Linden Labs buries Second Life

oh did you see the latest from linden labs ?

2.k : You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer.

This item is a bomb. That says if a third party viewer shows you anything not in a Linden Lab viewer, it is a violation of the policy.
This single item seems to totally void the advantage and reason for the existence of third party viewers.

Oh but they do say that LL will work with 3rd party vendors to integrate functions on LL Viewer. How noble of them!

Linden Labs is basically saying "if you have a cool stuff we don't have in viewer 2, either you give it to us for free and help us add to viewer too, or we kick you from sl"
I have NEVER seen anything like it on 3rd party programs

isn't that necessary if there trying to make a stable viewer ?

Nope. Not at all

That is just it, it is just the opposite!!

The current policy gives Linden Labs the freedom to opt out of having to do niche things for users. For instance: builder tools. Builders are a small segment of Second Life users, but they are important. Because there is a 3rd party viewer that gives tools to builders the linden labs viewer doesn't have to have any of the "prim aligner" "sculpty maker" "blender Importer" and other esoteric tools that builders want.

But the new policy will make it illegal for 3rd party viewers to have ANY FUNCTION the ll viewer doesn't have. Who would take care of builders ? What about the "RLV" / Restricted Life user community ? LL viewer is not restricted and has no advanced prim alignment so no 3rd viewer can offer it.

I suppose 3rd party viewers could give free code to LL and help it add RLV and builder tools to the core ll viewer. Putting aside the unfairness of making independent software developers work for free for a multi-million dollar company, this also makes the LL viewer a very bad viewer.

Having no 3rd party to take care of niche users would force the ll viewer to be a bloated thing trying to please everyone at once, the facebook jokey, the fashionista, the builder, the role player. the university student... Trying to please everyone at once makes you have an exceedingly complex code with bad performance. buggy and ornery, hard to use, attending every niche's most basic needs badly, while pleasing no one. Sounds familiar ?

Second Life's failed model for server coding is now being imposed on the client side.

To give you an idea of how awful it is, let's imagine if IBM had done that when it licensed the PC technology. No one would be able to sell gaming pcs or graphics workstations, because every thing they sold HAD TO BE in the pc from IBM.

Alienware could never have existed. Neither would any good home pcs. Tablets ? Netbooks ? No niche product unless it was developed by IBM. IBM knew it couldn't control the myriad of possible uses for a PC, not even being as big as they were. Linden Labs on the other hand, seems determined to keep the 3D Virtual World space firmly under it's wings and has been smothering creativity on this area for years on the server side. Now it is trying to do the same client side.

It is an awful policy that will completely bury Second Life.

If Linden Labs succeeds on being the mandatory source of all innovation of client features, it will delay the release of new features or make it's source code a bloated buggy mess. Or both. And forget about easy to use, "kitchen sink" software is just too vast to be user friendly. If they fail, there will be an exodus from Second Life, as people migrate to better viewers on other platforms.

I never heard of something so idiotic

From what I understand even the very popular Restricted Life Viewer is now completely illegal. Because SL viewer is not restricted. [Note- apparently RLV is "exempt" from this policy, based on what criteria no one knows... ]

Talking about illegal.. What Linden Labs is imposing to 3rd party developers might be illegal. Anti-trust law might apply in this case.

They are inhibiting competition, "injuring" 3rd party developers and SL users alike all the while using unfair advantage to dominate the viewer market and prevent innovation.