(18:12) Because the Phoenix team are unable to remove the on-line truth indicator from previous releases, does LL want to have older versions of the Phoenix Viewer blocked from accessing SL?
It’s not something that has been discussed. Blocking people’s Viewer is not a step LL wish to take unless there is some real overriding need to do so. There are a number of new things that are coming along that will require Viewer updates of one kind or another which will be rolled-out to the TPV development community, so people will have lots of good reasons to upgrade their Viewers over the coming months. As such the issue of people using older versions of Viewer (including Phoenix) will take care of itself.
(20:40) Policy changes 2.i “You must not display any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of any other Second Life user” and 2.j “You must not include any information regarding the computer system, software, or network connection of the user in any messages sent to other viewers, except when explicitly elected by the user of your viewer.” (audio breakup). This is really about the Viewer tagging system. (commentary on research into user bullying based on Viewer preference). The community feels there is more behind this policy that this one thing (bullying), so are these Policy changes about slowing the migration of users from the LL Viewer to TPVs?
That’s really not LL’s primary motivation; the biggest single motivation was very emphatically the discovery about issues of “negative social interactions” users experience when in-world, some of which equated to griefing, some of which did equate to people’s choice of Viewer. The fact that people have to download anything can be a significant issue, and people were being told they had downloaded the wrong Viewer and that they should really be downloading some other Viewer from someone else, people would then get anxious about it and go away. This concerned LL because it is not good for anyone if new users are not comfortable being in SL.
In addition to that there are other considerations. LL regard the policy changes in terms of addressing security issues and not just about Viewer tags. The policy items were not written to simply say “Thou shalt not have Viewer tags”, but to address concerns about the transmission / display of information relating to a person’s account, computer system, operating system, network connection, etc., because these things are not things any Internet application should be revealing about any users of that application. So LL have taken a stand that what goes on outside SL is nobody’s business, and essentially, what Viewer a person runs is nobody else’s business.
There have been various other ways in which SL technology has been used to detect information about people’s RL identities, and LL are trying to work out ways to make that progressively more-and-more difficult. Viewer tags are seen as part of this process.
(20:45) Where Viewer tags disabled because LL is embarrassed by the number of TPV users in comparison to those using the LL Viewer?
No, that didn’t have anything to do with it (a point was made prior to the question that had LL wanted to simply obfuscate Viewer usage, they could have altered things server-side so that all Viewers would report at LL’s Viewer). It’s not a secret as to how many are using the LL Viewer, and the number isn’t as big as LL would like it to be. What Viewer someone opts to use is not an issue for LL; what is an issue is ensuring that the Viewer works and is within the bounds of the TPVP with regards to privacy protection, IP protection – that they are not “Copybot” Viewers, or Viewers designed to crash other Viewers or griefing tools, and that they are adopting the new features of SL in a reasonably regular way in collaboration with LL, so that LL can introduce new features without TPVs “being a drag” on LL’s business.
The motivation is not so much to make sure that people are using the LL Viewer, but that people have access, through whatever Viewer they are using, that makes SL accessible (such as mesh content).
(31:56): Does LL regret going open source?
“I think a lot of people in Linden Lab do, yeah. Absolutely.” A case could be made that it was not a good thing to do from a control of your own business viewpoint, but LL are not going to try to change what has happened.
(32:34) There is concern that LL wants to eliminate TPVs or open-source or gradually phase-out TPVS and the next policy change is seen as buckling down the straps and making it harder for TPVs.
“I hope that’s not true. I won’t have a job!” LL understand the a lot of people like the additional features and functionality make through the interfaces provided by TPVs. At this point LL Viewer users are a significant minority (number 3 in popularity behind Phoenix and Firestorm, with Singularity in 4th).
(32:42) Why does Oz think the LL Viewer is only third place?
“I think the period in which we stopped publishing new Viewers – at all – we went away and worked on Viewer 2 for a long time without releasing any updates to our own Viewer for a long time … gave third-party Viewers an opportunity to grab a bunch of market share. And I think there are then a bunch of social factors that then made that difficult to reverse. One could argue – and I’m not going to take a position on it one way or the other … that some parts of the initial releases of Viewer 2 were not done in a way that accounted well for the way people expected to use things in Second Life. Q Linden used to say that the best thing about the Viewer 2 release was that it overnight changed 1.23 from the worst Viewer Linden Lab had ever released to the best. There’s a significant resistance to change in the Second Life community. ”
When LL release with the sidebar removed and chat bar free-floating, it was on the basis of users saying repeatedly that the sidebar was the worst thing about Viewer 2, with the chat bar being docked against the bottom of the screen being the second – yet with the release of a Viewer with the sidebar removed and chat bar re-integrated into the communications floater, LL had complaints about these being bad changes.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Thanks for this. It does alter the way I feel about the TPV policy change, at least tentatively. Thanks to Oz for doing it.
Three things struck me: one is that the LSL change has been put on hold. I had no idea of this, and I would be willing to bet that most people concerned about it don’t know, either.
The second was Oz’ statement that viewer usage number are no secret. As far as I know, they *are* secret, and this ranking of viewers by use is the first I’ve seen.
The last thing is that he said that users have resistance to change, and gave as an example that when the sidebar, etc. were added to the viewer people complained, and then when they were removed people complained. I don’t think this can be counted as “resistance to change”. It’s just people expressing a preference.
Otherwise, it was reassuring and interesting. Glimpses into LL are rare, and this one was fairly extensive.
LikeLike
There has been a lot of misinformation circulating vis-a-vis the TPVP changes and knock-on effects that is taking time to correct (the most noticeable being the initial knee-jerk reaction that the policy changes halt *all* TPV development).
That llGetAgentStatus is being looked at again has been known in some circles for a while – although admittedly, it is probably most widely known by those Watching the JIRA. Jessica made mention of it is last week’s Phoenix Hour broadcast, but again, the news might have been lost amidst all the issues around that meeting – sim crashes, sim restarts, stream breakages and poor audio.
In referring to the Viewer use numbers, I think Oz was saying they were no secret in the context of the TPV developers – remembering that it is Jessica asking the questions. Usage numbers are regularly discussed in the TPV developer meetings, and are published in the meeting transcripts and as such are known, but again not in the platform-wide context you and I would regard as “well-known”.
Where change is concerned, I think it fair to say a little of blame resides on both sides in many cases: there are times when LL doesn’t really disclose what is coming down the road, and so when things do happen, there is a fair amount of sturm und drang. Equally, and I have to agree with Oz, even when changes are announced and trumpeted well ahead of time, people state their opinion in such a forceful manner it does come over as outright resistance to whatever is going on. As such, it is fair to say the LL need to manage their side of things a little better – although they have made improvements in the last 12 months, and the user community needs to sometimes needs to consider changes being proposed / rolled-out with (dare I say) fewer histrionics.
I think Oz did a sterling job.
LikeLike
We should remember that LL does not make any more money if someone uses their viewer instead of a third party viewer. While they might take some pride in having the “most preferred” viewer, at the end of the day what matters to them is that people are logging into SL and spending some money…no matter which viewer they are doing it with.
LikeLike
Precisely – and hence again why increasing the market-share wasn’t a motivator for the TPVP changes.
LikeLike
Maybe. I’m not so sure. The viewer to some extent controls how the user is directed. The first thing you see when you login with Firefox is usually a link to their blog or wiki. The viewer can provide immediate links to the Marketplace or destinations inworld that may be revenue generating. In many ways the viewer is to SL what the browser is to the web. Why do Google and Microsoft and the Mozilla foundation care which browser you use ? Because there is a lot of money to be made by corralling a user base in your browser (viewer).
LikeLike
I don’t see the web parallel as you describe it.
Firestorm includes the ability to view the Destination Guide & Events pages (Phoenix, iirc actually displays the destination guide images towards the bottom right of the splash screen (it’s been a while since I’ve run that Viewer, admittedly)). Once in-world, users will be using LL’s search engine and Destination Guide regardless of the Viewer flavour. Similarly, Viewer-based purchases of L$ go via the Lindex regardless of flavour.
While other Viewers don’t have the market-share of FS/PH, all V3.2-based Viewers pretty much use the LL splash / login screen as does Singularity (4th most popular Viewer according to LL) and so on.
Currently, there isn’t a viable alternative to SLM that offers the range of products – if one exists at all. Apez was sold to Egoisme, but doesn’t appear to be in operation under either brand; MVX vanished; SLapt.me has gone; we all know what happened to On-Rez (there was another marketplace, but I cannot for the life of me remember the name, and nothing is coming up on Google), so there isn’t really a Marketplace out there to threaten LL’s dominance (and it would take time for one to establish itself sufficiently to become a threat).
In-world revenue generation will generate revenue for LL regardless of Viewer – it’ll come through tier and through cash-out commission.
As such, it’s hard to see the Viewer being a major determiner of revenue for LL beyond the obvious – getting people in-world in the first place.
LikeLike
I read this, and I’m still boggled by why they’re so hurt about the online status indicator.
It’s such a big nothing, that nobody even thinks about, but they felt the need to make a vague, yet potentially broad-sweeping rule about it >_> It feels like they’re testing the water like they did with the Received Items beta – Push something out that they know we won’t like, let us RAEG all over it, and then come in for the knockout punch while we’re all tuckered out.
LikeLike
The rule with regards on-line status was already there insofar as the Viewer was concerned long before the “on-line truth” status first appeared in a TPV (Emerald): people have the ability – and therefore the expectation – of being able to set some degree of privacy around their in-world time by broadly defining who can or cannot see when they are on-line.
Since its introduction in Emerald the Viewer-end “on-line truth” capability has rendered this ability and expectation null and void without any real justification for doing so. In asking for its removal, all LL are doing is re-balancing the scales of expectation based on the capabilities they provide for users within the Viewer code.
As to the Received Items beta, it is also clear that LL is actually listening to constructive feedback and seeking to improve the capability based on the feedback they have had to date. I can say this with confidence as I’m one of the people who supplied initial feedback and, as a result have been asked to review a further proposal on the capability to help determine if LL are understanding and addressing concerns correctly.
LikeLike
“LL could conceivably achieve it simply by removing the majority of their Viewer development back behind the curtain, leaving TPVs forever in a catch-up situation.”
That is exactly what they have been doing. Huge gaps between code drops. The most recent one followed weeks of silence and while large, contained only bug fixes and tinkering.
LikeLike
I thought Oz did a very good job of laying out what LL is trying to do and what it is not trying to do. Despite comments to the contrary, I think there is a huge benefit that LL sees in having the most used viewer in world. Simply put, their job gets a lot easier if they don’t have to worry about bringing the third party viewer’s along. I wonder if perhaps the situation has, by no fault on anyone’s side, reached a point where the current method of allowing TPV’s is broken. Both sides seem so bogged down in meeting the other side’s needs, that neither is really developing much.
LikeLike
I’m not sure that the TPV dev / Lab relationship is/was “broken” – as Oz states, the relationship has, if anything improved from a state of “cold war” confrontation to that of mutual co-operation. Rather, I think this is purely as Oz states: a way to put a stake in the ground as to how Viewer development should be handled between the to going forward in order to help LL manage its business.
Demarcation like this way can usually be a good thing as relationship grow closer and more collaborative, simply because the dividing lines that were apparent during “cooler” times in a working relationship can get increasingly blurred and lead to direct misunderstandings – simply because things can be taken for granted or assumed on either side up to the point where someone says, “No.”, and real upset ensues.
The only real problems here are how LL announced the changes to the broader community (they didn’t), and for not adding a couple of very brief lines to the Policy that could themselves has helped prevent a lot of the subsequent misunderstandings around the intention of clause 2.k.
That said, I agree, Oz has done a really open job of sitting down and taking the time to address concerns and upset, and to provide insight into the Lab’s motives and thinking. Not just here, but in the forums and elsewhere.
LikeLike
Very well put, and I hope you are right. It does seem as if LL is at least offering some opportunities for communication with TPV developers. Putting together a simple set of “rules for the road” for developers may bea good thing that will ultimately make development smoother for all parties. That would be my hope, as I worry about developers on both sides getting slowed down by having to jump through each others hoops. The clause 2.k, once understood, is relatively minor in my opinion. The problems, I think, began when users where having to get the info through their TPV developers instead of LL.
LikeLike
Very well said, and I agree with 98.2% of everything you have stated.
LikeLike