[Opensim-dev] An Open Letter to Open Source and OpenSim Communities

[Ryan McDougall]

On Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Sean Dague <sdague at gmail.com> wrote:
> Ryan McDougall wrote:
>> We will begin this new process in January and continuing until
>> February of 2009, with a feasibility study. That process will conclude
>> with a proposed road-map as a result, what will be able to take us
>> through 2009 and beyond. The process will begin internally with
>> RealXtend, in order to solidify a unifying core set of principles, but
>> very soon move outward to include a call for proposals and comments
>> from all of you. With a clear road-map and a successful consultation
>> process, we are confident that we will birth an cross platform Open
>> Source community that will be at the forefront of the 3D Virtual World
>> revolution.
>>
>> We invite you to give your feedback by visiting the RealXtend website,
>> trying out our software out, signing up for our mailing lists, or
>> joining us on IRC.
>
> On the client front, it is probably worth noting that there are 3 BSD
> clean room open source clients out there now.  It might behoove you to
> work with one or more of those teams instead of starting another new
> one:
> http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/12/the-state-of-open-viewers-december-08/
>

Thank you very much for your input.

We of course have not made such a rudimentary error as to not notice
that there are in fact other viewers. Please rest assured that our
decisions are the result of serious and long-term planning and
discussion, and not foolishly made.

We respect each of the developers involved in the respective viewers,
and think very highly of their work. We believe that it is a statement
on the health of the community that there exist so many options. Time
will tell which of the available options will gain the most momentum,
but in the mean time, the compatibility of licenses ensures that there
will be much sharing of algorithms and code and good-will.

Detailed descriptions of our planning process, something ongoing for
several months now, and its results, is available for interested
parties upon request on another medium.

However, let me give you some basic reasons why we were unable to join
an existing effort:

== OpenViewer
Unable to join due to zero tolerance policy towards LL source code
exposure. This eliminates all of our viewer programmers.
http://openviewer.org/wiki/ContributionsPolicy

Please rest assured that we have and continue to have ongoing
consultations with US IP lawyers regarding specific means of
protecting reX and its contributors from spurious legal claims,
however we must disagree with the strictness of the OpenViewer policy.

== Xenki
Windows only. This invalidates our re-commitment to cross platform.

== IdealistViewer
One of our core requirements was that reX be usable for hard,
professional, real-time 3D video games, which our partner company,
Ludocraft, intends to use along side their Unreal-based games.

For this reason it was felt that a large part of the code must be
written in C++ to retain an acceptable performance edge. Higher level
languages should be limited to one, and Python was chosen over C#.
This makes it hard to join IdealistViewer if we don't even share a
common language.

If you have other questions please let us know.

Cheers,