User:Mm Alder/SLDev Open Source Viewer

What is the SLDev Open Source Viewer?

According to the announcement from Linden Lab

"Our hope is that we can create a widely-used openly developed version of the Second Life client which is a compelling alternative for a broad set of users, and contains enhancements and development that then rapidly make their way back into the mainstream Second Life version."

Translated, that means it's how you, the open source developer, get your code into the Second Life viewer.

Second Life is Open Source!

In January, 2007 Linden opened the source for the Second Life viewer and many residents began to contribute code to improve or otherwise extend the functionality, reliability, and openness of the viewer. But the code wasn't really open for mutual development between Lindens and residents. Residents got to see the source, and they could create patches to be applied to it, but they needed a Linden to actually apply that patch to the code used to build the Linden public viewer.

In addition there were two systems for reporting bugs, fixes, and features: the public JIRA (PJIRA) and the internal Linden JIRA (just JIRA). Residents read the former and Lindens read the latter. Every now and then a Linden will comment on the PJIRA, but if you add them all up, you'd think Linden was operating out of someone's garage. There was talk of merging the two, but that never happened.

At the same time, there was a clamor from residents to fix the bugs before adding new features that nobody wanted. Like WindLight.

The result was an ever increasing difficulty for open source developers to get code accepted into the published viewer.

The Nicolaz viewer, The Dale Glass viewer, Kirsten's viewer, Imprudence, and more

Eventually, developers became impatient, and decided to publish their own versions of the viewer under the open source license granted by Linden Lab. The result was that residents came to like the alternate viewers more than the official viewer. They were faster, easier to use, had nifty new fietures, and crashed a lot less.

Unfortunately, some of the noble developers who undertook this task, had real lives, and couldn't afford to take the time to figure out and merge in the new features published by Linden every time a new official Linden release came out.

Philip, Benevolent Dictator For Life

But someone at Linden looked around and thought to himself, "If they can do it, why can't we?"

The Open Source Viewer is the brainchild of Philip Linden, the Chairman of the Board at Linden Lab. When Philip decided to give up his role as CEO, he found he had time to do something worthwhile for the company.

Philip realized that developers were becoming discouraged with the difficulty they were having getting their ideas into the official viewer, and if Linden didn't do something, they would lose all interest. So he proposed that Linden follow the trail charted by Nicolaz, Dale Glass, and many others, and have their own Open Source Viewer, but with one decided advantage: he could get the latest Linden changes merged in just by decreeing (oops!) asking. Thus was born the http-texture project! Huh?

http-texture

Philippe Bossut (Merov Linden) had been working on an internal Linden project called http-texture whose goal was to transfer texture assets via HTTP protocol rather than via UDP. Philip decided that Philippe's project would be a good place to start an internal open source project. And so it was.