3rd Party Viewers… wants the Lab to take the control back?

Before i start writing i should say i’m an Emerald Viewer user and i’m a user for many reasons, some of them are:

• Client built AO
• Radar
• Temporary texture uploads (possible the best feature)
• Clothing-layer protection
• Animations window (with individual control over them)
• Lots of precharged Windlight presets
• Easy access to some graphic settings: Windlight preset, Drawing distance, number of particles…
• Lot of options on UI (user interface) skins
• Auto response choices
• Avatar physics

Also some people with more technical knowledge than me say the viewer doesn’t consume so much memory as the “official” one.

All this features are not included in the “official” Linden Lab’s Second Life viewer and possibly some are also in some other 3rd party viewers. I can’t talk about them basically becuase i didn’t tried them, well, i tried Imprudence, and it works pretty good, but personally i prefer to use Emerald for all these features and also i don’t like much the type of letters in Imprudence, but that’s only an aesthetical preference.

Anyway, if you want to know the 3rd Party Viewers, please, check the page about them in the Second Life Wiki.

But some days ago Cyn Linden posted something in the Second Life blog about some changed in the policy of Linden Lab towards 3rd party viewers, let me paste some of the text (anyway, of course, is better you follow the link and read it fully):

There are currently many third parties who create and distribute viewers. Most of these viewers are useful because they are innovative and many enable a more customized Second Life experience for those who use them; however, it appears that some of those third party viewers also contain functionality that is being used to copy content without the right to do so, facilitate griefing, enable phishing, collect user data without clear disclosure of such practices, and distribute software that contains harmful elements.

We will create new guidelines and policies outlining the standards that third party viewers must meet in order to connect to our platform, as well as tools and programs to help the developers of third party viewers and the wider community learn about and comply with those guideline. One of the tools will be a “viewer registry” that will allow developers to list their viewer in a third party viewer directory maintained by Linden Lab, identify the features of their viewer, and represent to the Second Life community that it complies with Linden Lab’s guidelines for third party viewers.

At the same time Cyn invited the community to join a discussion about the new policy. And then the tension began…

Actually the discussion has some interesting and constructive messages, but some of them are only rumours, half lies, or Prokofy Neva’s comments… I think Linden Lab wanted to do some work against some viewers that are working out or against the TOS, or the ones who jump over the Owner and Creator permissions and restrictions. But what was a discussion about this became a discussion about what features are acceptable or not and even about Open source itself. Some comments were specially about Emerald Viewer, not sure if is becuase that’s one of the “leader” 3rd party viewers or for some personal reasons. There were some comments about IM encryption and about the “famous” Breasts Physics on female avatars (both features of Emerald). Finally Linden Lab updated their post with some comments to clarify (more or less) their position and the team of Emerald Viewer decided to publish an oficial answer.

About the question in the title, does Linden Lab want to take the control back over viewers? i think the answer is NO, but YES. I mean, i can agree some control is needed, specially regarding if a viewer can “ignore” or “to be ahead of” the permissions of copy, modify, transfer, but at the same time i agree that can’t limit the development of 3rd Party Viewers meanwhile they are respecting the TOS and the IP rights. Personally i agree basically with the team of Emerald Viewer in their answer.

Possibly some can agree with what i just said, possibly some not. Anyway, read and have your own opinion. Sometimes i think i should end all the posts with this sentence.