Imprudence for Second Life

by Tateru Nino Sep 2nd 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: News items, Second Life, Virtual worlds

Second Life user Jacek Antonelli has announced a new, user-interface oriented project called Imprudence as a major fork of the Second Life viewer. Citing difficulties and delays within Linden Lab's own development and quality assurance pathways, Antonelli and McCabe Maxsted have created the basis for a community effort to rework the viewer's user-interface.

'The Second Life Viewer suffers from a stifling atmosphere of non-change. This atmosphere emanates from Linden Lab, whose attitudes and policies discourage all but the smallest and most superficial improvements. This is the result of the nature of Linden Lab as a corporation,' they write, listing lack of resources, burdensome QA that punishes change, and a paying customer-base that actively resists alterations.

Antonelli and Maxsted believe that a community project can overcome all of these obstacles -- and that if users do not choose to attempt it, the status will continue to remain pretty much quo for the foreseeable future.

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According to the Imprudence website, they problems they hope to solve include a cluttered interface, crude tools, and stability/performance problems. They acknowledge that these are issues that Linden Lab has made some progress on, but not substantial progress.

The Imprudence Manifesto itself outlines the atmosphere which has generated it, the goals that it seeks to achieve, and the means by which it intends to achieve them. Imprudence is looking for contributors to help with every aspect of the project.

While a number of alternative Second Life viewers already exist, few of them deliver any significant user-interface changes. The Imprudence project certainly has the potential to spawn a host of viewers that users can select from, each cherry-picking the best qualities of others.

It will be interesting to see how the project progresses, and whether it can truly achieve its goals.

Tags: imprudence, jacek-antonelli, linden-lab, mccabe-maxsted, open-source, second-life, virtual-worlds

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

jo_auto said on 11:31AM 9-02-2008

Let's not demonize Linden Labs. The lack of alternatives and the slow adoption of changes from the user community is because the viewer does not have a plugable architecture. They will not get benefits from being OpenSource until they make it possible to write plugins for it.
Jaymin Carthage

Tateru Nino said on 11:54AM 9-02-2008

I don't believe anyone was demonizing the Lab at all. Admittedly, a plugin-based architecture is one of those things that seems to be in eternal limbo.

JayR Cela said on 6:33PM 9-02-2008

I agree with jo_auto
the inability to have simple add-on / plug-ins seems pretty silly when you look at the basic fact that the official LL SL Client is based on the Mozilla Gekko browser. Anyone at LL ever hear of plug-in's for FireFox.
I have brought this up at numerous in-world meetings for over 2 years now. No one in charge seems to listen or care.
I do not recall meeting Jacek, anytime in the recent past, but I am a friend of Max, and know him from the AWG meetings. As far as I can tell, he has an excellent understanding of the current state of affairs, not only with SL but several other Virtual World environments as well.
Personally I feel these 2 people are on the right track with their idea. It will be interesting to not only participate with their project, but also to be around to see the outcome

JayR Cela :_)

Jay said on 9:43PM 9-02-2008

When I saw the headline, especially the word "Imprudence", the first thing that came to mind was that griefing group from a few months back with the silly youtube videos.

What was their name again. Hmmm. Oh well, I guess it doesn't matter, they were just a useless flash in the pan.

Good luck to Jacek and Max, I hope that you have alot of success.

Dude BeJesus said on 2:19PM 9-03-2008

10 bucks says Jacek is a dude.

Tony said on 3:03PM 9-03-2008

Wouldn't this move benefit by joining with the Adam Frisby in his OpenViewer efforts? He has already made pretty good progress from posts to his blog, and progress can be used for a viewer that runs within a browser

Rob Linden said on 7:29PM 9-03-2008

One big reason for releasing the source code of our viewer has been to allow for innovation outside of Linden Lab, so it's great that McCabe and Jacek are starting this experiment. We know that our more careful approach to viewer enhancements of late has been frustrating for many, but a lot of residents seem very happy with the stability, performance, and UI improvements of the 1.20 release (McCabe's "Classic" skin was an essential component of this release). Going forward, having alternate viewers like Imprudence out there gives us greater latitude to remain careful about our release process, so that we don't need to throttle back on our quality assurance testing on our mainline product, while still letting others quickly iterate on future solutions. We're hoping that the UI innovation that McCabe and Jacek are working on will be work that will eventually find its way into the Second Life viewer.

@3 (JayR): we're slowly modularizing the system, trying to do so the least disruptive way possible. The bigger the rewrite, the longer it takes to get back up to the previous level of stability, so we have to be careful here. Moreover, as the Google Chrome release shows, there's still a debate about the right way to do plugins, where there's a pretty good argument to be made for greater isolation of plugins than exists in current day browsers. Committing to a plugin interface is a really big deal, and we think that it's better to wait and get it right rather than rush into something that commits us to an evolutionary dead-end.