Open Source requires resources?

Philip Linden: You need a lot of people to manage the process.
Philip Linden: But we see no reason why SL tech shouldn't be open...
Philip Linden: of course in some sense (in-world) all of SL is in a meta way open source.

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That's a bit crazy I think if you just provided us with anonymous CVS, we could probably figure it all out by ourselves quite easily.

Now, if you're worried about this busting your security model or whatever, that would make sense!

I'm all for a open source game like SL.

Netscape had to spend a long-ass time working on their in-house code before it was ready to be open-sourced.

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We had a nice discussion in the technical issues forum about scalability issues with SL's growth.

A major conclusion is that eventually SL will have to open source its sim server code.

I worked at Netscape when they open sourced it. The first stage was just a quick tarball dump, albeit not marketed that well.

No cleanup - no work whatsoever.

There was some cleanup as it went along, but that was more just because the code needed cleanup and I personally didn't see any significant developers contributing because of the cleanup or contributing anymore effectively.

I think it was more just an excuse to get rid of all those NSPR ifdefs..

Keep them happy by making them think that we think it's a good idea, but sideline the issue using the easy excuse that we don't have the resources.

I found the comment of Philip's on open source requiring more resources to be quite strange but then I found so many inconsistencies in what he said at yesterday's town hall that I sort of turned off after a while. The last line you included about it being open in a meta kind of a way really made me want to throw up - it was so thickly covered in marketing packaging it was painful. By the same token every piece of software that you use is meta open source. I mean, come on.

Philip Linden: You need a lot of people to manage the process.

No, you don't. You need a lot of people to manage the project if you don't already have a product. If you have a product and a team of coders who are working on it, you have all the people you need right there. Let the community handle version splits as they see fit.

Philip Linden: of course in some sense (in-world) all of SL is in a meta way open source.

In that same sense, I guess Word and Excel are open source.

LL is right in one aspect:

There's a lot of cleaning that will need to be done becuase the protocol isnt open. LL will need to hire some code security auditors and hunt through the code looking for security weaknessess. Of course they can be found without open source, but it's generally a lot more difficult.

-Adam

Well, there was an article in Terra Nova linking to another article discussing an experiment trying to introduce bugs into a Wiki: they were corrected almost instantly because people saw the bugs go through on the RSS.

Same thing applies with patches to OpenSource: you dont have to constantly rescan the whole source code with every change, and the community is quite capable of auditing changes itself, as long as the changes are available in diff format for maybe a week or so prior to roll-out.

With SecondLife generally, with or without OpenSource, it's probably getting to the stage where roll-outs need to be phased a little. If you rolled out a patch to an entire site in 4 hours in a professional environment, you'd most likely get sacked unless you had a *really* good reason and had done tons of testing. It's just a recipe for disaster because something *always* goes wrong.

Phased rollouts take care of this because you dont take out the entire site if/when there's an issue.

Yes, there's a little bit of a challenge figuring out how to do phased rollouts, but it's a question of lazy people take the most pains. A little bit of work beforehand saves ever so much time and panic later, and you can generally re-use the same strategy for future deployments.

Azelda

Edit to say: and yeah, I have seen people get sacked for doing failed whole-site un-phased roll-outs.