To me it would seem that the optimal solution would be a project loosely coupled with both of the development teams for ReX and Opensim. This breed of Tundra-based Opensim viewer does show a substantial amount of promise, but it would really need a dedicated team to dig in and suss out all of the inevitable roadblocks without diverting resources away from either of the core teams. This might be the place for a for-profit venture to step in to take up the flag of doing the heavy grunt work to get a implementation cranked out and released into the wild. Such a venture would have to develop the viewer with its' release as open-source as a given and build a business model around leveraging services around it.
While we're tossing around blue-sky concepts for a hybrid, I'd like to point out a big advantage of not hard-coding the viewer UI is the ability to experiment with radically different layouts (Ilan touched on this tangentially). One of my longest running soapbox rants is that for new adopters of Opensim/SL, the viewer is too complicated and loaded with functionality that they don't want or need. It's much like giving an industrial-grade smelter to someone who just wants an EZ-Bake oven. There are of course plenty of people who do want and need the advanced functionality, but those people are very rarely the ones who are trying out the platform for the first time. By not hardcoding the UI, there's a lot more freedom to experiment with a simplified experience that will help draw in new users. Theoretically, if we can make it easier for new users to have positive experiences with both Opensim and ReX, it will lead to a positive feedback loop. -- http://groups.google.com/group/realxtend http://www.realxtend.org
