Soft Linden wrote: > What I'm trying really hard to get across here is that keeping > discussions civil, focused and constructive will help foster community > involvement. Q is working really hard to make sure that a feature held > in the dark for business reasons will never hold the rest of the > project hostage again. I can't see a reason why another Viewer 2.0 > style dev cycle will happen again.
Many of us are frustrated that 2.0 UI development followed the same path as Dazzle: secret development and one-size-fits-all forced usage. Kind of ironic that the Dazzle skin is no longer even an option in 2.0. > We're also working on restructuring the project so we're working in > peer code bases rather than doing one-way exports and manual patch > imports. That's going to make us better still about bringing outside > work in. But these efforts are going to be wasted if the teams are > still put off of working with the community because of the garbage > hostility that's been a frequent part of the list since very early on. "garbage hostility" will always be part of open source projects. Don't take it too personally. You have to determine when it is representative of the community and when it is just someone having a bad day. > For a good example: Read back on the list for the kind of responses > the render team was happening in the open. The render branches were > published continuously, and the developers were quite public-facing > for most of a year. > > The result? There were some morsels of great feedback, almost none of > them via this list. But there was also an overwhelming volume of > griping about not supporting year-old video cards, people crediting > other projects for Linden work, grousing about that not being the most > important thing to work on, grief about the state of Windlight, > insistence that we abandon our own engine entirely, stumping for other > projects, folks from this list blogging Runitai's comments out of > context, on and on. > > Tons of counterproductive chaos when someone wasn't getting his way, > some good QA feedback, a couple good tech suggestions, and almost zero > code contributions. That's what we've gotten when the decision makers > are out in the open - you can't say it hasn't been done. The render pipeline is kind of atypical in that it requires OpenGL coding skills. That's a rare skill. And the workings of the render pipeline are usually not apparent to end users except when performance changes dramatically or the system crashes. User interface changes, on the other hand, are immediately apparent, and usually bother someone. 2.0 would have been a greate opportunity to modularize the UI to make it customizable, so that users could keep the old appearance or select new features one by one. Working in the open might have enabled that. Mike _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
