Recently, Linden Labs/Research announced an upcoming move (Havok AI sublicensing) that seemed to indicate that they were going to develop their Second Life(tm) viewer without further consideration of the Open Source community. There are some who believe that they will just fork the SL(tm) viewer without the changes needing licensing and continue onward, either with open sourced solutions to the features they develop that can be used in OpenSim, or simply by doing without those features. While this may work for awhile, their message is of a slippery slope variety, and will probably result in their closing it down more and more as time goes on in order to make it a tradeable asset.
In light of this development it has occured to some in OpenSim that they need to break free of the ties to Linden Labs/Research(tm) and produce their own open-sourced viewer with no LL dependencies. However, there are strong reasons for not wanting to write one from scratch: mainly, time and money. Due to this, it has been suggested that OpenSim start with an already existing viewer, such as Radegast, or Tundra/Naali and build from there. There seems to be growing support within the OpenSim community for such a viewer. In fact, both Ilan Tochner of Kitely, and Tranquility Dexler(David Daeschler) of InWorldz were *very* interested in the possibility ( http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2012/04/new-linden-policy-may-hurt-viewer-development/ ) . Would it be possible to achieve an OpenSim compatible version of the viewer (and possibly the platform) ? I think it would draw more people to the entire Tundra platform as they use the viewer. -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
