SecondForge open source project formed!

Through the magic of the internet and SL forums, I got in touch with a man named Xavior Nicholas. He had a vision. We later met with Jesse Malthus. He shared oue vision. That vision is to make a truly useful system for SL scripters and builders to collaborate and share resources for a greater good.

Well, Xavior, Jesse, and I have now formed SecondForge. Our hopes are to develop an archive/development system that will network people that are passionate about open source.

This project aspires to bring people together in SL much like SourceForge has done in RL. If you share our vision and would like to be part of this movement, contact any of us in game. We are just getting started and the support and participation that you could provide would help out greatly.

Thank you everyone for your thoughts.

Thanks for making this thread, Dustin.

I'll try to elaborate a bit more later, but first I need some food

Thanks for the post, Dustin.

To elaborate a bit, what we are hoping to accomplish is to provide a collaboration system for developers to work on open source projects.

By open source projects, we aren't refering to open source scripts. We are referring to complete items that are released for distribution and modification to the public. These are projects that can be used "out of the box" that include scripts and textures, animations, and whatever else required for that project to be complete.

It has been suggested many times that a wiki would suffice for this project. However, projects are not limited to only scripts. Some projects require scripts in various pieces of a linked object, or non-linked objects that communicate to each other, but designed to work together. Textures, animations, and prims cannot be posted on a wiki also.

What we hope to accomplish is to provide a means for people to submit their work to existing projects that have been submitted to the repository. This would allow for anybody to submit a patch or revision, while being managed by a developer willing to manage the project, most likely the author. This creates a centralized management system that allows the users to better work with the various creators.

We would also keep archives of old versions of projects, as well as a current 'stable' release version archive, and finally a beta archive. We believe a primary concern is to keep these projects as organized as possible.

Simply put, we intend to replicate sourceforge.net within SL. We're still working out a strategy as to how this is all going to work, but we have many other things to sort out as well. Any help is greatly appreciated. We are not doing this for ourselves, but for the open source community. We know you are out there, somewhere. We just want to bring you together. RL is a prime example of what can be done with open source software when people collaborate.

This project is intended for everybody's benefit. There are many benefits that the open source model provide not just for developers but for non-developers as well. People that have a passion can work together to create quality content. Non-developers will have a convenient way to submit their feedback on items that they find at the archives. People that have commercial products can contribute open source versions of their products (similar to how Red Hat works) and learn from it, as well as publicize themselves. There are many more benefits and that list is really beyond the scope of this thread. I just want to say that this is to benefit everybody, not just us, and not just developers.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Am interested and have been in such an intiative for quite some time now

What kind if OS licenses would you folks be consdering or allowing developers to release their work under? Is it the usual blurb or are there any SL spec licenses you guys have thought about?

And do you people have a sim or hangout area where OS dev folks can approach you in world with their ideas, resources, etc.?

thanks.

The licensing issue is something that we haven't given much thought to just yet. There are a lot of aspects of this project that we are trying to take care of first. So far, it's just the three of us. We were probably going to let the developers decide for their own projects what licenses to use, but then again, I don't want to create any kind of 'legal' problems if some licenses conflict with others. I'm not a lawyer or anything so I'm not sure how all that stuff works. It is certainly something that we need to straighten out before this goes too far so it doesn't come back and bite us.

If you have any information that could help us with it, it would be extremely appreciated. We don't have a lot of land that is officially dedicated to the project yet. I have some land that my gf and I have allocated for it. It's not much right now (1500sq m), but I'm willing to allocate more if need be.

If you want to contact us, it would be easiest to IM one of us about it. Jesse and Dustin seem quite dedicated, but I'm not sure of their availability. You can contact me any time about it though, and if I'm not in-game, I'll respond by email if I can.

Thanks a million