Mika Feiri

Sofar most people seem to have concerns about the "You must not provide any feature [...] not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer." Let's be honest, that is a big pile of steaming poo. TPVs are there because they provide extra features that LL's own development plan didn't cover or include. Demanding that TPVs conform to a set of features limited to LL's own viewer is certainly going to hinder things. Don't take me wrong - "Shared Experience" is an interesting concept and should definitely be endorsed. However, enforcing it with restrictive policies is eventually going to turn against LL themselves, and against the whole userbase. Wouldn't it be much more reasonable for LL to set up a semi-public SVN, CVS, or any other versioning system, and encourage TPVs to share their features with others (and with LL)? The policy in question would then be reworded to something like "If you provide feature(s) not included by or accessible to users of the Linden Lab viewer, you are obliged to submit the code into Linden Lab's public [sVN/CVS/Mercurial] in the form of a plugin." Not only the authors of the implementation would be rewarded by keeping a slight edge (being one release cycle ahead with their feature), but LL and other TPVs could also include the useful feature in their next release which would, in turn, improve the "shared experience" and speed of development for everyone. And all of that at no or very little extra cost for LL. Now that I've explained all of this, my question to LL would be: Where on Earth do you see any advantage or reason for applying a restrictive policy instead of endorsing and encouraging TPV developers to share their features with you (and everyone else)?