Lindens Discuss 3rd Party Viewers
I know, It's been forever since I blogged on anything! But today was the first 'brown bag' meeting the Lindens are holding to discuss their plans on the 3rd party viewer registry. I found it quite informative. What viewer you use can make a huge difference in your Second Life experience. There are features that all viewers have, features that some viewers have, and some viewers have features specific to themselves. 3rd party viewers are getting a bad rap lately because people want to blame somebody for all the content theft that's been going on. The fact is, the viewers aren't to blame, the people using them in illegal ways are to blame.
Anyway, the Lindens have a plan to create a registry by which they can approve of viewers which are safe to download and use to connect with the Second Life grid. They are working on requirements for approval, and asking for ideas from the community in this regard. Jeska began by asking about features which those who use other viewers require in their viewer of choice. OTR (encrypted Instant Messages) was brought up and discussed, the usual suspects were also brought up (ie Avatar Radar, In-client AO, Import/Export, Temporary Texture upload..), all great features and very useful. A case was even made for bouncing bewbies and it actually made sense! lol
The discussion then moved on to some of the Lindens' plans concerning a registry, and they asked what requirements should be met to make each of us feel comfortable downloading and connecting with another viewer. There was discussion of meeting GPL requirements such as available code, approval based on review by Linden Lab, User review/ratings system, code signing by developers, review based on inspection with a mind to ToS, and much more.
When asked for questions, the start was slow, I think because we all waited until the last minute to type our questions into Blondin's IM box. Once we got going, though, there were good questions asked. It was asked if the registry would herald greater enforcement of the GPL to which the reply was yes. The largest concern from the general public seems to be viewers with more capability than is acceptable, allowing unscrupulous persons to violate TOS. This was discussed at length, with the natural outcome that these features would need to be investigated in terms of legitimate use, and TOS violators dealt with individually.
I asked the question on the other end of the spectrum, where would viewers with limited capabilities fit into the scheme of the registry, such as viewers specific to inworld games and such. The Lindens seemed very much in favor of these and placed them in the same category as the text viewers and screen readers and accessibility viewers currently available and under development. The registry will consider these for approval along with any others.
Discussion then turned to bots, and the new initiative to flag them as bots. The clients used for bots will be considered and approved in the registry along with all other clients. Moving on to content copying, Marty was very clear that import/export is not a violation when the permissions system is adhered to. Features which specifically ignore the permissions system will not be acceptable in any case.
All in all, I enjoyed the meeting and learned quite a bit more about the Linden's registry plans than I did from the entire 90 page blogrum that deteriorated very quickly into what seemed like the transcript of a 3rd grade recess squabble. I'm not sure how helpful I was on this issue, but I found it educational and interesting.
Anyway, the Lindens have a plan to create a registry by which they can approve of viewers which are safe to download and use to connect with the Second Life grid. They are working on requirements for approval, and asking for ideas from the community in this regard. Jeska began by asking about features which those who use other viewers require in their viewer of choice. OTR (encrypted Instant Messages) was brought up and discussed, the usual suspects were also brought up (ie Avatar Radar, In-client AO, Import/Export, Temporary Texture upload..), all great features and very useful. A case was even made for bouncing bewbies and it actually made sense! lol
The discussion then moved on to some of the Lindens' plans concerning a registry, and they asked what requirements should be met to make each of us feel comfortable downloading and connecting with another viewer. There was discussion of meeting GPL requirements such as available code, approval based on review by Linden Lab, User review/ratings system, code signing by developers, review based on inspection with a mind to ToS, and much more.
When asked for questions, the start was slow, I think because we all waited until the last minute to type our questions into Blondin's IM box. Once we got going, though, there were good questions asked. It was asked if the registry would herald greater enforcement of the GPL to which the reply was yes. The largest concern from the general public seems to be viewers with more capability than is acceptable, allowing unscrupulous persons to violate TOS. This was discussed at length, with the natural outcome that these features would need to be investigated in terms of legitimate use, and TOS violators dealt with individually.
I asked the question on the other end of the spectrum, where would viewers with limited capabilities fit into the scheme of the registry, such as viewers specific to inworld games and such. The Lindens seemed very much in favor of these and placed them in the same category as the text viewers and screen readers and accessibility viewers currently available and under development. The registry will consider these for approval along with any others.
Discussion then turned to bots, and the new initiative to flag them as bots. The clients used for bots will be considered and approved in the registry along with all other clients. Moving on to content copying, Marty was very clear that import/export is not a violation when the permissions system is adhered to. Features which specifically ignore the permissions system will not be acceptable in any case.
All in all, I enjoyed the meeting and learned quite a bit more about the Linden's registry plans than I did from the entire 90 page blogrum that deteriorated very quickly into what seemed like the transcript of a 3rd grade recess squabble. I'm not sure how helpful I was on this issue, but I found it educational and interesting.