#SL Viewer Policy Change Meeting

An audio recording of the Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers’ meeting where the Viewer Policy Changes were announced prior to the blog posting of them has made it to the net. The audio is about 2 hours long. The following is my summary of it. I was mostly interesting in the policy changes. I’ve tried to convey the meaning of statements accurately. I don’t quote but paraphrase.

You can use the time marks to find the related items. I’m not sure how well the Windows Media Player handed the time marks. Once I started moving back and forth through the recording, I think they messed up. But, I’m not going to spend two hours checking them. Also toward the end I was burning out and the discussion was less interesting for me.

You can find the original recording here: TPV Dev’s Meeting 2012-02-24.

I know the main speaker is a Linden. I’m just not sure which one. I am guessing  Oz Linden. He leads the Open Source group and some references within the recording suggest it is Oz. But, I’m not certain. So, I’ve used (? Linden) as the name in the following text. Whoever it is, they do an excellent job of facilitating the meeting.

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1:15 Discussion start – There is some futzing around as they get started. The discussion announcing the Viewer Policy changes to be posted after the meeting ends begin here.

(? Linden) expects none of the changes to be dramatic or change much in the way things work now.

If there was any doubt to which TPV’s the changes or entire policy applies to, it was clarified in the meeting.  The TPV Policy applies to all viewers connecting to the Second Life grid. Whether they are in the TPV list is not a determining factor.

3:15 – The effective date of the changes is when the post announcing them appears on the Second Life Forum. While no dramatic changes are expected, the Lab is open to discussion of any problems the new policy creates. I think it can be inferred that if there is a problem the Lab may be willing to change the wording of the policy.

4:50 – First new policy/rule – 2.a.iii : You must not provide any feature that circumvents any privacy protection option made available through a Linden Lab viewer or any Second Life service.

If a privacy feature is built into the SL Viewer, a TPV Dev may not take it out of their implementation of their viewer.

6:00 – True Online Status – This is a feature that creates the most problems for the Lab and TPV Dev’s. Some viewers and HUD’s use LSL (Linden Scripting Language) to implement an online status feature. Use of LSL is not an escape from or work-around of policy. So, online status as it is made available in the SL Viewer has to be maintained to work the same way. If I don’t friend you and allow you to know my online status, no viewer can circumvent that. There are viewers that will check online status and report it regardless of my privacy settings. That is ending.

4 thoughts on “#SL Viewer Policy Change Meeting

  1. Pingback: New TPV policy changes - Page 19 - SLUniverse Forums

  2. Hmmmmmm… “trust us we are the new and resident responsive LL”. I’ll believe it when I see it, they have to overcome a lot of negative inertia.
    I did a tally of the New Feature catagory at the jira, OVER HALF are labeled Awaiting Review — (~4000). If LL really intends to be more responsive to feature requests they need to have a better system than the jira. Right now the best avenue we have is to tell the TPV teams, they listen; oh, or we can hire Qarl (if he will ever do it again with all the attitude he has gotten).

    • I understand the negative inertia. Once burned and all… The Lindens are aware of the problem.

      The JIRA is integrated into the work flow of LL. It is also the primary bug reporting and feature requests processes for numberless software projects both commercial and open source. It is pretty high end software for this type of work. It has developed over years. So, what would suggest?

      I know many think the JIRA does not work and the Lindens ignore it. But that is not the case. Go to the JIRA and select any of the Projects from the top menu and check the summary. It gives you items reported and items fixed within the project. As of today there are 67 new issue reports and 42 resolved in the last 30 days.

      That brings us to the ongoing problem of whether to add new features or fix problems with existing features and services. The Lab’s resources are limited. I doubt we will every be happy with adoption rate of requested features.

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