Open Source Busybody Reporting for Duty
Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 4:28 PM by: Rob LindenHi everyone…I’m Rob Linden, aka Rob Lanphier. I’m a relatively new Linden, hired especially to work with the community on open source issues. I’ll be the primary liaison for issues relating to open source. My goals are going to be to put in place the mechanisms for effective collaboration between Linden Lab and the rest of the world on improving the Second Life viewer. I’m really excited to be at this point today. More below the fold…
First, a little bit about me. My background is as an open source coordinator and developer. I did a lot of work on Real’s Helix initiative, and more recently spent some time doing MediaWiki development. I joined Linden Lab back in September, and have been working on the preparation for today’s announcement ever since.
Now that the announcement is out of the way, what do I do now? Well, I’ll be working with you, assuming you are someone who is interested in Second Life. If you are interested in helping build the Second Life viewer, I want to help you get involved. And by “build”, I should make it clear that you don’t need to be a C++ developer….we’ve got lots of things you can do to help out. If you’re someone who is skeptical or even a little fearful about what this announcement means, I hope to help change your mind about it. I think this is a huge opportunity, and that if the community wants it to be a success, it will be a success.
My priorities this week: I’m working with our hosting provider to sort out any last little glitches with logging into and using the new wiki and the new issue tracker, as well as paying attention to the activity there. I’ll be getting to know everyone on the mailing list and IRC channel. And, of course, I’ll be in-world at many times throughout the week, including Cory’s Town Hall meeting, and other office hours I’ll post to my wiki page, so feel free to stop by if you’d like to chat. For you Lindens in the crowd, consider that my A&Os this week (how much more transparent do I have to be than putting my weekly status on the blog?).
As a free software zealot myself, I hope fans of open source and free software find this as exciting as I do. The viewer represents a relatively small portion of the overall Second Life architecture. But, this will hopefully be an important step in giving you control of your computer. We certainly don’t want you to have to install proprietary software on your computer to enjoy Second Life, and now, you won’t have to. Admittedly, there are still some rough edges in a purely open source compile, but that’s a bug, not a feature. Let’s work together to fix that.
I’m excited to meet everyone. This is going to be fun!
January 8th, 2007 at 4:35 PM
Welcome aboard, Rob!
January 8th, 2007 at 4:36 PM
This is a very interesting development. I never would have thought that Second Life would go open source. Unfortunately, I don’t have much time to assist in improving Second Life. However this does not mean I won’t spend time at all. I hope this will be a success.
I myself am a great fan of Open Source projects since others always see mistakes you yourself would have misted. I think by working together with others a lot of bugs will be solved easier.
My compliments to the whole crew of Second Life.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:40 PM
[...] For those of you wondering what I’ve been doing at Linden Lab, now I can tell you. [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 4:48 PM
Oooh, welcome Rob.
Looking forward to meet you in SL and start to work together.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:49 PM
Nice to see another Linden who may help lighten the workload for the rest of them. =)
January 8th, 2007 at 4:49 PM
I guess I’m gonna be hearing about Second Life doubly now, since I regularly read both the blog and Slashdot.org…. They’re all F/OSS loonies over there
welcome aboard!
January 8th, 2007 at 4:51 PM
I was wondering who llrobl was….guess that was you. Thanks for helping shepherd this truly tremendous event.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:53 PM
Free software “zealot”? Please don’t tell me that means you’ll take the rest of the Lindens hostage and demand that they add support for non-euclidean shapes in the Viewer. xD
Welcome to the team, Rob, and remember, “It takes a human to make a mistake, but it takes a computer to really screw things up.”
January 8th, 2007 at 4:54 PM
I really have Only One area of concern, and being relatively Unknowledgable about these programming issues, and “Open sourcing” i think it’s a Valid one.
Can/Will making source Code available to Outsiders make SL More Suceptable to Hacking, or Grid Attacks?
If so, what protections do we have?. If not, why not?
Those of you who Understand this better than i, Please don’t yell at me, Just answers please.
Angel.
January 8th, 2007 at 4:55 PM
Well, it’s good to have you aboard, Rob. However, as one of the less computer saavy members of SL, you’ve just handed me a lot of jabberwocky. To one of the many ‘unwashed’ who inhabit this game, you might as well have been talking about improving the dynamic structure of Reboks.
Still, it’s nice to see someone so friendly and willing to share information numbered among the Lindens’ ranks
I immigrated from one of the ‘enemies’ vr universes, and I must say that the staff here is quite refreshing in their candor and willingness to interact with us who number among the now 20,000+ inhabitants of SL.
Good luck to you. And if the Almighty sees fit to hit me with a thunderbolt and increase my brain to mensa status, I’ll be delighted to help you.
But for now, this little ol’ lady is going to go back to her virtual knitting.
Good luck!
Mariah Jubilee
January 8th, 2007 at 5:03 PM
Aye sire!
*Was thinking of joing the developer/programing team at Linden Labs*
Do you guys allow Jokers?
January 8th, 2007 at 5:11 PM
Thanks, all!
Re: Angelique LaFollette - there’s a section of the FAQ dealing with security issues: http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/faq#security In short, we think this is net positive in all aspects, including security.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:12 PM
This is perfect. There is some worry in the community that valuable open-source contributions would be difficult to roll back into the official SL client. I’m glad to see that Linden Lab has already recognized this difficulty and has effectively placed a spokesman for open-source efforts within their own company. Congratulations, and good luck. There’s going to be a lot of poor-quality code to sift through to find the nuggets of pure genius.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:13 PM
@Angelique:
Since computer security is part of my RL job description, I’d like to offer a view of NOT open-sourcing the code — from a security perspective.
Today, Linden Research is a relatively small company, and they have a close-knit set of developers who have a lot of “vested” interest in the well-being of the company (which is a good thing.) SL is like their baby, and they guard it zealously.
Tomorrow, however, Linden will grow and hire new developers, contractors, administrators, etc. One day, they will unknowingly hire Evil Linden.
Evil Linden is one smart cookie, but when he was a baby his mum dropped him on his head a few times too many. He puts a seemingly harmless “Easter Egg” in the client code, and even tells everyone about it. All the Lindens laugh at his “cute” obfuscated pranks; one happy family they are.
As you might guess, his “harmless” code steals everyone’s credit card number and sends it offshore, which coincidentally just happens when Evil goes on vacation somewhere in the Carribean and never returns.
Or, consider an alternative scenario. Meet Petra Semyorka (my cousin.) In RL she works at a datacenter in San Francisco, which just happens to host SL’s proprietary code repository. Petra has a fetish for collecting Beanie Babies, and being short on money, one day she inserts a malicious line directly into the client source code repository.
Lindens are ill equipped to deal with these kinds of breaches. In the Evil Linden case, they trust him as part of the “family”. In the Petra Semyorka case they don’t have facilities to tamper-proof their codebase, nor time to notice and examine every single change.
By opening up the source code, now you have literally hundreds of more people examining every aspect of the code. This kind of scrutiny offers protection, not only from each other, but from the Evil Lindens or Petra Semyorkas of the world.
-peekay
January 8th, 2007 at 5:14 PM
Um open source. I got home from a math lecture and thought of addding a blackboard to my offices in Sociaria. But I want my blackboard to write LaTeX code or MathML. Could we/you Lindens or open sourcers provide a LaTeX facility that could allow SL scripts to access and write LaTeX output to a SL blackboard? May be we could up load a LaTeX file or write LaTeX in chat and have it appear as math expressions in world i.e. on an object like a blackboard. Um does the viewer display some sort of XML or HTML or MathML? Is this possible or a good way of taking the viewer? Does the viewer use VRML? A lot of questions and a goal: a math blackboard.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:23 PM
>Can/Will making source Code available to Outsiders make SL More Suceptable to Hacking, or >Grid Attacks?
>If so, what protections do we have?. If not, why not?
Yes and no.
By going open source SL will definitely make it easier for people to write malicious code. However, it will also have a load more people plugging any security holes. In general, the upshot of this is that it depends on the community working on SL. If there are more people genuinely interested in making SL better, then going open source will actually make it more secure rather than less, and when there is an attack of some shape or form, there will be a lot more people around working on stopping it and making sure it doesn’t happen again.
It’s a win/win situation in a lot of ways. It takes a load off the Lindens by basically letting their staff concentrate more on the servers/sims and grid, while the community do most of the work on the client side. The upshot of it all should be a better client, more reliable servers and a better game experience all around.
I’m quick to criticise Linden Lab when I think they’ve screwed up, but in this case, I gotta be quick to praise them. Moving to Open Source is a big step forward in my opinion. However a lot rests with how well it is co-ordinated, so good luck Rob
January 8th, 2007 at 5:26 PM
Peekay: that cousin of yours sounds like trouble.
She single?
January 8th, 2007 at 5:28 PM
[...] Rob Linden: Open Source Busybody Reporting for Duty - “I’m a relatively new Linden, hired especially to work with the community on open source issues. I’ll be the primary liaison for issues relating to open source. My goals are going to be to put in place the mechanisms for effective collaboration between Linden Lab and the rest of the world on improving the Second Life viewer.“ [...]
January 8th, 2007 at 5:37 PM
Howdy Rob:)
Welcome to SL and congratualations! I was wondering if all the open-source news today meant there would be an upgrade of the LINUX SL client from “alpha” to at least “beta” or maybe full client?
January 8th, 2007 at 5:39 PM
I for one welcome our new open source overlords.
January 8th, 2007 at 5:50 PM
Welcome, Rob!
Well, right off the bat, down to buisness –
What is LL’s plan for dealing with patches to the source?
Are y’all intending on getting secondlife.sourceforge.net?
I’m assuming you are going to be the person checking patches and applying them when they meet quality standards… I’ve been reading the LIBRARY licenses — it appears Kakadu doesn’t allow 3rd party redist of their code without a license. Does this mean we need a Kakadu license to distribute compiled binaries?
I’m hoping this will be a system where we won’t need to distribute out of band binaries…
By the way, llhippo.cpp — LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL! Pass on a laugh to the coder responsible for that one, would you? *G*
January 8th, 2007 at 5:57 PM
Rob, congrats for coming on board. First a statement - I think mods will come to resolve pain points that people currently have - like my personal one for corporations regarding no proxy (search Proxy! Proxy! Proxy!). I also have two concerns - one, will there be a review process for harvesting and re-incorporating extensions back into the base for the next release level, and two, will anybody provide a coordinating function so people don’t inadvertantly waste effort resolving the same pain points? Competing code might be a waste of development resources as many people would likely defer to someone else and go work on another area if they knew someone was working on it already. Let’s maximize the delivery and investment of everyone’s time, at least in the beginning!
January 8th, 2007 at 6:03 PM
Heya Rob!
I’m glad to hear you’re settling down quite well. We look forward to working together with you!
.fox
January 8th, 2007 at 6:05 PM
One more point I forgot - if any of the Lindens have some analysis already done on what it would take to incorporate the corporate proxy in the current code base (or something thereabouts) I’d be happy to review it and consider putting it in our Second Life budget…
January 8th, 2007 at 6:09 PM
To Peekay Semyorka,
I guess you have to trust the open source ideals. It’s more than just for the faithful. I wonder if SL right now is the ARPNET of the past.
January 8th, 2007 at 6:11 PM
welcome aboard rob liden
January 8th, 2007 at 6:20 PM
Welcome sir! As a OS zelot (but not a programmer) I certainly welcome this to SL. I’ll be glad to help beta test any and all SL clients as soon as they’re available.
The only thing I can see that needs work on it, aside from stability is the keyboard buffer. I’m quite a fast typest, and I can easly outstrip it. I think all that’s needed is some sort of large buffer, and greater input speed.
Again, welcome
- Shad
January 8th, 2007 at 6:22 PM
Welcome Rob!
So I’m curious to know if LL will continue to release new versions every other week or so? And will we see new stuff incorporated from users as soon as the next version after the one on Wednesday?
This is all very exciting, and I must say that I found the Open Source FAQ super informative; a must-read for people like me who at first were a bit worried at the announcement earlier.
I’m very optimistic now and believe that this could be the first big step in making Second Life as popular as the World Wide Web someday.
January 8th, 2007 at 6:57 PM
Woohoo! Thanks for everything, Rob. This looks great so far.
January 8th, 2007 at 6:59 PM
Not sure about this Issue Tracker, it takes me to a basically blank page (jira.secondlife.com)that asks me for my SL Username and Password.
I guess it’s a secondlife.com page, so probably isn’t phishing.
Just a bit paranoid I guess
January 8th, 2007 at 7:00 PM
All this press and blogging and I swear I still don’t know what the heck this thing is. Could someone just give a simple one-sentence summary of what exactly the viewer is and is not. Simple! Like: The Viewer lets you do X, but you will not be able to do Y. Simple! Thanks.
January 8th, 2007 at 7:16 PM
The Viewer is the client software you download from us. It’s what you may commonly refer to the Second Life application, or .exe. It’s like a browser for the 3D world of Second Life. If you know C++ (or even XML), being able to modify the viewer gives you some great opportunities to implement features you’ve always wanted, as well as fix the nasty client-side bugs that you hate (alpha sorting, I’m looking at YOU).
What modifying the viewer won’t let you do is increase your L$ balance, increase the size of prims that you can make (thank you, LibSL!), destroy other people’s content, read or modify scripts you wouldn’t otherwise have access to, etc.
While there may be security risks when giving everyone in the world access to our viewer code, we believe that having more eyes on the code will turn up any potential security flaws faster than if it was just those who have read the code 13,373 times.
January 8th, 2007 at 7:41 PM
My questions are related to mandatory viewer updates.
Will most updates continue to be mandatory?
Will older versions be made available, either for use or as open source?
How will updates affect modified viewers?
Will there be a new open source release for each update?
If so, will it be required?
Will modified viewers work on the beta grid?
January 8th, 2007 at 7:56 PM
With more emphasis on the wiki now, will there be a section on there for server infrastructure? I know you can’t give out the server code or say “here is exactly how everything works” for just intellectual property reasons. But I remember during the latest big hardware failure there were a lot of people that had some good ideas on how to prevent this from happening again. It would be nice if there was someplace people could give feedback on even an overall view of the current layout. Like ways to not have a single machine for any mission-critical thing, etc.
January 8th, 2007 at 8:06 PM
i just have one thing to say…. are you lindens insane for making it open source? you will get hacked and already sl has been having so many major problems, i dont know why i even bother to pay on this site
January 8th, 2007 at 8:16 PM
Welcome Rob
I’m looking forward to trying this out 
Cat
January 8th, 2007 at 8:20 PM
Hmm… I think my post got scrubbed.
January 8th, 2007 at 8:59 PM
Rob,
My University is interested in participating in Second Life as either a portal or as a classroom environment for distance learning or even local learning. The question that got us involved was this… “when the next wave of students gets to the University, what medium will they grow up with and be familiar with as a delivery/communication tool?”
Linden Lab’s Second Life is of extraordinary interest in that regard. There are two of us in IT that are presently exploring that and would like to be part of your adventure. The background of one of us is database DBA, programming, project management. The other of us is Systems Architecture, Network Architecture, Storage, SAN and NAS, power, data center design and build, and project management. We would enjoy being involved as our time allows and would especially like to incorporate hooks for distance learning.
John
January 8th, 2007 at 9:30 PM
So, I guess the question is how does one keep all of this form becoming another CopyBoy hellstorm?
January 8th, 2007 at 9:35 PM
One more analogy on the “many eyes” analogy.
Think of it as having hundreds of people proofreading your work. Your work will become infinitely more reliable, because mistakes missed by 99 people might get caught by 1.
The “downside” (if there IS a downside) is that the programmers who want to make derivative works, can… because they KNOW how the client works. Yes, that is how copybot was made.. But Copybot was essentially a Xerox machine, but a copier is really two very important things linked together.. a “Scanner” and a “printer”. These are two functions that are absolutely critical to the desire of builders to have “an offline builder” and to be able to “save our builds on our harddrives”. these functions could oneday create the EASY ability to generate inworld content from various types of 3d files. Meaning that one day you literally could upload content you made for another game, or download a prototype build that you made during a meeting in SL, and send it directly to the guys in production.
Other things that could be developed.. text-only clients, or limited graphics versions (imagine running the SL client on a web connected palm pilot or cell phone? imagine being able to use any computer with a Pentium or better processor to access SL). Could there be “Combat Clients” made for SL? sure there could. But it’s also quite possible that the programmers could develop special clients designed just for whatever thing YOU enjoy most. The Builder’s client.. the Scripter’s Client.
Hardware stores are full of things that can be used as weapons.. but mostly they are used to create new things. LL just unlocked the toolshed. There will always be people who will use tools for evil. Now though, it won’t only be the outlaws who can build.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:07 PM
Any plans for a Linden-Forge to host it on SVN or anything like that?
Cheers.
January 8th, 2007 at 10:43 PM
Welcome Rob, I hope to see you do great things in the coming months. If there’s a need for volunteer testers you can count me in.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:01 PM
@Brent
So basically LL is moving future development over to the open-source community similar in what Netscape did with Mozilla and eventually Firefox? If yes… okay I understand. So the residents will still play the game using the client we download from secondlife.com. However the open source community comprised of developers, gaming programmers, hobbyists, and Linden Lab will work concurrent, nonlinearly, and in tandem to come up with some spiffy improvements to the game client, and the best stuff will make it in? If yes to all this… then awesome! Bring it on.
January 8th, 2007 at 11:29 PM
Welcome aboard. I’m not quite sure “fun” is quite the right word, because you’ll be the one that gets all the blame with each and every hack and exploit that gets tried out by ‘customised viewers’. You do realise, of course, that you’ll only be able to regulate the submitted ‘improvements’, and it’s rather difficult to patch the numerous abuses that are bound to appear as people modify the client when you don’t know what they’re doing to get through? Copybot - the other OS disaster - will pale into insignificance with what no doubt some of our hacker friends will generate.
Good luck. You’ll need it.
Broccoli
January 8th, 2007 at 11:54 PM
I would like to ask about the physics of the sky.
In some programs, such as Starry Night Pro, and websites such as astro.com as an example, the fixed stars and planets have an ephemeris recorded digitally which I think would be an added benefit to the day and night sky. More specifically in Starry Night, an astronomy program, the real-time sky depending on your location is accurate, so eclipses and constellations are in their correct place and occur at the correct time in relation to the world.
I was wondering if it would be possible since Secondlife runs on a 24 hour clock if the at least the fixed starsa could be added to the night sky, and the ecliptic path of the Sun and Moon could also be included. If one was going to get daring with the remaining planets, someone could actually code in the ephermis of the planets so that there was an astronomical correlation to the night sky and secondlife. I think astronomers, astrologers, and stargazers all alike would want to look up at the night sky more often if that real factor was added.
-Merre
January 9th, 2007 at 12:03 AM
Just a few concerns…
Given that theres NO SUCH THING as a decompiler or a packet sniffer, we know for a FACT that ALL the .exe files and data files already in the client are 100% tamperproof by default. This is why there has NEVER in history been any sort of an attack on SL.
But if the source is OPEN, whats to stop someone from modifying the client and using to to say… HACK INTO THE PENTAGON? Or cause the clocks on all our computers to reset to midnight when it ISN’T in fact midnight? Do YOU know what time it is without looking at your computer? I sure don’t!
On the other hand, remember when they first opened the source for Mozilla? What happened? Pheonix… Thats what happened. Sooner or later due to licencing issues that led to FireFox, and now we have SwiftFox and MadFox and again due to licencing issues, IceWeasel. ICEWEASEL! And you know what? I have an albino ferret that looks a lot like an Ice Weasel, and he’s VERY fast at navigating through series of tubes… So maybe this won’t be so bad after all.
One final note, I’m going to tell an unrelated story that I feel will illustrate all my concerns: My uncle Chet grew potatos in Wyoming. He used to have a big gate that he always kept closed to keep the vermin out. But one day he decided to open the gate, figuring that if any rabbits came in, so would gorillas that thrive on rabbit meat, allowing him to stop actively protecting his field and focus on his cows. When he opened the gate, sure enough a bunch of rabbits got in and destroyed the potatos, but the gorillas never came… Vaguely related stories really make you think, don’t they? Makes you think: “What if it turns out there are more potato rabbits than rabbit gorillas?”
Despite my irrational fears steming from my ignorance and my inability to give even a profunctory glance over the numerous articles that have been posted by the Lindens attesting the relative safety of opening the source, I still would like to say Welcome Aboard! Let me know if you need anything broken.
January 9th, 2007 at 12:29 AM
Hi there, Rob! Great to see Second Life going open source! I managed to compile a i686 version last night and will tackle a x86_64 Linux build next. I’m looking forward working with the open source crowd, fixing bugs and bmaybe even adding one or two features
January 9th, 2007 at 12:34 AM
Personally, I’d like to see someone add in a feature that lets you remap your input keys, like for movement and such. Some of us use non-standard layouts on our keyboards, like me. My home row is “aoeuidhtns-” not asdfghjkl’; or however it is on a qwerty keyboard. (I don’t even remember for sure. Its been that long since I used qwerty that I can’t type on that layout without looking at the keyboard and I don’t have one to look at anymore.)
–
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don’t.
January 9th, 2007 at 12:45 AM
Hi Rob,
I’m guessing your email address is Rob@lindenlab.com
?
Or how do you recommend we contact you regarding possible scams and flams that opensourced SL may bring? I as well as other good sl folk may have thought of ways to scam with opensourced SL that weren’t mentioned in the faq
January 9th, 2007 at 12:57 AM
Do we have an in-world group for people interested in working on the SL project to communicate and find one another? I started a group called “Hack SL” for this purpose. I have faith that the broad base of the SL community is intelligent and mature enough to not get the wrong idea from such a hastily selected name. I’m open to suggestions or alternatives
-
There’s only 10 kinds of people in the world;
those that understand binary and those that get laid.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:04 AM
Welcome Rob. I would just like to say that I am sorry for the fire you are going to come under in your current position.
After reading that FAQ about security issues etc., I did come across one little point. The proposed solution seems to be along the lines of “Let’s encourage them to be more creative, so they don’t just copy someones work instead of building their own.”
Thing is, is this really going to deter those people who, say, do it for the sole purpose of pissing someone off? Say they have some sort of ridiculous vendetta, and the person they hate is a top class builder. Easy way to get at them: copy their work and either sell it off or make freebies out of it. This really is excruciatingly annoying, and is something no amount of ‘persuasion’ will fix.
So yes, we do really need to stop viewing everyone as some innocent human that wants to play by the rules. Come on, think about what would happen if you suddenly (and not altogether unexpectedly) found a group of people dedicated to hacking SL spring up. Their little ‘community’ would provide all the encouragement they need.
I remember back when CopyBot had not surfaced. People had nothing to fear when it came to building excellent projects, and often selling them. As soon as the CopyBot reared it’s head however, things slowed down. People were unwilling to show off their creations, which stunted a growth in content development. Paranoia set in. This is not a good thing, and imagine how much worse it will get when your average Joe Vendetta gets his hands on just the tool he needs to carry on his little game.
I agree with Broccoli Curry. CopyBot will pale into insignificance, and this is not a good thing.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:36 AM
/me chants, “copy-bot! copy-bot! copy-bot!”
for about a half hour. It’s back. Fix pls, kthxbi? ^_^
January 9th, 2007 at 1:45 AM
Oh, crap. Does this mean Micro$soft is going to release a viewer of thier own? Or build it into some future OS that we must all use or our cars won’t start?
I’ve been using Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird for several years with nothing but continued improvements and as near as I can tell little or no security problems. More importantly, when they do realease an up-date, everything continues to work.
January 9th, 2007 at 1:47 AM
Yes, my posts are definitely getting scrubbed. I don’t know why. I barely used any bad langiage in it at all
Teleports are working and the blog breaks. Ain’t that the rub?
January 9th, 2007 at 2:37 AM
*thinks about the possibilities of a D3D enabled viewer for ATi card owners then faints happily*
January 9th, 2007 at 2:45 AM
Welcome aboard Rob,
I’m very excited about this developement also its a hugh leap forward for Linden Labs and the community as a whole. The open source will give the sl community a thousand eyes into the viewer and get most of the bugs out fairly quickly.
The open source model has been very successful on many projects. I hope that same success follows here.
I wish you the best of luck!!!
January 9th, 2007 at 3:00 AM
I’m curious though, just how far can we modify the client viewer? Can we have it support two graphic’s API’s? I ask now because I don’t wanna get my hopes up for a D3D enabled viewer only to have them dashed against the rocks.
January 9th, 2007 at 3:18 AM
Welcome Rob.
Your enthusiasm is wonderful. I like that a lot.
I don’t know a lot computers, programming and alike… but I do have a friend who does. She is an ICT professional working as seniour administrator for a large Dutch company (our deal is, she does al that is needed for my computers and I do her taxes).
We had a long talk about Open Source. I already new a bit about Open Source (because I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Gnome and some Open Source programs). She explained to that there is no “anyone makes his/her own client”. People could do that, but it will stay outside the distribution of the “real SL client”.
She also explained that there we be not things just be added like that, but that all will viewed, discused and reviewed again until it is clear the piece that will be added is usefull and secure.
It is good they put an experienced person on this place (being you! :P).
After my talk with friend the few concerns I had are gone.
And remember…
http://www.xs4all.nl/~morwen65/Images/Diversen/t-shirt.jpg
(My friend gave me that t-shirt some time ago when already chatted about Open Source earlier).
Good luck with the job,
Morwen.
January 9th, 2007 at 3:19 AM
To all the people who think Linden Labs are crazy to open their sources, or are just uncertain if this will be good or not, i’d like to invite them to consider a simple real-life example. A trite comparation, sure, be let’s see how have been faring this far two competitors opposite in conception and philosophy: Firefox and Internet Explorer. Or if you want, Thunderbird and Outlook. Since Netscape released their code to the public, the Firefix browser has seen constant improvement and timely error corrections (with that i mean, i see bugs and security flaws announced in the bugfix list of patches, not in security alarms bulletins). As for Internet Explorer or Outlook flaws, security holes, with their being the apotheosis of closed software and arbitrary deveopment… do i really have to talk about something we all know too well? And i don’t have all the day to list them, either… not to speak about the succesfully exploited bugs.
With that i mean to say that the end results of such decisions and different policies are under everyone’s eyes, and even too clear. To skeptics, apocalypse prophets and others: are you still so sure opening the client code is such a bad decision..?
Oh, almost forgot… welcome Rob.
January 9th, 2007 at 3:30 AM
I know a little about programming (and that’s it, a little).
I don’t understand 1 thing, is it possible to communicate with SL and build things for example or can I only VIEW data (something a ‘viewer’ implies). Or is some 2 way interactio possible?
For example could I program a second build button that when pressed rezzes a block in front of my avater?
January 9th, 2007 at 4:07 AM
Welcome Rob,
The “viewer” in other words is basicly what we see on our screen, correct?
Not sure if this would be possible but something I would like to see is maybe DX8 or DX9 and the game using all those graphical features. All new shaders, multi-texturing on one prim face, etc.
New prim shapes added or more options in changing prim shapes.
Not sure if any of this is possible with the code, but I surely would LOVE to see some graphical improvements.
Cant wait to see what everyone comes up with.
January 9th, 2007 at 4:38 AM
Welcome, Rob - as a very old free software hat (been at it for 2 decades now :-)), I envy your job
Have fun! And keep doing the right thing!
January 9th, 2007 at 4:42 AM
Hi,
I would love to play around with this great idea. But im not a compiler. I have downloaded the source. Please don’t call me thick, But does the viewer open up from your hard drive, i.e. off line ?
Everytime I try to run a part of it, it says, secondlife.exe missing. If anyone with experience of running this would like to give me a leg up on starting it off Please do.
Thanks all and TY Linden for a great opportunity to play with this new development.
Sam
If you want to drop me an email I think you can from here - Good Luck
January 9th, 2007 at 7:12 AM
I understand the mandatory updates were mostly meant so the communication protocol could be updated on both sides at once.
I gather the recent caps feature will take care of the different versions of communication interfaces, but what if old interfaces have security/stability/hackability issues. Will the old, vulnerable, interfaces remain intact or will this require mandatory updates of the client protocol code of all viewers?
January 9th, 2007 at 8:20 AM
“We certainly don’t want you to have to install proprietary software on your computer to enjoy Second Life, and now, you won’t have to.”
Tears of joy, tears of joy! I can’t begin to describe how happy I am about LL’s position here. And I hope I will be able to contribute the odd line of code myself, the goal of course being to make the Linux viewer the fastest, most stable and most feature rich of the available viewers! *grin*
Thank you LL. You guys rock.
January 9th, 2007 at 8:31 AM
This is gonna be so cool! Welcome Rob Linden. Can’t wait to see what the Mac guys like myself come up with on our end. I sure hope it starts with some of those little disabled preferences in the Mac client.
January 9th, 2007 at 8:34 AM
Okay, all you evil hackers who have been violating the ToS, hold it right there!!
“…you may not modify, adapt, reverse engineer (except as otherwise permitted by applicable law), decompile or attempt to discover the source code of the Linden Software…”
There it is in black and white! You’re all in violation. A plague of lawyers will descend upon you all! Bwaahahahahaha!!!
Okay, but seriously. Is the TOS going to be updated to explicit allow us to “attempt to discover the source code” by downloading it?
January 9th, 2007 at 8:43 AM
Welcome, Rob! Also, “Welcome, Open Source!”
Some strange entity who seems to be isomorphically mappable to me via a network of overlapping avataric identities in a growing matrix of virtual worlds advises me that I will soon be contributing code to this project. It seems that in another virtual world, that essentially Xaotic entity is a technical lead and senior software architect. He says that although he’s been doing a lot of C# and Ruby, lately, he will be happy to brush up his old C++ skills to make the Second Life experience better! Apparently, he will be psychically transmitting some of his knowledge and experience to me and he promises me that I will magically be able to deal with pointers and will be immune to what he calls “off-by-one errors.”
I don’t imagine that many other Xaos Dragons emit C++ code, but the creative possibilities inherent in the virtual life process has surprised me before. Of course, since I seem to be Second Life’s *first* Xaos Dragon, I guess I get to set the pattern. Watch for Xaos Dragon code in a virtual method near you!
January 9th, 2007 at 9:04 AM
Merre-
Regarding the stars in SL… Currently the stars are generated at random on each login, the sun position is determined by the servers (unless the local client has overridden it) and the moon is always opposite the sun. As you can see, there is plenty of room for enhancement there, and it is a good example of a relatively self-contained piece of the SL client that someone could decide to modify. That said, if you made the stars complicated enough that they adversely impacted the rendering performance of the client, you would probably want to make the fancier starfield an option in the preferences so that some people could opt out.
- Andrew
January 9th, 2007 at 10:04 AM
Welcome, Rob. Exciting times are ahead (in the bad or good kind).
Now I wish I was jobless to have time to hack at the client ;_;
January 9th, 2007 at 10:11 AM
Rob, welcome aboard, and I look forward to working with you in the future!
January 9th, 2007 at 10:38 AM
Welcome Rob. Will there be any psychiatric help for those of us trying to get this baby compile on MSVC 2005?
January 9th, 2007 at 10:49 AM
>Please don’t tell me that [that] means you’ll take the rest of the Lindens hostage and demand that they add support for non-euclidean shapes in the Viewer.
I see no reason why we cannot have non-euclidean shapes in the viewer. We already have a tesseract and teleporting. For those of us who, like Dr. McCoy, don’t trust the transporter, I trust that wormholes will shortly be opened up, as well as subspace /and/ transwarp vessels for those tired of the albeit-interesting-in-its-limited-three-dimensionality current subset of the Universe. Up, Up, and Away!
January 9th, 2007 at 11:37 AM
Everyone praising the “great security” of Firefox all forget one important detail: Firefox is the MINORITY browser.
What does this mean?
If I want to make a really, really, REALLY big splash, I don’t hit the MINORITY browser! I hit the MAJORITY browser!
I mean, how many terrorists who lay their hands on a nuke will use it to nuke the great big city of Ceres, New York? A community SO BIG it has NO DOWNTOWN!!!!!
NONE, that’s who.
Now how many terrorists who lay their hands on a nuke would use it to hit New York, New York?
Well, Firefox users are like the residents of Ceres, New York, saying “Terrorists? What terrorists? We don’t have any terrorists *HERE*.”
In contrast, IE users are like the people of New York City. There’s far more people using IE or in New York City, so these people are worried sick about terrorists.
You guys want to make a comparison about the security of various browsers? You’re not comparing their relative securities, but their relative popularity.
Who’s going to nuke Ceres, New York, a community so big it doesn’t even have a downtown?
Who’s going to nuke Firefox Users, a community that is very much the MINORITY community on the Internet?
Contrast that to who will nuke New York, New York?
Who will nuke IE users, the VAST MAJORITY of internet users?
Think about it. It’s not a difficult concept to grasp, people.
Let’s assume for a moment that, through some Miracle, all the people in New York, New York, abandon New York, New York and rush to the city of Ceres, New York? Wouldn’t the terrorists stop harassing New York, New York and start harassing Ceres, New York?
In the same way, let’s assume “Super Secure Firefox” manages to overwhelm Internet Explorer in popularity, such that Firefox is now the super duper, major domo, do-all and end-all browser that EVERYONE uses? Certainly, wouldn’t all the browser attackers switch from IE to Firefox?
What does this do to the concept that open source software is “safe?” Especially given that, as “open source,” it’s code is available to the public?
Would we really want to have an open source product be the one used by most users in this way?
Of course, the Open Source Community buries it’s head in the sand. If Firefox were to become the most popular browser, they contend, the terrorists would continue to attack IE. That’s like saying if Ceres developed a population of 14,000,000 people overnight, and New York City went to a population of 100 people in the same time frame, that the terrorists would still attack New York City.
Remember: The terrorists blew up two buildings and killed 100 times the population of the entire community of Ceres, New York.
If you’re a terrorist, either on the internet or in real life, you will want to make as big a splash as possible.
Destroying the village of Ceres, New York, or hitting Firefox Users, doesn’t make that big a splash.
Destroying the city of New York, New York, or hitting IE users, does.
Now, if the populations / user bases were reversed, if Firefox had all the internet users attention instead of Internet Explorer, then hitting Firefox would make the big splash, not hitting Internet Explorer. So, all the attackers of Internet Explorer would turn their focus to Firefox, and Firefox would become the buggy, insecure internet browsing platform.
And I challenge anyone here who supports open source software on the grounds of it’s relative security to prove me wrong!
No one has yet. Because they know, in their hearts of hearts, that there is NO SUCH THING as a POPULAR, SECURE BROWSER. Open source or not, whatever’s the MOST POPULAR will be the MOST INSECURE.
January 9th, 2007 at 2:40 PM
[...] pm | In SecondLife, Technology & Gadgets | Ayer el cliente a opensource. Pero hoy se presenta Rob Linden y aparecen los links al nuevo wiki, nuevo bugtracker pero también aparecen, aparte de los [...]
January 9th, 2007 at 5:12 PM
A little perspective…
I have the source building and am using it world right now. What am I going to fix first? Making the damn IM and edit windows remember their positions again! (really, this should have been fixed for goot by now)
There will be some positives t this and some negatives. It will not be the end of SL but it will also not mean that there will be some super optimized externally maintained clients running around either.
I find the answers to the “Security” question to be a lot of fluff. There WILL be events that cause people problems possibly some big ones and then they will fix them. “In the end” security will be better, but between now and then… it’ll be ups and downs.
There will NOT actually be “hundreds” of eyes looking at the code. “Dozens” maybe seriously looking at it and taking the time to do proper work on it. Even if there are hundreds than hack and slash at it. While some bugs are small in scope and obvious to a new pair of eyes, frequently the fixing of a bug has far ranging consequences and people outside of LL that have no idea about the code design (Till then spend hundreds of hours studying it) are particularly poor at being able to produce rock solid fixes in a lot of cases.
The fact that we now know that the source will only be updated after the release of the main client, and no word yet on how the servers will continue to honor older externally produced clients means that the jury is still out on the praciticality of maintiaining a client extrernal to SL over time.
It also remains to be seen how new features are accepted by LL. Bug fixes are the most likely positive thing that will happen now (and even those will be limited). Actual feature introductions will require a LOT more consideration from inside LL and be MUCH more difficult to get into the main client.
Probably the first feature I’d like to see is a set of hooks in the client to allow people to work with the official SL client by adding various plugins to it without having to rework the client source every two weeks to keep your chat color highlighting feature (or whatever) current. libSL allowed some nice things to be done (though noone ever really did much with it) But it was based on having to intercept the packet stream which is ever changing (and changing now in a big way). Having a method that is a published API for altering chat locally (syntax highlighing etc) would be a really nice addition to the client, rather than trying to build in a fixed system as a feature addition.
Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled squeeing and screeing
January 10th, 2007 at 1:10 AM
Welcom, Robert! You may be the one Linden I don’t want to shoot at because of grid problems!
I am personally overjoyed that the source was released. Finally, I can develop applications in a decent language, C++, instead of the Windows-centric C#. Another plus is that I can finally port SL to FreeBSD, which I much prefer over most Linux distrobutions I’ve installed.
January 10th, 2007 at 6:13 AM
“Lynn Kukulcan Says:
Now, if the populations / user bases were reversed, if Firefox had all the internet users attention instead of Internet Explorer, then hitting Firefox would make the big splash, not hitting Internet Explorer. So, all the attackers of Internet Explorer would turn their focus to Firefox, and Firefox would become the buggy, insecure internet browsing platform.
And I challenge anyone here who supports open source software on the grounds of it’s relative security to prove me wrong!
No one has yet. Because they know, in their hearts of hearts, that there is NO SUCH THING as a POPULAR, SECURE BROWSER. Open source or not, whatever’s the MOST POPULAR will be the MOST INSECURE.”
in coding microsoft have. Taking from your example, if i were a terrorist that wanted for some reason to hit a downtown, i’d go where there is one, in NY that incidentally is really big too. bonus! I’ll hit more downtown people this way.
Your reasoning fails in one simple point Lynn: where you say “all the attackers of Internet Explorer would turn their focus to Firefox, and Firefox would become the buggy, insecure internet browsing platform”
It’s not how many bad people target a browser that makes it buggy or insecure, it’s the quality of its programming. It’s like saying that if enough people shouts bad words at you, you’ll catch the flu and parkinson, that is absurd. IE is so targeted because while the most popular browser, it’s the worst programmed one, too. It’s deeply linked with the OS, so any holes have more chance to do more damage, and it’s *objectively* full of bugs and holes that MS takes months to fix. And it doesn’t help that in the last few years microsoft had relaxed too much, cause it was sure to finally have the browser monopoly.
It’ s out now IE7, that has astounding features like tabbed browsing, RSS feed, and many more! wow! Firefos has had them since two years now! This gives an idea of the readiness and up-to-date-ness
So if i’m an hacker that wants to exploit some security hole, i’ll go for IE holes, that has so many to choose from, and will likely stay open for months. And incidentally, has a large (not earned) user base. bonus!
While it’s true that IE has many many more users than FF or Opera or whatever, it’s also true that’s actually more insecure because has actually many more bugs than other browsers. That’s why it’s so much the “browser of choice” for crackers and such. If FF was the majority browser, maybe it would be targeted more, that’s true, but it’s still true that crackers would have less holes to work with, that would quickly close too because of quicker updates from its open source dev team. The perfectly secure software doesn’t exist, but there are some that are more imperfect than others.
The open source community that fuels FF development is far more extended and fast than any dev-team could ever get, and thus they spot and fix bugs and security holes far more quickly than MS. Plus they’re free to correct/implement anything they want based on what people really want and what’s the trend of web standards, unlike IE that’s guided by blind corporate politics and proprietary choices. Is random chance that along with buggy, IE it’s one of the less HTML and CSS standard compliant browser? Or that it has many specific tags that only work with it, cause they’re out of standard and thus unsupported by anything else? (Or, on a side note, that Office only lately and partially supported PDF save and the open OpenDocument format?)
If something has to be dynamic, fast, flexible, eterogeneous, must be free to move, not restrained by money logic. And money logic is what drives large companies, not volunteer communities. That’s why so many applaud and appreciate the choice made by LindenLabs. If they wanted to continue to succesfully develop SL into something greater, a mature metaverse, a more complex system, that was the choice to make.
January 10th, 2007 at 6:20 AM
Correction:
“…is far more extended and fast than any dev-team MICROSOFT could ever get…”
shame on me for not re-reading before submitting…
January 10th, 2007 at 8:34 AM
[...] del código del cliente de Second Life. Poco después del anuncio también se anunció que habían contratado a alguien para hacer de enlace con la comunidad [...]
January 10th, 2007 at 8:27 PM
Welcome aboard, Rob.
Would I be wrong in telling folks that only textures given to someone *as a texture* file that can be viewed from within inventory using the texture viewer are vulnerable to being copied ?
If so, *they already are*, and quite easily, using and *any* graphics editing program from Gimp to Adobe CS2 using “Edit”/”Paste as New Selection”.
Scripts, animations, textures embedded in objects and such are still quite secure as they are all *server* side.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:25 AM
Galbraith I hate to burst your bubble but there are already exploits for FireFox and many of them are critical enough to disable your network. An open source browser is not infallible. Nothing is.
January 11th, 2007 at 10:35 AM
Johnnie Mohr wrote:
Rob,
My University is interested in participating in Second Life as either a portal or as a classroom environment for distance learning or even local learning.
I’ve been thinking about that for my school, too and am very excited about the possibilities. Now that the client is OS, I won’t recommend it to my bosses(stability was my only concern before, and now I’m much more concerned). I still hold out hope for the future when the server code goes OS. We could then host our own server and have much greater control over security. I think this is where the VR world SL started will lead; private safe havens floating in a ‘wild and wooly’ universe. When it happens, I want to get credit for predicting it.