Second Life's best viewer ceases development. The "mad patcher" has had it.

by Tateru Nino Apr 7th 2008 at 6:45AM

Filed under: Patches, News items, Opinion, Second Life

Nicholaz "the mad patcher" Beresford who maintains a modification of the Second Life viewer (which, we believe, can pretty much no longer be called a Second Life viewer if Linden Lab's policies go ahead) is widely regarded to produce the best Second Life viewer experience to be had.

Now that seems to be over. Beresford is pulling the plug on his much lauded (even by Linden Lab) viewer project.

"I just one time too often stumbled over LL™'s inability to support their open source in the most basic way," wrote Beresford, when announcing his decision today.

Beresford, like many others, seems baffled at the continued inability or unwillingness of Linden Lab to even accept simple bug-fixes, and patches that plug up memory leaks. "When I started, I thought LL™ folks were just a bit overworked and with some outside help from a group of friendly open sourcers and code sorcerers the viewer would turn into a solid, stable and even sleek piece of software."

"There was a time when code submissions were readily accepted, then they were more and more cherry picked and these days, as far as I can tell, they are ignored at large, even if they are addressing the most basic and obvious problems like crashes (and I am not at all speaking of GUI changes)."

We here at Massively have never seen a viewer experience as good or as smooth as those provided by Beresford's patches, and we're going to miss that. Beresford's viewer felt like a luxury motor vehicle compared to Linden Lab's official viewer - and could be run for days without worrisome crashes or memory leaks.

Tags: breaking, linden-lab, nicholaz-beresford, open-source, patches, second-life

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Gwyneth Llewelyn said on 7:13AM 4-07-2008

This is shocking news, Tateru! We were all expecting that at some point Nicholaz would be hired by Linden Lab to support Zero, Soft, and the others that work on the open source team to quickly incorporate the dozens of fixes and patches that he has released in the past and kept up to date with LL's freshly released viewers.

Well, we can't blame Nicholaz — he did *outstanding* work for free for such a long time — but I understand his frustration perfectly!

FlipperPA Peregrine said on 7:55AM 4-07-2008

Gwyn, I'm betting (and have heard, but not verified) that Linden Lab made Nicholaz an offer. It would have been insanity had they not done so! The problem is, after trying to work with such frustrations as Nicholaz has expressed (doing a lot of work for naught), why would you want to join the very company causing such frustrations?

Regards,

-Flip

Nock Forager said on 8:33AM 4-07-2008

I understand maybe LL has their own reason, but it seems at JIRA there so much efforts needed that the fix codes to be accepted. Still, at least they listen us. It's much better that other MMO...

Loki said on 9:25AM 4-07-2008

NOOOOOOOoooOooOOOOOo PLEASEEEEEE, LINDEN LAB SHOULD PUT HIM ON THEIR PAYROLE!!!!!!

Samantha Poindexter said on 9:19AM 4-07-2008

Nicholaz addressed the question of why he wouldn't accept a job with Linden Lab five months ago, in this entry:

http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/2007/11/jayrs-questions.html

I'd been hoping against hope that he'd fix 1.19 the way he did 1.18, but I certainly understand why he's had enough. Alas.

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 8:01PM 4-07-2008

wow, damn :/

instead of patching the oficial, why not fork it and not think about his chanegs and addition being incorporated ont he oficial code?

TigroSpottystripes Katsu said on 8:28PM 4-07-2008

nvm, I've jsut read his blog post about this decision, i my questionw as answered there :\

Stimpy Tripp said on 4:29PM 4-08-2008

I too will miss Nicholaz. I think what I liked best about him was how responsive he was when I'd send him a crash dump. Within a day he'd respond with something like 'Oh! That's a new one, were you moving around a window?' I was moving around a window, and I'd read in his next update about how he had fixed it.
I went to Ohio State University. at the time I attended, there were about 60k students. They had a saying, "The biggest strength of OSU is also its biggest weakness: The size." I'd argue the Tao of LL (TM) is the same. comes in handy attimes to have folks doing whatever they want, but I bet programmers can find other things to do thats more fun than fixing bugs.
-s