Firestorm Fundraiser

The Firestorm Team provides the most popular viewer in Second Life™. They provide a new user area training people new to SL. They provide and maintain a JIRA, website, and wiki. There is a cost for all of these things.

Firestorm Logo

About 2-years ago they ran a fundraiser and have been paying for stuff from that effort. Now those funds are running low. It is time for a new fundraiser. See the article Gacha! A Firestorm Fund Raiser!

The Gacha event is happening at the Firestorm Sandbox. You can make a donation in the marketplace and you can pick up a Firestorm Jacket while you are there.

Or… you can make donations directly to Kio Feila in-world.

These funds go toward paying expenses. All labor is from volunteers.

Help out.

Firestorm Team Thank You

Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.

Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.

Firestorm Support Jacket - Link farther down the page

Firestorm Support Jacket – Link farther down the page

You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu. Continue reading