First Brownbag meeting on 3rd party viewers

Last night we had the first of the 2 Brownbag meetings with Linden Labs regarding the 3rd party viewer policy for Secondlife. After _the_ blog post and the rampant rumor mill the actual results were quite tame, info coming back from Lindens was coherent and was quite supportive of open source and the work the 3rd party developers had done.

The key outcomes are :-

• LL will not be restricting access to the Secondlife Grid via technical means.


• The Viewer registry will be a purely optional thing, and is only there to give users some trust in what they are downloading, as well as provide who did it and a list of features etc


• LL will be taking more action against ToS violators


• Viewers will not break the ToS user actions will

The above points have the exception that LL will be looking out for viewers that have a primary aim is to break the ToS, eg cryolife etc.

We did not get very much information on encryption, LL just asked for real usage cases.

LL Commented that open source provided a valuable contribution to the viewer and Secondlife.

The next Brownbag is scheduled for next week

3rd Party Viewer Policy

On a recent announcement that has probably failed to escape anyone in the Secondlife community, Linden Labs have announced new restrictions on the connection of 3rd party viewers to the Secondlife service.

Exactly what those restrictions are are yet to be seen, but the topic generated a lot of traffic on the above blog comments page and made the entire comments system total unstable.

Today at 3PM SL time we have the first "Brown Bag" meeting which I have been one of the lucky ones to get an invitation to but this sparked an idea to hold a pre-brown bag meeting for many viewer developers and other concerned individuals to get together and hash out there concerns and questions for LL.

Tuesday 27th Oct, 2009 approx 50 people turned up at the Open Source expo center on Hippotropolis and we spent a good 1 1/2 hours talking about the issue our concerns and created a list of questions and a summary of our position.

The executive summary of the meeting can be found here and this was passed to Blondin Linden and Cyn Linden before the first brown bag meeeting to give them chance to be able to answer our concerns.

Todays meeting will be in voice and Torley will be recording it, but expect live chat and feedback from me in #opensl on efnet and AWG Groupies in world