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.