Open source viewers - any available to try?

Okay, I've been searching around for a while, but I can't find anybody who is working on a viewer that is available to try out yet.
Are there any?

Thanks

From what I've seen so far the only open source clients I've heard of had to do with copybots, searchbots, landbots, etc. Otherwise I think everyone is just sticking to what LL gives us.

Other than the above uses, I don't think anyone will really care about open source until they open some of that good ol' server side and it's hot, buttery goodness! That's when we get this party started!

http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/faq


open source means they give you the complete source code for the viewer

go make it do something cool



It's takes alot of time effort and brains to edit the viewer to do something 'cool' and those who do take the time to do it, do it to make money

so they have no real reason to share what they made, but you can do it! come on! grab that programming book off the shelf and make us something cool!

this isnt necessarily true.
sourceforge has tens of thousands of examples of open source programs created by sharp people for no cost and with no intent of making money.

Yes there is one, check it out.

http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

I suspect many programmers aren't willing to invest time into developing a client for a system that could ban them and confiscate all their assets at any moment.

I think the frequent changes to the backend greatly reduce the independent development of viewers. If you make an alternate viewer that works today, then when the next mandatory upgrade occurs, your viewer won't work anymore. Thus you can't just write your alternate viewer once and be done with it; in order for it to continue to be useful, someone would have to keep modifying it. However, if you can write a patch that gets accepted into the LL viewer, then LL will be keeping the alteration properly meshed with the rest of the system.

The most viable use of the opensource client, is that programmers with a passion for the game and their skill, have been able to resolve many of the bugs that have plauged SL. They have, using their highly skilled talents, offered many resolutions to bugs, to LL who have used those resolutions/patches in the new client about to be released. LL have acknowledged this in the recent blog.

The biggest issue of anyone wanting to release their own 'branded' client, is one of trust. The vast majority would receive such a release as some sort of exploit and have little faith in it, even if it came from a source such as IBM for instance, and maybe consider it a way of a third party being able to track them, or gain some marketable feedback device, which is a shame at best.

I suggested, along with others, that LL operate a form of validation certificate system, whereby submitted versions of the client, would be tested by LL before receiving a 'clean bill of helath' certificate, the revenues to pay for validation would be by way of the supplier paying a fixed fee at submit stage, but, they would only do so, if, there was some way of recouping their outlay, which defeats the object, unless they could gain something for their efforts, other than recognition.

One potential would be to 'brand' the client with advertising space, much the same way as 'toolbars' adorn our browsers over the internet, but who would want to see advertising logos, flashy click through graphics dancing around their client window and menus? Well I wouldn't mind, if it created a stable and useable system. You get what you pay for in any world.

just imagine how much Gentoo or Debian would cost if any of the above was based on clue.

Or they could have just done the sensible thing and add a plug-in mechanism to SL.

To me, cynic that I've become in this little world of ours, I've felt, since they open-sourced the viewer, that LL main goal with it was to get people they dont have to put on thier payroll to develope SL in ways they havent got time for or arent creative enough to figure out on thier own.

Once someone makes something really cool, watch it get GOM'd faster then GOM.

And may I add that I did (pretty much from the day the first workable version was finished) and have been using at ever since. It has improved my SL experience considerably - no memory leak, less lag, improved stability. Nicholaz did a great job on this, and as far as I'm concerned they should erect a statue in his honour at Linden Village.

Well I'm convinced. I'll definitely give it a try-and perhaps I'll be able to stay logged on longer than 15 minutes without crashing

What, you mean they'd get offered some money, turn it down, decide they didn't want to compete anymore, close down their own successful business for no reason, and then piss and moan about it on the forums for the next three years as if their demise was anyone's fault but their own?

The whole point of the open source project is for people to develop new features that LL can roll into the official viewer, and anyone working on such a feature should already be fully aware of that.

this isnt really an issue if the client is being developed in the open, source code available in the open source spirit. we dont worry about firefox stealing our banking details because it is developed in the open and any geek can look at the code and see what it does.

Personally, you couldn't pay me to use a SL client that some geek I have never heard of has hacked together from the open-source code. I don't have time to pour over thousands of lines of someone else's code to determine for certain that he isn't capturing and stealing my account name and password, or doing other illicit things with his hacked code. No thanks. Not even with an alt that has no money or property.

It's one thing to surf the web using an open-source web browser that gets used daily by millions upon millions of people. That doesn't require me to key in data every time that I use it that would allow an unscrupulous coder to access my finances or to impersonate me by haijacking my account. But I would never use a no-name open-source browser to do my banking...

I'll agree with the earlier poster, who said the value of the open source client is in those programmers who use it to develop something cool or fix some bug, and who then turn that code over to LL to be validated, approved as safe, and added to the beta and eventually mainstream client that LL offers.

its all dependant upon the userbase of the client. if you have hundreds of people actively working on a project the chances of some rouge geek adding malicious code are close to zero. 'peer review' is a huge element of open source projects.
im glad there werent so many people demanding mozilla be 'microsoft certified'. if they had, basic things such as tabbed browsing would still be 5 years off. advanced scripting would likely be 10 years off. open source projects definitely drive commercial products to improve.

my point was that ppl EDIT the client to make things that make them money, I.E. LandBots to purchase land and sell it at a profit

if they spend the time to WRITE the landbot to make THEM money why would they then release it to others for free....

your the one that needs a 'clue'

any software that connects to some server being mod'ed to give one user the ability to do something you can't does happen ALL the time and the ppl who do that don't give there mod'ed version to others for free

there is your free 'clue'

Is anyone else having trouble extracting the "Nicholaz" viewer? When I try to extract it from it's zip I get the error "Error reading the file". Did he zip it in some kind of weird way that requires a specific extractor?

Probably just a downloading error. The file is plain old ZIP, no specials.

i believe most bots (including landbots) are based on libsecondlife reverse engineered code, not the open sourced client code released by LL.
the vast majority of open source projects are worked on by many individuals and businesses who need the software they're working on to make money. believe it or not, most share their work freely. that's just how open source works.
try not to take things so personally, child.
i've modded the SL client myself. i've shared information about those mods on the opensl mailing list and contributed to the wiki. drop the illogical lectures and take your delicate ego elsewhere please.

I'm running the Nicholaz viewer with no problems that I can tell.

nicholaz-16e.zip? Works fine here. Clear your browser cache before attempting the downloading again.

I had no problems at all unzipping it, as Nicholaz said it must simply be a bad download.

Nicholaz- great job, this client does seem more stable. I have had no end of troubles with recent clients (basically in the last two months) and yours is the first one I can actually use without crashes and massive leaks.

That would only work if, the pluggins are validated, don't try and steal your account details etc (see activeX), piggyback some nasty code into your system... I mean internet browsers were considered safe, but there are less holes in a garden seive, at least for now, the client is somewhat secure.

That is until it includes such 'advances' as ActionScripts from versions of Flash (although much needed by some, would open abuse to others), Javascripting and ActiveX as the boundaries become blurred between the Internet and the SL world, thats why it has been resisted so far, but, LL are under more pressure to open these small portals.