Changes to the Third Party Viewer Policy have been announced and they are contentious. Crap Mariner has a post with links to other blogs with good discussion on the issue. The most startling issue for me is whether this will hit innovation, as @SecondLife so well puts it:
“BREAKING NEWS: Linden Lab changes Third Party Viewer Policy to ensure that all viewers suck as much as their own.”
The part of the policy that leads to these concerns is :
2.k : You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.
Exactly what this means is where matters get vague, however in the recorded meeting, which is long but you can listen to here, Oz suggested that Parcel Windlight settings and avatar physics, which were initially exclusive to third party viewers, would be forbidden under the new policy.
This is where matters get complicated. The question really is whether Linden Lab would have ever worked on implementing these features if third party viewers had not implemented them in the first place. Another issue is how exactly do features like avatar physics or parcel windlight settings actually damage the shared experience, the world will look different to different people anyway, depending on their graphics card and their settings, so this seems a bit too draconian in my view, if these features don’t hinder how the world looks for me, I don’t see the issue. I generally use the official Linden Lab viewer, so back in the days of Phoenix having jiggling boobies, I missed them, but I don’t recall anything looking odd to me by that feature being enabled on the Phoenix Viewer.
However the concept of Linden Lab wanting to work with people on such changes, is a positive one and Oz goes to great lengths in the discussion to point out that Linden Lab are under new management and that new policies are in place. However without the proof of concept of a feature, will people be able to make a convincing case for its inclusion?
There are other issues in this policy, such as true online status which is being broken by Linden Lab along with viewer tags displaying which viewer someone is using. I agree with Oz that a person’s online status should be managed by them, although there are good use cases for scripts that deliver items to people who are online, I feel that a person’s choice should be the more important factor, however is this going to break content that doesn’t subvert a person’s choice?
One big area of shared experiences of course comes from Mesh, Oz rightly points out that this is an issue of viewers not keeping pace with change, so if people have a subpar experience on non Mesh viewers, that’s a matter of choice.
If this policy leads to better collaboration between Linden Lab and developers, then the concerns will be quickly put to bed. On the other hand, if this leads to development being stifled, then it will undermine progress in Second Life. Right now we will have to wait and see and hope that this does lead to a healthier development system, one whereby third party developers don’t feel the need to make world changing options in their viewer because Linden Lab will work with people on change, rather than taking an age to even acknowledge it’s a decent feature.
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