Ok some facts here is most people in SL arnt malciious they are few and far between.
1. Griefers.
2. It doesn't take a lot of malicious people, just a few. Once the tool is available, people are more likely to be malicious because it's easy (script kiddie syndrome)
And it lowers the commercial value of SL by allowing people to manipulate things having your own little world wouldnt be good either that would hurt the value of SL.
How? Would SL lose customers? Probably not... those little worlds would be good test beds for designing stuff in private, but who has the resources to host a decent number of sims/people? It wouldn't harm LL, because *They already offer the game for free*. There is little incentive NOT to play on LL's grid.
Startup companies might create different grids, but competition is good for a capitalistic market.
Look at it this way you will get a linux client consider that its still alpha they have to develop it it has to go thru the same stuff pc and mac did. They decided to release it which is nice for you guys but you jsut complain cuz dev is slow is all i've seen. There is absolutely no reason other then rushing about the development of it that it would help.
Oh, I don't care whether they make it open source or not. I'm just arguing that your points about it being a bad idea to open the source are weak arguments. I hold to my original point on that score: It's LL's software, they can do whatever the bloody heck they like with it
It would never be the official client and would cause alot of problems that i wont go into.
Why not? I mean, we've kinda hijacked this thread, so moving to another thread would be smart, but I'm honestly curious to know what these problems are.
As for it "never being the official client"... do you know how the open source development model works? I posted a link to The Cathedral and the Bazaar earlier in the thread... you should check it out. The Lindens would be the development core, accepting or rejecting patches from the community. The dev core in an OSS project become mediators as well as developers, sorting through submitted patches and seeing what's good.
It's a lot like having someone over your shoulder, saying things like "why don't you try..." or "you could speed things up by..." Except there are hundreds of those people. Yes, it adds some interesting management issues, but if you're prepared, it's a powerful tool. And nothing has to be "unofficial".
And L2J used java and was a piece of crap in all honesty lol. It was missing alot of content and other stuff.
Hey, I like L2J! My roommate and I wrote a graphical admin interface for it once, and he submitted a lot of patches to them. Of course, the problems you describe have to do with the fact that they never hit a critical mass of developers. (again, see CatB) But the project had a lot of potential.
And Java was a pretty feasible platform for it. Ran fine on my machine. No more lag than the official servers anyway.
As far as stuff being stored locally to a degree yes but its not really anything like that.
You seem to know a lot more about the SL client than I've been able to gather from my experiences. If it's not really like the model I describe, how is it implemented?
making free is alot about trust and then a ton of people with a diff client slows production and alot of other stuff ill not run into specifics here to long...
Open source projects fork VERY VERY rarely, and usually only for a damn good reason. It is in everyone's best interest to share fixes with each other. If the open source model slows production, why does Linux improve so rapidly, especially compared to, say, Windows?
I'd like to hear these specifics though. Perhaps a new thread is in order?
