On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 11:42 AM, JB Hancroft <jbhancr...@gmail.com> wrote: > I'm concerned that there are so many divergent viewer projects, that the > end-user experience is going to be fractured. > What happens when I want "this shiny new thing" (available only with the ABC > viewer), and "that other shiny" (available only with the XYZ viewer)? > > I'd like to avoid this, in the future: > (Person 1: "Oh, you Don't Have the RubyShine-on-steroids plugin for > Snowglobe? <*smirk*> > Well, Everyone Knows... you just can't enjoy > high-end SL jewelry without it." > Person 2: "Well, yeah, but I have to choose between my Super-Gizmo > Estate Mgmt Viewer, and awesome jewelry... Sigh") >
I think this is an unavoidable consequence of open source. If LL hired more developers and implemented all the new things that have appeared in third-party viewers, then the third-party viewers would just build on top of that and add even more new features. Think of it like this: the official viewer is developed by 42 (I just made this up) developers. Third-party viewers are developed by those same 42 developers, plus more people! So third-party viewers are always going to be a step ahead, no matter how much effort LL puts in to keep up, the third-party viewers are always building on top of that. If you're implying that we have all these third-party viewers because the process of getting patches accepted into the official viewer is difficult, I'm not going to disagree with you. It could be a lot easier, and if it were some of these people might have contributed their code to the official viewer instead of spawning a third-party viewer. But look at any open source project, even the most open ones. There's always going to be someone that decides they don't want to contribute back to the original program, they want to fork it and develop on their own. Colin _______________________________________________ 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
