Why Do Volunteer Second Life Software Developers Do So Much Unpaid Labor to Support Nearly All of Linden Lab's Customers? Firestorm's Project Head Explains

It's probably the strangest symbiotic relationship in Silicon Valley: Linden Lab, the startup that's highly profitable from Second Life, open sourced its SL viewer software 12 years ago, and over time, various open source viewers have increased in popularity, among Second Life's user base. Firestorm, updated and debugged by dedicated team of volunteer SL users --  has become the most popular.

How popular? Far more popular than the official SL viewer put out by Linden Lab the company. So popular, in fact, that any update Linden Lab makes to its platform is effectively irrelevant unless it's supported by Firestorm.

Two years ago, project head Jessica Lyon tells me, "Firestorm was carrying somewhere around 72% of SL users. I've no idea what that metric is like today but I suspect it's higher now as many third party viewers around back then have dissolved." By a conservative estimate, 80-90% of SL users now use Firestorm.

In other words, an unpaid volunteer development team is providing the software for nearly the entire userbase of a highly profitable company. Which like I said, is pretty unprecedented.

"It's a rather unique situation for sure," Jessica agrees. "But is a matter of perspective how one looks at it. We see ourselves providing a better experience for 80-90% of the user population, rather than supporting a for-profit company without gains."

Firestorm hasn't even attempted to monetize its efforts, she adds:

"We never wanted money, in fact I have always been dead set against earning revenue of any kind. That corrupts a project and Emerald is a great example of how greed can manifest into destruction and corruption." (Read about some of the sordid Emerald story here.) "Also consider that we didn't invent the viewer, we grabbed it from Linden Lab and improved it, but the majority of it is still Linden Lab's work.

 

"We do what we do because we enjoy helping folks," Jessica adds. "We are an altruistic project through and through. There has never been heard a complaint from anyone on the team about Linden Lab making money off our efforts."

 

And Linden Lab does non-financially compensate them to a certain degree, by subsidizing the team's SL regions that they use for the community gateway. "Otherwise no, there's no monetary compensation or anything like that. We don't ask for anything or want anything."

 

They might not ask for more, but personally, I think Linden Lab could at least throw the Firestorm team a big all-expenses HQ party every year. As for the 80-90% who depend on Firestorm, it wouldn't hurt to take time to reflect how rare and fortunate this relationship is for them.

Comments

[Metacam]

Sadly they would have been better off just coding a new Metaverse

[Adeon Writer]

They could just rename Firestorm Viewer to "Second Life Viewer" and hire them as employees. Y'know, that works too. 🤔

[Orca the Terrible]

I was thining the same as Adeon: If the FS team is so much more capable than LL's own viewer team, why not offer Jessica and gang some well-paids jobs?
And the Singularity folks as well. For they are keeping the V1.2.3 look and feel alive much better than even FS's Phoenix mode can do.

[return man 3]

Firestorm will be set on the largest map of Battle Battlefield - Hal Halvoy. DICE and co-developer Criterion will offer solo and team play mode (16 teams with four players), whereby the player must complete a mission to unlock the use of vehicles, including tanks and aircraft. helicopters, or support aircraft calling feature, ... DICE said the two-player game mode will arrive with Firestorm sometime in April.

[CronoCloud Creeggan]

Adeon's got a great point there. I used to use LL's own viewers exclusively, usually running one of the Snowstorm test builds (though I kept a Firestorm install for testing), but then LL's own Linux viewer would refuse to run on a 64-bit Linux. Apparently, LL never switched their Linux build system to 64-bit. The only LL viewer I could run was the Obsolete system viewer, which had....issues. So even though I preferred the LL viewer UI, I switched to Firestorm because Firestorm DOES have a proper 64-bit Linux build that WORKS and has fixes to bugs in LL's Linux builds LL never got around to fixing.

[Summer Haas]

Think about all the ramifications of hiring that team. We have no idea what the financial situation is for the FS team. I'm guessing most of them would rather not work under the thumb of a major corporation. Some may not even be able to based on their location. Then of course there is liability on LL's part. They can't just allow the team total autonomy due to legal issues. Attempting to hire the team and make that viewer official would likely completely kill it off in less than a few months time.

One thing I would be curious to know though is exactly how many hours go into converting LLs code over to Firestorm every year on average. Is this something they devote a couple weekends to every time an update to the code comes out or is this a major operation that takes thousands of hours?

[Luther Weymann]

Two things I hope I never have to contend with in SL. 1. Linden Research having a proprietary SL viewer and no other viewers but theirs will work. 2. The Firestorm team becoming employees of Linden Research and the Firestorm code being taken over by Linden Research. Neither one of those has a good outcome for residents.

[Mary Goonlife]

Why no love for the Darkstorm Viewer?

[Anon]

While I'm sure you no doubt think you're being funny Mary Goonlife, your Darkstorm copybot viewer, as well as being not allowed to connect to the secondlife grid, which of course makes no difference to you is completely outdated and doesn't support things like animesh, bento, the new inventory system, bakes on mesh and probably more.
Probably why most of you copybottors use a different viewer based on Singularity now which still doesn't support bakes on mesh.
That's why there's no love for Darkstorm or you.

[Tonya Souther]

Disclaimer: I'm speaking only for myself, not the Firestorm team.

Personally, I'd love to be hired by LL. I've even applied a couple of times. But I'm not the tiniest bit interested in living in either California or Massachusetts, and while they are now open once more to hiring remote employees (they weren't for several years), they do not as yet hire in Minnesota where I live. I think it would be a great place to work, even if I would have to give up my connection with the Firestorm team.

And that points to the main problem with hiring the Firestorm team: we're spread out not just across the US, but internationally. Most of the developers live in various countries in Europe; I may be the only current developer in the US, as a matter of fact. That goes for the remainder of the team, as well. Don't forget that a large part of what makes Firestorm as amazing as it is is the participation of folks not just in developing, but in supporting and QAing and the gateway team that helps people learn about SL and gives them a place to start getting involved. I can't see LL hiring the entire team even if it could.

I don't think LL would ever pick up the entire Firestorm codebase. In the end, Firestorm addresses a different need from the LL viewer, which is aimed at the casual or new user, learning to navigate in SL. Firestorm is explicitly aimed at the power user. There are features that LL will never adopt, the one springing most quickly to mind being RLV. (Their Experience platform can do some but not all of what RLV does.)

I've long thought that LL's position, where their platform depends heavily on the efforts of a group of third-party volunteers, is one that I would not want my own platform to be in. That said, we do try hard to keep up with new features as LL adds them, Bakes on Mesh being the most recent, and when EEP lands, we're going to try hard to follow that quickly as well.

We'll see how it works out. It does seem to work well enough, though.