Since Firestorm's Now Second Life's Top Viewer, Shouldn't Its Developers Have Access to SL's JIRA?

Firestorm is now the most popular viewer among Second Life users, Linden Lab's Director of Open Development Scott "Oz Linden" Lawrence recently told Firestorm's team leader Jessica Lyon, responsible for more total user hours than any other third party viewer, and more than Linden's own official viewer (which trails far behind). This Linden Lab announcement makes another recent Linden Lab move, replacing its JIRA reporting system with a simplified bug tracker, seem even more strange. As lead Firestorm developer Tonya Souther wrote, "It makes it much harder for us to know whether the bug we're hunting is a LL bug. It also makes it harder for us to realize that we just fixed an LL bug and contribute the fix back to them." If viewers like Firestorm were just niche products, that might be a bearable cost. But since most of Linden Lab's most active users depend so much on the folks who work on projects like Firestorm, shouldn't the company be trying to make their job easier, not harder?

It's possible I'm missing something (if so, let me know), but as it stands, I stand perplexed.

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Comments

[Metacam Oh]

Linden Lab knows best, don't let the numbers or facts fool you. Everyone should use Linden Lab viewer, they want to control you control everything who cares if everyone who uses their product uses something else?

[Bucky Barkley]

The problem is that SL, the service, is such a nice walled garden that is so hard to leave (even with a series of misguided LL decisions that continually kills off parts of the garden).

One wonders if there will be a single event that provokes a mass migration to OpenSim based grids, or if there is worthy successor (CloudParty?)

And Yes, *everyone* should have access to the SL JIRA. Barring that, does it make sense for most to agree on using JIRA (or equivalent) on some third party site? Granted, it wouldn't have LL involvement, but at least all of the Residents would have a common place to share. That would be a hell of a lot better than the LL approach.

[Iggy]

LL should thank their lucky stars for Firestorm. Some of us cannot run the official viewer well, if at all. We'd have quit SL by now, without Firestorm.

Sometimes I wonder if that is not part of the Lab's roadmap...a Steamplay option only, without any TPVs, after Valve buys the company out.

[Orca Flotta]

Normandy, France, June 6th 1944

Beach, some German officer calling headquarters, panicking: "The allies are coming!"

Berlin, some other German officer:
"The führer is sleeping and must not be wakened."

Beach: "???"

Berlin: "Your "allies", can you see them? No? It won't be as bad as you say, we expect them to attack somewhere else."

Now substitute the allies with SL users, the officer on the beach with some mid-level LLer, and Berlin with the invisible CEO.

[Janet]

Valve wouldn't buy a platform as rickety as SL. If the cost to fix common, years-old issues (chat lag, sim crossings (yes I still lag like heck any time I change sim, alleged fixes apparently not applying to me,)) is so high LL'd rather worry about mesh than fix them, then Valve sure as heck isn't going to waste the time. Valve's interest in SL on Steam is to get more SLers playing "real" games. If someone starts using Steam because SL's on there and then goes on to buy Portal II, Valve could care less about SL.

[Shug Maitland]

"perplexed" -- pretty much describes most peoples reaction to this whole fiasco.

- the Governor, looking out the town hall window, "the clock on the square is not keeping good time"
- the Head of Maintenance, "I will send someone to adjust it"
- the Governor, hefting a sledge hammer, "never mind I know exactly how to make it tell time perfectly twice a day"
- the citizens, perplexed, "why did he go to such extremes, we really need to know the time"

[Nathan Adored]

Well, someone else made a good point today in their blog, that LL might be wanting to hand off Marketplace-type services to Steam, rather than trying to keep the troubled and buggy Marketplace still running.

http://www.dgp4sl.com/wp/2012/09/steam-punked/

[Katharine Berry]

Yes, you missed something – some of them (the ones who actually contribute to Linden Lab) do have access.

Indeed, active contributors all have some degree of access.

You may now resume prophesying the end times.

[Dave Bell]

Katharine, there's a contradiction here.

We've somebody on the inside of the |Firestorm team saying that lack of access to JIRA reports will be a problem.

And yet these "active contributors" have "some degree of access".

It makes me wonder just who decides who gets the access, and what they can do with it. As usual, we have the weekend in the way. As usual, it looks like lousy Linden Lab communications. But it would be very easy for Linden Labs to exclude people such as Henri Beauchamp because their viewer is not on the official TPV list. And there are certainly signs that Linden Labs is reluctant to apply bugfixes from external sources.

In any case, the big problems are with the server code, which has never been "open". When the OpenSim project was set up, it started by reverse engineering the SL Server, taking the communications defined by the Viewer of the time, and duplicating that black box. Some OpenSim features lead me to infer that the Linden code was poorly written. We are, in SL, stuck with the 256m square region, while OpenSim can run multiple regions on the same server-code instance, eliminating sim-crossing within that block.

Likewise, the Linden code makes 40 avatars a practical limit on numbers in a region. I've seen what happens to the lag when you reach that level. Yet outside projects have shown some sort of virtual world operating with 100 or more Avatars.

Can all these things be directly compared? I doubt it. But I get the strong impression that a clean re-write of the server code could pay off in the long-term costs of maintenance and improvement. Sort of a Viewer 2 for the servers.

Though the example of how Viewer 2 was handled is not encouraging.

[Nalates Urriah]

People that have signed Contribution Agreements and are active are added to a JIRA group so they can see all the BUG items.

[foneco zuzu]

I just wonder when there will be a splash screen on firestorm saying that there are more grids then Sl and Firestorm works great on them!

[Hitomi Tiponi]

So this means that the signers of a Contributory Agreement can see issues on the JIRA - but not that unsung hero of SL helping out newbies at welcome areas, or that content creator creating new content to make the world more appealing, or that landowner who provides the funds to keep linden Lab running.

We live in a very strange virtual and real world!

[Bucky Barkley]

@fonecu - the first milestone would be for the concurrent number of users on OS grids to match SL (e.g. if you had 50,000 users spread across the top 10 OS grids at the same time there were 50,000 users on SL) - of course, this is super hard to measure.. if you look at every grid as being a large web site, and at every Sim within as a page, it's hard to step back and get any unified view of what's going on. I'd be delighted to discover that there is some service out there that periodically pings the major grids to find that info... but... individual grids are going to have their own notions about what they make public.

The real answer about measuring OS grid traffic is that it maps just like web sites - you just dont know for sure where the traffic is going until they tell ya :)

[Adeon Writer]

Cool VL is my viewer of the month, but I can't deny absolutely everyone I communicate with regularly in SL uses Firestorm.

[shockwave yareach]

Unfortunately, with the copybots and the people responsible for Emerald still in the wild, I do not trust any TPV anymore for any reason. I just cannot. It's unfair to be tarnished by the actions of a few miscreants, I agree.

But this is involving money and personal information. If it was ONLY a silly game and no money was involved, I'd be more open to the idea. But since my credit cards, passwords, and access to my computer is involved, I won't allow TPVS by who-knows-who from who-knows-where to run on my computer.

Not everything should be open source. The viewer and the server are among them, simply because money is involved. If LL rips me off, I have a place to send the cops. Where do I send the cops when the next criminal app hidden in a TPV decides to rob me blind, hmmm?

Once bitten, twice shy.

[Adeon Writer]

Linden needs to just hire them already, geez.

[foneco zuzu]

Personally i can't find a good reason to not trust Tpv developers as i didnt had any single problem with Emerald and still believe deeply that LL used it to try to shove v2 in our mouths!

[foneco zuzu]

And as a matter of trust, one needs to remember 1 rule:
Never blod or use your credit card on the computer or network you use to play!