but that we now enjoy far and wide on SL because one or more of the TPV makers created and added them, and now we take them for granted.
On thing that REALLY disturbs me is the fact that LL just declared the common, widespread and taken-for-granted practice of showing what TPV you’re using in the text and the color of the text over each avatar’s head to be now totally illegal. Apparently they decided to make this DRASTIC change purely because a handful of people have been harassing ppl over their choice of TPV. I genuinely believe a far better approach to this, and one that would not have required ONE jot of changed code in this regard, should have been to declare that it was a violation of the TOS to harass someone over their choice of TPV, just like it (should be) a violation of the TOS to harass anyone for any *other* reason, and that if they harass someone, they are Abuse Reportable for it.
Another thing that really bothers me is the way LL have now handled the online status issue in this TPV policy change, and how they’re deliberately going to break lots of content, and which I fully expect there will be lots of backlash over. The fact that online-status boards at music clubs and the like will now break.
Yes, there are people out there who get REALLY bent out of shape if people know they’re online when they don’t want them to know. Tough toenails. Some people get bent out of shape when they find out someone doesn’t WANT THEM to know when they’re online or not online. Tough toenails. But to make a drastic change in how SL operates because of a handful of double-damned Drama Queens is frankly cockamamy and wrongheaded. The response to this SHOULD have been: “There is no such thing as total privacy online. LIVE WITH IT!!!! We’ll deal with the really obvious, cyberstalker enabling things, but beyond that we’re not going to go out of out ~@#$%&`* way to hide every possible aspect of your online time just because you’re a hypersensitive, full-of-yourself jackass! LIVE WITH IT!!!”
In short, the rest of us should not have to lose a lot of useful, mostly harmless functionality because of a handful of total jerks in world, those jerks should instead learn to deal with the consequences of their being a jerk. Instead these jerks now get somewhat isolated off from the consequences of their jerkiness, at the great inconvenience of the rest of us, when before they’d have had the consequences of that jerkiness flung back in their face, and maybe have had to actually (GASP!) change their ways.
This new TPV policy mess is one of those cases where they should have discussed a lot of this first, before ANY decisions on a policy change like this would have been made, to let us all have our say in it before any of it was written in stone. Likely the ultimate change that came about would have been one that met in the middle with what we might want, or even might have gone along with what we’d want, but instead they just suddenly drop this change on us out of the blue, already fully formed out of the head of Zeus, but that flies completely in the face of how a lot of ppl in SL actually do things.
@Pat That was one of the questions that I sent in to the Lab. Still waiting on responses.
Mewling: We are the Lindens – You will be assimilated – Resistance is futile!
Yup, for sure. Of course, not resisting is pretty futile too. LL is an equal-opportunity dictatorship. ;D
@Tateru
Could you inquire about any checks and balances? This is a total power shift from from TPV devs having 100% say over their best ideas to Oz having 100% say over their best ideas.
What reassurances can we have that our and contributors say counts? “Benefit of the doubt” won’t do, we need process, a system, and a democratic one at that.
@Ezra Statistically speaking, more open source (or crowdsourced) projects work out well if there is a single person at the top who makes the decisions than if it is done by vote or done ad-hoc.
Democracy or dictatorship – either model in an open source project can be a ticket to success or to disaster. Why? Because the choice of either of these models is far less important than the character, quality and goals of the people who make the decisions. One autocrat or many people in a committee, or everyone as-ever and however they please … it doesn’t matter. If their character and goals do not fit the project, its users and contributors well, then it’ll be a mess, whichever model is used.
That’s been the lesson from millennia of crowdsourcing and open-contribution efforts. One that still hasn’t really sunk in yet, it seems.
The problem with Linden Lab’s opensource effort is not that there is only one person in charge of it. It’s that that person is Oz Linden. His attitude, condescending way he talks to TPV devs is damaging to the company he works for.
One of the first public meetings after he got hired, he made clear there is no room for discussion. It’s Linden Lab’s platform so there is no use arguing against their decisions on say JIRA. “It’s our JIRA, you lose!” were his exact words.
Then he started alienating the opensource developers. Not only those that worked on TPVs like he did to Henri on the opensource-dev mailing list, but those that were contributing the Linden Labs own opensource project at the time: Snowglobe. Some of the most proficient contributors like Aleric and Robin and others working on Snowglobe were dismayed that their project infrastructure was yanked away. Oz woke up one day and decided that the way to force everyone to develop for V2 was to stop providing automated build services for Snowglobe and even went as far to delete its SVN repository.
There is not a meeting with TPV developers where he doesn’t come with condescending remarks like (paraphrasing) “we are adults here at the Lab, and do it properly with QA and all, unlike you kids that ship any old crap”. This is especially infuriating since one of the most often cited thing about why people prefer TPVs over the official viewer is their stability.
And now with the new policy “no new shiny stuff for TPVs unless you give it to us first and *I* approve it”, the opensource developers don’t have even the option of innovating on their own.
If Linden Lab really wants to benefit from their opensource program, and not to shed even more users, they should really reconsider both the policy (2k) and their personnel choice.
@Tateru
This isn’t like most open source projects. In other open source projects if the masses don’t like how a maintainer like Oz is handling things, the community forks the project and goes about their business. Linden Lab has this luxury with every open source project they depend on for their viewer, website and servers.
Because Linden Lab is running an open source project impossible now to fork since they could simply ban any viewer connecting to Second Life that they don’t approve of, I again ask, where are the checks and balances?
TPVs used to balance things prior to this policy. If Linden Lab refuses Qarl’s mesh deformer similar to how they refused the prim alignment tool, before this policy we could still have it in TPVs..that’s out the window now. Power has swayed, drasticly, there -has- to be some proportional shift of power back to third party devs for contributing to Second Life to be as appealing now as it was before.
@Latif
All of that is troubling and sad to hear.
Still, I question if any one person can represent the Second Life userbase in its entirity. What’s worked best in the past is a whole lot of TPV devs catering to different audiences in different ways. There’s been times I’ve used Imprudence because I really loved their focus on .xml imports and temp textures before other viewers picked it up, and times I’ve really depended upon Kirsten’s focus on exposing new graphics features.
There just seems to be zero possibility for contributors to decide on their own whats important for “shared experience” breaking features. I just think this could be done better somehow…like would-be key contributors like you or Qarl be given their own “project viewer” branch with exposed download links to us all no different than the Direct Delivery project viewer.
Everything going through Oz though? Or any wouldbe person that replaces him? Its not going to work. Second Life will stagnate.
Like I said before I love Oz’s desire outcome of a same shared experience for everyone…but its not happening like this. Ignored JIRAs, Lindens simply waking up on the wrong side of the bed and being bitchy to thousands of caring users, its not going to work.
This is highly unusual… but I’m going to be unpopular and play “devil’s advocate” here. I’m a user and a person who has been incensed at how LL has run their company for years now. But I also worked as a corporate consultant for more than 25 years. Many of us are aware of how business works.
Bottom line, Linden Lab is not a democracy. As someone pointed out back there, the Viewer is not an “Open Source Project”. The code is open source and Linden Lab has in the past allowed full TPV access, but frankly that was a dumb and foolish move business-wise. Mind you, I’m glad they made that dumb and foolish move, because it gave us several options when the V2 abomination hit the grid. But the reality is that the Viewer is a major chunk of the software that makes Linden Lab’s product work. As such, it has no business being in the hands of uncontrolled, unofficial open-source developers. That’s just basic business savvy.
As Tateru points out, historically Open Source projects that were run “by democracy” have had serious problems. One of the most noteworthy is Linux, which has so many versions and “distros” and “we think this is better” or “we think that is better”… that it’s difficult for anyone to agree on anything. Imo that’s its biggest flaw and has been responsible for Linux failing to take over the entire PC market and yanking it out of the corporate hands of Micro$oft. The Linux project is like Orks in Warhammer 40k; if they’d ever stop fighting among themselves and unite in common purpose, Micro$oft wouldn’t stand a chance. The one main, dominant advantage Micro$oft has over the Linux development movement: at Micro$oft, someone is in charge and makes the final decisions. The last thing on earth they want the Linux community to do, is agree to put someone in charge.
From a corporate, business standpoint it makes perfect sense to have someone regulate what does and doesn’t go into the Linden Lab product. Without such control and regulation, we wind up with fiascoes such as the Emerald privacy snoop stunt… which (to my understanding) was unfortunately foisted on the entire project by one single person who betrayed the trust people bestowed upon him. (Correct me if I’m wrong there. I never trusted Emerald from the very beginning because of just that possibility, so I didn’t much follow what happened.) That is one of the problems inherent in OpenSource; it’s only as trustworthy as the security systems in place in producing the final distro.
Businesses have the exact same problems: their product is only as trustworthy as the employees in charge of the project. But at least they have some control in that an employee that intentionally bugs code has the potential of losing his paycheck and winding up in jail. Too often, no such control exists in Open Source projects.
So it does make sense that Linden Lab would want greater say and control on what goes into TPVs… because TPVs affect public use and perception of the final product. That’s just a fact of life, a fact of business and a reality of conducting business responsibly.
The question that remains then is: in what manner does Linden Lab work (or refuse to work) with the Open Source community? Do they work closely with all that free labor and encourage development, or do they draw the reins in tightly and exert full control over what is used to access their grid? Do they accept donations from people like Qarl without question… or examine those donations to see if that’s something the company really wants as part of the Second Life platform?
Using Qarl’s project as an example… a number of people may really like what he did. On the other hand, it may have repercussions on the product we’re not aware of. From what I can tell in the rumor and chit-chat mill, it wasn’t so much that they rejected Qarl’s project… but with supposedly the rude and condescending manner in which they did so. In truth the entire handling of Qarl’s dismissal (according to Qarl) was questionable (even he didn’t know why they let him go) . Considering he was the developer of sculpties… that would seem a valid question.
So maybe that’s what the crux of this matter comes down to: not what Linden Lab is doing (basically, protecting their product)… but rather how they’re doing it. I think Qarl hit the nail right on the head when he echoed the thoughts of numerous pro-users over the past years: Linden Lab management conducts the board in an arrogant, condescending and dismissive manner that is contrary to the best interest and wishes of their customers. No matter what policies they institute, that kind of conduct and attitude is going to alienate the very people stocking their bank account with serious amounts of cash every month.
The truth is Linden Lab has every right to decide what will or will not be allowed in Viewers that directly affect their final product. They are a company. They have a product. They want to insure that product is presented to the public in the best manner possible (an area in which they have experienced epic fail in the past… at their own hands *cough Viewer 2 cough*). They have every right to hold the reins and drive the carriage.
Perhaps it’s more how they’re treating the passengers of that carriage that is at issue here.
Just a few thoughts for chewing. : )
PS. All that said and all the points being made… I do have to say though, that I doubt TPV viewers could do much more harm to the LL bottom line and customer satisfaction than Linden Lab themselves did with Viewer 2 / 3. I mean seriously, a hacker / griefer couldn’t have done more serious harm to their platform. Comparatively, frankly speaking I’d rather trust the TPV devs. ;D
Its not about what Linden Lab has the right to do. Its about what they’re willing to do to make Snowstorm attractive to third-party devs since they’re deciding to push Snowstorm on third-party devs.
Do any TPV devs seem happy and willing right now to drop what they were doing and focus all their creativity on Snowstorm? If no, then something needs to be done to appease them, or Snowstorm continues to fail. That ‘something’ should probably start with what TPV devs have lost due to this policy change; a guaranteed measure of creative control.
This is entirely about making sure TPV devs are able to be as happily innovative and creative next week as they were last week. Everything else is moot.
Wayfinder, I’d say that is a pretty good summary.
As much as anything, we’re reluctant to trust LL with so much control. And the reason is past experience.
We don’t know what happened in the Redzone affair, not in detail, but it was always a bit suspect, legally, even under US law. And both Redzone and Emerald have associated rumours of supporters within Linden Labs who turned a blind eye to suspect features and behaviour until they became too blatant. It was outsiders who exposed the criminality, not Linden Labs.
It is intriguing that they stopped the tracking of Linden status so that, even if we had a good source for a name of some malefactor, we don’t readily know if some individual is still working for the company. It’s a sad reality of business life that giving a bad reference to a bad employee triggers expensive lawsuits. And this no-publicity culture, applied both to employees and SL users, means that we have little reason to be confident that we are in a well-regulated social environment. They refuse to take any documentable responsibility for enforcement of the TOS.
It’s rather damning that I have seen more documentation of the changes imposed at http://www.phoenixviewer.com/ than I have from any official source. That’s a big enough TPV developer team that they have to be able to communicate to get anything done at all.
The Phoenix/Firestorm team have made their mistakes. And they’ve been held back by the rather unpublicised series of graphics code problems that became apparent about the time Mesh was released. Coincidence, I suspect, but it looks like the Linden Viewer developers lost track of some of the changes in graphics drivers which were happening.
The last JIRA-entry I bothered to track has been around for a long time. It’s the sort of bug which, if you don’t have formal documentation, could easily be taken to be expected behaviour. And, when the Lindens started saying that they had fixed it, it was trivial for me to demonstrate that they hadn’t.
The Marketplace has been horribly unreliable. Not our problem, say the Lindens. talk to the merchant.
So now the iron hand of Linden control is made more obvious. And they expect us to trust them.
I almost wish that I hadn’t paid for a year of Premium status, in advance.
@ Pat Perth “Does this policy mean text-only viewers that allow you to connect to SL over some cell phones or low powered netbook computers are disallowed?”
No, viewers such as that will be allowed, the policy is flexible. It’s viewers with extra features they are concerned about.
There’s a recording of the meeting, it’s long but I think Radegast gets a mention and is said to be ok, although it may be I’ve read that elsewhere.
@Ciaran Laval The problem is that the flexibility of the program is based upon the say so of Oz on the day, the policy wording is brutal and leaves no wiggle room. Insert something about verbal contracts and paper.
Another perhaps telling point is that in the past policy changes have been delivered by management in person.
@Ciaran
The only thing Oz said when I asked about Radegast and other text clients was that they were special case anyway without saying how they’d be impacted by the “shared experience” rule.
If you go by the letter of the rule they would not be allowed. I’m sure they have no intention of banning them though.
“Yes we have published some rules, but we reserve the right to interpret them any way we like.”
I think many of us have understood the SHARED EXPERIENCE idea in an overly restrictive way. After listening to the examples given in the audio recording I would say the viewer could have the entire render pipeline replaced to give a 3D TV render and not violate policy.
I have a summary of the audio up with time marks so you can find the parts you want to check out.
http://blog.nalates.net/2012/02/26/sl-viewer-policy-change-meeting/
The audio tape is almost 2 hours long. I’ve squeezed it to 3,000 words +/-.
@Nalates Going by the examples that were given at the meeting, I would say that the broad understanding of the shared experience seems to be about spot-on. It seems to be about any user seeing content differently on their viewer to how another user sees it.
we have to take into account the reasons why those decisions were taken:
online status: many people complained about that feature, that invaded their privacy to appear offline to whoever they wish, third party viewers were getting that information and showing to other persons if you were online or not against their will, Linden Lab is protecting the users right to privacy.
sharing type of viewer: third party viewers display what other users are using, fragmentating Second Life users by viewers they use, some discrimination is possible.
shared experience: a problem with third party viewers is that each had its own features that werent compatible with others, like when mesh came, or some didnt want to include Media on a Prim, the users of those viewers were unable to use an object that had the lacking component, or they tought they looked some way while others didnt saw them the same.
there has to be a standard way to experience the world, specially when you dont know what viewer a user of your product have, and who better to set the standard than the official source?
I’ve just been reminded that the examples given at the meeting are, per Lab policy, not official. They could have been given based on a misunderstanding, or based on miscommunication. They have to be confirmed as the Lab’s official position first.
@Canoro Philipp why then break things to solve the problem ?
Having Online status just work as first intented would have allowed existing content not to be broken by those who need to have their online status known… (Now, you will always be able to know connected status of you friends AND people in your groups, so will will revert to a odd method to find someone online: adopt one of their group, see if they are online).
For the viewer tag, Linden Lab require each third party viewer to broadcast an indentitifier, so we will soon find huds who will tell you wich viewers people are using. Why not simply require the fact of displaying viewer tags to bo opt-in ? Just because the Lindens are ashamed to be so less succesful than TPV… thats childish…
Do not tell me removing (function wil be broken, in Oz Linden own termes) useful things because someone as complained is a good thing… it WILL NOT give us more privacy at all. For privacy whe should have our IP adress hidden by Linden lab, for exemple.
My feeling on this:
LL, or at least Oz, want to have things be a done THEIR way, narrowly and controlledly. They think they’ll get a certain advantage out of taking much more control over the way viewers are done, and away from the more open-ended way it was done before. There are also a number of things they’re probably taking for granted will just be there, such as all the innovation that comes from all those TPV developers coming up with bright ideas, and all the good will and devotion large numbers of users have to certain viewers.
However, I think what probably WILL happen is it won’t come out the way LL, and Oz in particular, expects it to. He likely has a picture of where he expects the state of the viewer to be in six month’s time, a year’s time, that comes out of how HE wants to run things, and that he figures will come about from constricting things down to just the features HE decides should be in there, and rejecting anything HE ALONE doesn’t think belongs, but the likelihood is… the result will probably fall far short of where he expects it to be, probably won’t go in the direction he thinks it will, and at the same time he will likely lose a lot of the things they took for granted will continue to Just Be There, precisely *because* he’s removed any possibility for real creativity and innovation, or in the very least has blunted the effectiveness of that creativity and innovation, and because he’s removed or destroyed a lot of things that many people have found legitimately and genuinely useful in the TPVs, such as temporary texture uploads.
At the same time, a lot of the changes they will have made in world, such as the breaking of all those online status boards, with the assumption that it will make things way, way better for everyone… won’t bring much if any good or advantage after all, but will instead cause a lot of individual harm without benefit. It will turn out to be one step forward, four or five steps backward.
Six months from now, a year from now, LL may well look back at how the new viewer developer scheme panned out, and at the way the other related decisions panned out, and they’ll cringe, they’ll facepalm, and they’ll say, “My God! My God! How could we have been this misguided! It has been a total disaster!”
Maybe it will even result in Oz being fired, or being pulled off viewer development altogether and moved over into the janitorial department or some such. Maybe it will force them to completely scrap the new viewer developer system they’re corralling everyone into, and it will swing completely in the opposite direction from where they’re trying to take it now. Perhaps they might then create a committee of selected people from each major TPV developer team and have THEM all be ultimately in charge of what direction to take viewer development into.
In any event, I would hope that somewhere along the line, there would be a DRASTIC change for the better in how LL in general is run, taking MUCH more input from the what the general users are saying and doing, and away from this great disconnect between the Lindens and the Residents. They are each in their own little world, and aren’t really hearing each other as effectively as they should be. To put it mildly.
It makes sense for Linden Lab to attempt to control and manage Second Life through policy initiatives. It’s almost the only means that Linden Lab has to influence any aspect of Second Life at all.
By the same token, however, changes to the terms and policies require a great deal of cross-disciplinary planning and thinking-through in order to have beneficial outcomes.
Policy changes affect every level of Second Life, and need to be considered at every level of the Lab.
I pay my Premium fees for a year in advance, which is a decent financial deal for the Tier and a supply of L$, and I suppose it is a good thing that, by the time the next payment falls due, the Lindens will have had time to facepalm and change their minds.
But I also have the sick feeling that what I bought is no longer what is being delivered. Contract law, in this corporatist age, sometimes feels horribly biased.
@Canoro
“Shared experience” is still going to be broken. This policy doesn’t mean anything bad for any TPVs that don’t implement certain features in the main viewer like Shared Media or mesh, it just means TPVs can’t implement shared experience breaking features themselves.
So as long as TPVs we’re still going to have fragmented experiences. If a Viewer 4 came out tomorrow with shiny new features like Avatar 2.0 or whatever as an example, but TPVs refused to release a version of it because the UI sucked to them and it had a lot of performance issues; then the “shared experience” fragments the same way it did when Viewer 2 was released.
Unless Linden Lab ever pursues an aggressive update to connect mechanism with the server we’re always going to have a long lag of new client dependent features being released and the whole grid actually being able to see it.
i’d say though this is actually a step in that direction. This step is preventing TPVs from ever being ahead in breaking shared experience, but with Linden Lab being this strongarming it wouldn’t surprise me if next they start dictating minimum version numbers TPVs are allowed to build on to prevent another years long Viewer 2 vs. Viewer 1 fiasco.
@Tateru Thanks for the reminder than everything Oz says is not in any way policy and can change at a moments notice. Shared Experience is anything they decide it to be on the day. Basically we’re back at square zero and I feel like the lab should be doing a LOT more to encourage and win developers over.
@Nalates After listening to the recording, I think I have a clearer view of what Oz means. To me, his defining metric on whether you need to hijack protocols to carry additional/alternate data, or set up other out-of-band data delivery to exchange information with other clients, is the key.
(I wrote a little more here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115651166594579792799/posts/XCP99s5KLMf)
Of course, as Tateru points out, this is still only one Linden’s verbal interpretation of a policy which could reasonably be seen quite differently by other Lindens, and there will likely be edge cases.
Also, I can’t quite get a fix on it, but it sounds like some of the examples cited would, in fact, *not* violate this definition, which does give the vibe that it’s a purely case-by-case interpretation, though there may be some misunderstandings about which features actually do need to exchange data to work.
The fact that we’re now reduced to interpreting unofficial comment from interpretations of audio recordings made in a meeting somewhere to understand the meaning of a policy that is now in effect lets you know exactly how far down the Rabbit Hole of Fail this all has fallen.
So, basically, LL killed 3rd party viewers.
2k frightens me. It sounds like Harrison Bergeron comes to Second Life. Were it not for permitting features provided by the current client, letting you change the Windlight setting you see means not everybody sees the same thing. Ditto for having a different draw distance than other users, or having your graphics setting higher than somebody else. (We have that to an extent now, in view of LL comments about choosing features in part because an estimated third of users have utterly inadequate hardware for SL.) LL can’t mean that in the most extreme form, of course, or everyone would have to have their camera POV set the same, which makes no sense… but it does sound like LL basically doesn’t want to be shown up by a TPV, and are making sure of that by decree.
Oops… Forgot one more point. It sounds like 2k would preclude the very useful “unrender” feature that Firestorm has. Unrender would have rendered the infamous “Impeach Bush” extortionist an impotent joke; just unrender the eyesore that someone has spitefully erected by your house. If you’re an SL photographer, you can unrender a billboard that is getting in the way of your composition…. but that means not everybody in SL sees the same thing, breaking the “shared experience”.
@Melissa That is too alarmist. It’s fairly clear that you are free to mangle your own display as much as you want. You are not allowed, however, to *share those decisions and information with other clients* through a system which is somehow built into a 3rd party client.
@Tateru: I will be happy if that’s the case. I just wish they’d be more specific about what they mean about “altering the shared experience”.
I have a first round of responses from Linden Lab, but I have gone back with some followup questions based on the responses I have received. I’m hoping to write it all up in a post as soon as I can.
Is anyone actually surprised LL did not honour verbal clarifications their representative made? Remember the trademark policy debacle?
As of the time of this post, Linden Labs have made the usual announcement of a looming sim server roll-out. Since they have had restarts when there has been no actual change of software, on the grounds that busy servers can become unstable, this announcement is pretty meaningless.
The usual Forum announcement from Oskar Linden, who actually takes the trouble to communicate with customers, is missing. Nothing from Maestro Linden either.
So the only mention of any change being made in this week’s rollouts is Oz Linden’s voice session.
It’s currently 22:30 SLT and the good little Lindens should all be tucked up in their beds. Ghu only knows what the naughty little Lindens are doing.
Here is my take on this matter:
http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=741&p=3259#p3259
I have been reminded that the Mac version of the Linden Viewer still has some big problems with the correct rendering of some long-established features–I’m not talking about Mesh–so we cannot even be sure of what is in the Linden Viewer…
If the Mac version of Firestorm happens to be able to show these properly, which Linden Viewer is the standard it will be judged by?
Is it crazy to wonder if the version of the Viewer used as the test standard will be whichever one gives the result that Linden Lab wishes?
Btw, is this policy just about being allowed in that TPV list page hosted by LL or to be allowed to connect to LL’s grids?
@Tigro
The TPV applies to all viewers, with the excpetion of paragraph 6 which applies only to TPVs that want to be listed in the TPVD.
Citation: “Unlike the other sections of this Policy, participation in the Viewer Directory is currently not a requirement for connecting to Second Life. “
@Tigro As Henri says, it’s for being allowed to connect the viewer to the grid at all.
I am very much in agreement with what Henri writes in his post.
But the line of reasoning for the mesh deformer (that it would introduce incompatibilities if people started designing clothes for it without all viewers supporting if) clearly shows the edge cases, and that Oz’s litmus test of “does it require new information exchanged between compatible clients” does not hold up.
This is purely a client-side effect(*), but it just so happens to be such a good idea that we can expect people to change their inworld *behaviour* because of it (changing how they build). This is a pretty slippery slope, which essentially turns the rule into a purely subjective judgment about how much behavioral impact any given change is expected to have.
(*) It is, to my knowledge, still up in the air whether there will be some additional flags, specifically to control backwards compatibility.
@Tali -
i think your analysis is spot on. it inspires me to ask this question:
would a viewer which renders everything in black and white be permitted?
on the face of it – yes, of course, no state, only presentation is changed.
however, users may then start using textures which appear to be colorful static messes to the main viewer – but in black and white are filtered to reveal the actual images.
And is there risk they will start banning clients that allow the window to be resized bellow a certain size and fullscreen modes with a smaller megapixel count than the official client allows? (for people that for one reason or another won’t be using screens big enough or videocards powerful enough)
@Qarl
I think you’ve gotten at the subtlety of it all that matters most when it comes to 2.k. It isn’t the feature in question so much as whether that feature causes other users to use Second Life differently.
Your mesh deformer for example, if only TPVs had it and not the official viewer and no one ever made a fuss about it, it’d probably be ok under 2.k.
But since obviously store owners are going to sell and advertise their clothes as being compatible with the deformer, and the suggestion to see the deformations is going to be “get a TPV”. the deformer would run afoul of 2.k then more than likely.
At least that’s my interpretation of it. If that’s the case then 2.k could be shortened to “if people really like your feature enough that it starts changing their viewer recommendation, it has to go through our viewer first.”
@Qarl The example you provide is a good one and demonstrates that you can never reliably predict what the end users will do with a feature once they have it. SL is a shared environment, that is after all the entire point.
If this is really related to that “mesh deformer” thingy, then a handful of people forming a pressure group for their very own and only their very own (suggested) profit forced the Lab to change policy in an unfavorable way for everyone. Well done, meshies.
Vivienne:
The parametric deformer would have benefited anyone who used mesh attachments (like clothing). The Lab wasn’t “forced” to do anything stupid; they’re fully capable of independent action on that front.
I think it’s too bad the Lab’s “open source strategy” is in the hands it’s in. I found a read of a certain LinkedIn profile to be quite enlightening.
No names. no pack drill, eh, Maggie?
I think I found the LinkedIn profile; there’s a certain Linden guy involved in all this who has a link from his User page on the Wiki.
Looking at the career pattern, it’s possible the Peter Principle applies. A corporation has a formal chain of authority. TPV developers aren’t in such a chain.
As promised, I’ve written up the responses that I’ve received from Linden Lab.
“We have observed user confusion and problems that result from the fragmentation of the experience depending upon what Viewer you are running. And we think that all users should have … fundamentally the same world to be in, regardless of which Viewer it is.”
Seriously? Why not say they just pulled flying monkeys out of their ass and are going to build a city on the moon with Newt Gringrich.
This is the biggest crock of crap yet to be shoved out of LL no-think tank.
The confusion and problems users have in SL have nothing to do with viewers, well, not TPV ones.
First of all TPV viewers are elective whereas SL viewers are pretty much required when you first sign up for SL because TPV are simply not offered at the get go as an obvious available option.
TPV’s are used by SL users who have been in SL for a while and are preferred over SL viewers because they offer a better personal (not shared) user experience.
What is probably most confusing to all users are the countless “shared” problems inherent in SL which are technical such as stabilty issues involving LL’s software and servers and their own viewing clients.
And the cost of sims. I know people who pay less rent for a room or creative space in RL than LL charges for a sim. For $300/month, I want LL employees sucking up to me 24/7. And if I have more than one sim, I want LL managment sucking up to me big time. If I have a huge estate with dozens of sims, I want LL’s CEO’s and a half dozen of the most experienced LL techs’ personal phone numbers on my speed dial. Which brings me to….
LL’s deplorable customer service. Confusing much? Talk about fragmented.
And last, but not least, there’s LL’s questionable practice of implementing smarmy policies they pull out of thin air like the homestead bait and switch pricing debacle or eliminating discounts for non-profit/edu sims or a host of other three martini lunch decisions that have considerably worse consequences on the overall “shared” SL user experience.
These confusing user experiences — the rediculously high cost of sim space, questionable business practices and deficient customer service — subsquently result in a significant exodus of users from SL, many of whom created some of the best content in SL such as Rezzables. Or the impetus behind the closing of several sims such as the non-profit sims hosted by the MacArthur Foundation and numerous other wonderful places in SL that are vanishing faster than honey bees. Content is a key selling point of SL to begin with and as it dwindles, so will SL’s user base and LL’s profits.
Speaking of content, you can check in but you can never leave — you simply can’t port out what you’ve purchased and store your property on your computer or somewhere outside of SL unless you have full perms. Where’s the benefit in this insanity? Why should anyone buy anything in SL given that they don’t really own what they paid real money for? When the day comes that LL decides to close the place down, or there is some horrible asset storage disaster (like things don’t already mysteriously disappear from your inventory), you simply have to suck it up and realize that…
LL games its customer base coming and going. You’re gonna pay to play, one way or another.
And privacy concerns? LL has an obligation to protect the privacy of every single user’s account and billing information that they keep on file. This should be their their first and foremost concern and priority regarding all viewers and not whether a TPV has a breast physics option or other features their own viewer lacks.
However, when it comes to your avatar (aka 3D cartoon character) roaming about inworld doing whatever activity floats your boat, all bets are off. If you get upset because someone has cammed in on your avatar or can see if you are online inworld, then you need to book an hour with a psychiatrist right now. When you really need to worry is when there is a security breach that would allow someone to access your RL info and/or find you in RL.
If LL was truly and honestly concerned about SL users having an equally shared “unfragmented” experience, then before they do anything else, especially borking TPV’s, they need to stabilize the SL platform and at the same time, make a viewer that runs equally as well on older computers as they do on new ones, on all graphics cards, etc.
I was just talking to someone today about how SL 2.0/3.0 viewers suck on my laptop and that Phoenix 1.– that I’m currently using is the only way I can access SL without my user experience being one of maximum frustrating “fragmentation” because of lag and numerous crashes.
Apparently, LL management is so well compensated they have no clue whatseover of real world economics and that their user base can’t run out and plop down a grand for a new computer every time LL’s “let them eat cake” mentality throws out some arbitrary technical BS that severely hampers the user experience of their customers who, collectively, have invested their time and $$ into sims and creating the content that attracts and retains SL users which ulitmately benefits Linden Lab by generating the millions of dollars that pay the salaries of Linden Lab’s “fragmented” management.
“Your world” my ass.
LL should change the Second Life tag line to read:
“Your Imagination, Your Time, Your Money, All Ours”
Phoenix, Firestorm, Imprudence etc. offer about twice as many windlights and other environment changes than (I think) the Standard Viewer (I don’t know: I haven’t downloaded their latest). I could care less about name tags; I need my environments, as I use these a lot in photography and especially machinima. It’s a wonderful convenience! Should I be writing their names down now and hoping I can find them online somewhere because they or others that LL doesn’t support will be banished from my viewer? I especially like some of the desaturated colors offered by Burnt Hope and Abracadabra, and I’m not finished filming some projects.
OR: is windlight considered part of the UI and won’t be tampered with?
Thw Windlight system combines controls for the environmental lighting with a system of named pre-sets. And all the implementations I’ve seen allow you to see the settings for a named pre-set, and save and name your own pre-sets.
And it’s a viewer side only feature. The named presets in Firestorm are still there when I connect to a OpenSim server.
It’s lucky the Lindens haven’t realised that region and parcel Windlight settings allow them to monetize the system.
The Parcel windlight feature falls under 2.k, incidentally.
Not sure, Tateru. Windlight is a LL viewer option. So when someone disables these shaders (everyone is free to do so), this someone does not “share” the windlight effect at all. Following your conclusion, Linden Lab must outlaw their own viewer under 2 k., he he.
@Vivienne I’m not talking about the Windlight feature, but about the parcel Windlight feature which Oz says is falls under 2.k.
to pix : “If you get upset because someone,,..,can see if you are online inworld, then you need to book an hour with a psychiatrist right now.”
You know, I was pretty much right with you up to that point.
Shame you don’t get that part, there again if “True Online Status” had been called “really dead easy way to check up on people without making the already laughably minimal effort because we know you are too lazy and it gives you cheap thrills” then there might well have been a different response.
cheers
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