Linden Lands and Open source

First i must admit that I'm still pretty new in the open source community around linden labs. However I have been around open source environments for like my hole computer life starting at University. I have also been working in commercial companies, like Ericsson, since 1998. There are big culture differences between the two. In some parts this is now clashing hard to the surface. The open source developers starts to feel frustrated that the LL don't care about them. the LL getting frustrated that the open source community is so open and frank in there communication.

This culture clash comes really to the surface in a flame war between Bryan (Linden) and Alissa, about the move to cmake. Here Linden labs does what is common in a cooperate world. They share a little informations about what they are doing. How the progress is going and so forth. Alissa coming form a more open source world, is more direct in her words of why she don't see the need to wait with giving out all the needed info, e.g. the code. Bryans answer now show just how big the culture clash is at the moment. And even more so in the following message. Then Rob Linden come in and shares some information that probably is a severe and strange to the open source comunity as it is unavoidable in how LL works there company.

This is also probably the reason why i can't get windlight builds to work. Linden labs have made a clean out off stuff that they don't release. There internal source structure is different and there own. Releasing code, and releasing a viewer is a painful process. My releasing is to hard, i think:

$ scons -j4 DISTCC=no BTARGET=client OPENSOURCE=no BUILD=releasefordownload CHANNEL=Release MOZLIB=YES
$ diff -Naur -x '*tar.bz2' -x .sconsign.dblite -x packaged -x '*.o' -x '*.a' -x '*.pyc' -x '*.so' -x '*sln' -x '*-bin*' -x '*.swp' -x build -x '*vcproj' 18.5.3.linden 18.3.5  > balp-build-u2.diff
$ grep ^+++ balp-build-u2.diff |less
$ scp balp-build-u2.diff.gz 18.5.3/indra/balp-build-u2.tar.bz2 shaka.acc.umu.se:public_html/second_life/

Then make a blog entry about it and hope it helps someone. In all commercial projects i have worked at, I can't stay at that level. It's to much work. For source code it can not be harder that merging and checking in and applying a label. Any code clean up for release tells me I'm working the wrong way. My favorite way are checking in, label and send a mail to a college asking him, her to merge it. That way we get a code review, and make sure that someone else have understood the code. When i merge code, I also make the the release build, e.g. after making the code merge, just type "merge release" and maybe in a hard world add a label to that. There should be no more interaction form me them more build would have errors in them. Errors that could have been avoided.

Released: Balp Build BB-u2

A build for Second Life 18.5.3 with the addition of Nicholaz patches. It needs a install of SL 18.3.5 Linux version to run.

E.g:

balp@kitiara:~$ tar jxf SecondLife_i686_1_18_5_3.tar.bz2
balp@kitiara:~$ tar jxf balp-build-u2.tar.bz2

Then start Second life from that directory with:

balp@kitiara:~$ cd SecondLife_i686_1_18_5_3/
balp@kitiara:~/SecondLife_i686_1_18_5_3$ ./balp-secondlife

Patches at the same place for download.

 

Feed back on the build to me, anders (at) arnholm.se.

Nicholaz view on LL

The patcher Nicholaz have started to write a series of long articles to understand the Lindens Labs, a great series that started with his rant, talk about how LL sees the future, not what the residents have now. And now he followed up with how the bugtracker works. Reading these two as a developer you get this scary feeling of understanding why communication's broke down. It's just to separated, it's like the old protected world of developing inside software giants. This with the addition of adding a façade of being a new hip agile company, working with open source and other new cool future stuff. The organizations how ever is what I can see the same as the old dragons, maybe even stiffer in some area. The day to day developers mostly live in there own internal world, is they ever connected to the live net? Have they ever day to day interactions with normal residents? Or is that considered not working, except for a few customer contact people?

It explains how the Windlight browser code could be "release" with out working code. I think many people at LL now feel the open source and customers take energy away from "work". The only time for feedback an communication is a few hours of office hours, with a few selected people. Yes LL is making a new product and new area not yet fully developed, a new area. And it's great, however much of they do are stuff also appearing in other places, they are not the biggest online service, Blizzards are much much bigger. Many things we see in Second Life also appear in WoW. Many thing we see exists in Eutropia Univererse. How ever EU have a less working economy, imho. It's imho much uglier, especially the avatars that you can't customise anywhere near Second Life.

Windlight

How ever good windlight looks, it's somehow broken, the source code can't compile. There is a error about that in the JIRA. Some header files are missing from the library files at least. (glh/glh_linear.h), the include names and the layout in the nVidia headers i have found suggests that there are some modification done to these headers, they don't like to be in the glh/ subdirectory by default. I think the export of the source code have gone wrong at LL. One more think that points to how expensive it it to walk half-hearted into open source. When one starts to duplicate information, there will be more errors. One place contains a number of errors in the information, two places the double amount of errors, and usually not the same errors.

I hope that these error soon can be fixed with a new source code release from LL, at least in the subversion that contains the layout and maybe changes of the nvidia headers.