Iohannes Crispien

There is no such thing as an absolute with even open source code. Sure, it's open to use, but LL has every right to list who they deem are legitimate TPVs, and/or subset viewers, as well as grant or revoke the rights of viewers to be used on Second Life. Emerald Viewer is one case where a TPV was once part of the official list, then taken off, given a cease and desist, and blocked from access to SL. It would take some time to re-package it for the mobile environment. However, Android is essentially a fork of Linux developed by Google, and i-phone shares common language with Apple's PC - both of which many official devs are familiar with and have made working viewers for already. It's not about the code itself being impossible to run, but it is about how you package the code and refine it to work on phones that had things like different resolutions than home PCs, and how to get the hardware dependencies to work nicely with the code. Not really something that would take over a decade to do, and something that ought to have embarrassed LL that a small dev created Lumiya almost more than a decade before they got around to making an official mobile viewer, assuming they are still working on it and will ever get it out of the testing stage. It is a term that is understood what it means, and has a certain legal precedence that has not been utilized yet. The old copyright laws that could range up to 70 years before free use kicks in made sense back when you only expected royalties of public works to only really matter to the author and publisher of said works, for as long as they are alive to receive a check. But that's not how things work in an era when mega corporations are built off the back of dead, zombified corporations that currently exist only in name under the umbrella of the parent corporation - the mega corporation that owns it. Abandonware is that which is left in a publishing grave yard (or junk yard) or previous things that the original authors no longer hold the rights to, and thus do not get paid any more by its distribution, or lack thereof. It's also what that which the company that holds the rights to the product either don't know they have, or don't care to do anything with. At this point, when a product or code is abandoned, the question could be on whether it is necessarily piracy to use or distribute it? It's a grey area of the law, and is starting to get hashed out a bit, particularly now with streaming apps, question over who owns the rights to the content and its distribution, and what obligation is there to the user of a streaming app, who paid for said content. It's not a question that will go away, and currently entangles a variety of things beyond just LL and Second Life open source source code. How a variety of cases are decided will set real life precedence over who has ownership of what, and what rights users, developers, publishers, and platforms have.

No, they don't commonly sue TPV, but it is not only possible, but has happened that TPVs have had cease and desist orders due to breaking policy. Apparently you weren't around for the issue with Emerald Viewer, who were taken out of the TPV list for a DDoS attack on a rival site, among other issues surrounding privacy and abuse. For one, LL was, and supposedly still is, working on an official mobile app for SL. They talked about not wanting a broken or unstable version out, which is probably why you can't find Lumiya on the app store, nor in the active, or subset of officially recognized TPVs. As it is, especially with LL taking it's time to actually roll out the mobile app, it would help for the dev of Lumiya to make code for the mobile app open source so that other devs could fork off it and update the app to modern standards in SL. I suppose the dev could make a mobile dev kit, as long as LL has no issue with the source code being distributed in such a way commercially. Otherwise, even though its a grey area, anyone interested in reverse engineering how Lumiya works could do that and update things to modern SL specs. For on one hand, the LL source code is free to use, so the question of extracting from, and updating abandonware can be controversial. At the very least, any devs interested in making a TPV based on Lumiya ought to ask the dev about using the code, which would make it much more kosher in the long run. Plus, we could have an updated mobile viewer to use while waiting for LL to finally roll out theirs.

People have played with fire for thousands of years, and they're going to keep doing it. I paid for the app, and there is such a thing as a counter suit. We can argue the creator was negligible with the project, not maintaining it to the point of it being abandonware. It would be more feasible, and profitable, if the creator returned, updated Lumiya to modern SL standards and tools that current phones are capable of and sell the updated version. But, since that hasn't happened, we're left with an outdated viewer and hopes and wishes for LL or the alternatives to make their own mobile versions of an SL client app. Oh, and by the way, didn't I mention Lumiya was already exploiting a free source code for the SL client, and making people pay for it? That probably has a lot more to do with the downfall of the creator and why the creator's own website has disappeared, because LL themselves sued Lumiya's creator out of existence. After all the source code belongs to LL. But nice try at pretending to be a know it all legal eagle. Good luck next time! 😏👍

If you can find Lumiya, or had it previously, your perfectly fine to use it. It has never been blocked access. While I agree. SL should have bought the project, or hired on whoever made it, they didn't and the creator of Lumiya is no longer interested in the project. You can't steal what has already been tossed aside. That's like saying people still own the stuff they threw out and left to rot in a land fill. It's abandonware. Just like you can rummage a junkyard for spare parts, you can do whatever with Lumiya, since the author threw it away, including the official site. So people can preserve it, or can take the source code and update it however they want. But Lumiya itself is a dead product itself. Creators that give up their projects and leave them for dead deserve no sympathy nor hallowed respect beyond what they did when the project was alive, which was to exploit free source code to sell the only working SL mobile client app that ever worked worth a darn. Granted it was a small price, but it was still exploiting free source code. Because it actually worked like the PC SLclient on phones was awesome, and why people paid for it, since SL and the official alternatives weren't offering anything close. And they still aren't despite the massive amount of demand for it.Supply and demand. The official sources aren't offering it, the unofficial are. Easy fix is for LL and the alternatives to get off their asses and make a mobile client finally. Until they have one that works, people will continue to search out for Lumiya, and use it at their own risk. It's human nature. Deal with it.

"Meter is a meter everywhere - even in SL, it's the exact same meter we use in RL." It isn't a matter of meter, it is a matter of scalability. I'd been looking at this issue revently because of trying to figure out 'realistic' height for a mountain on a SL sim. I looked up the size of Mt. Everest, and it's at 29,035, or 8,850 meters. In this case, to build to realistic meter setting as in real life, this would go beyond what the average sim could manage for height. Therefore, you actually have to scale down mountain ranges considerably to 'fit in the box', so to speak.