Sunday February 26th @ 20:00 UTC / 12:00pm Noon Pacific

Hoagie Sim @ 3rd Rock Grid

As many if not all of you are now aware, after a lot of input from the public and our own discussion and thoughts on the matter, the current team has decided to move ahead with Kokua development to the exclusion of Imprudence. However we wanted to find an answer for our users who still prefer/rely on Imprudence but we weren’t sure what that was going to be, which was why after the town hall we stated the future of Imprudence was still to be decided. One developer outside our team had desired to join us or some time now, but he wanted to work on Imprudence not Kokua. Some of you may be able to guess that his person was onefang rejected, create of Meta-Impy. This gave us a series of options on how to proceed with either depreciating or continuing support for Imprudence.

There was much internal discussion on how this should be handled, we definitely wanted to move the existing team to Kokua. This extra help certainly meant we could at a minimum push out a final 1.4 release of Imprudence, but was it possible to do more? We decided to take a chance, and for the first time create two teams under the Kokua/Imprudence project (Perhaps we should call it Team Purple to simplify the joint name); the existing team members would work on Kokua and a new team of separate devs would continue work on Imprudence. These would be devs who would otherwise not work on Kokua, and the Kokua devs would largely not involve themselves with development of Imprudence as Kokua is now the flagship project (Though we’ll have occasional joint meetings and try to help each other of course). So it was decided to invite onefang rejected to join the team as the head of the Imprudence project, he’ll have to staff his team with devs and volunteers who are passionate about Imprudence like himself, so for all of you who love Imprudence he’ll need your help.

Thus we will be holding an Imprudence town hall of sorts, this Sunday February 26th at 20:00 UTC (That’s 12:00pm Noon Pacific) at our usual meeting place on the Hoagie sim of the 3rd Rock Grid. The purpose of said meeting will be to enlist volunteers to help develop and test Imprudence going forward, and to decide what direction to take it in. However unlike the recent Kokua reorganization, this will not be a “reboot” of the project but a continuation. So for all of you out there who lamented the “death” of Imprudence, here is your chance. Join us this Sunday, be you a potential developer or tester and help us to bring Imprudence into the future alongside Kokua.

Work continues on the new Kokua viewer. We’re moving forward using the v3.2 Linden viewer as a base, we feel this version of the viewer is stable enough and has solved enough of the UI problems from v2 that our users will be happy with it. It’s also what many of you recommended in previous blog comments and at our meetings. We’re currently focusing on releasing a stable viewer on at least three platforms, Linux 32bit, Linux 64bit and Windows 32bit. You can follow our progress by trying our experimental viewers if you’d like, but buyer beware, these are alpha viewers and you should read the warning label carefully before use. You’ll find the link to our experimental viewers page on our wiki bellow…

http://wiki.kokuaviewer.org/wiki/Kokua:Experimental

Currently there is both a Linux 32bit and a Windows 32bit experimental client available and we’re working to support more platforms but said clients just aren’t ready to be posted to the wiki yet (They either don’t run/compile or have known showstopper bugs). With the coming site redesign we’ll create a better way for users to talk about the features they’d like to see. Please understand that these experimental viewers are pretty bare-bones and lacking features we plan to implement at a later date. We feel that right now the collection of sites we have is a little unruly for both you our users as well as ourselves in an administrative capacity and we’re working to improve that.

Correction

The current experimentals are based on v3 viewer code, future version will be based on v3.2+

We’re going to continue to develop Third Party viewers with a focus on cross supporting Second Life and OpenSim/Aurora. However we’re going to focus on Kokua in the future, the ultimate fate of Imprudence is still undecided though as we may push for a final 1.4 release but nothing that takes up too much of our time. Kokua will use Second Life v3.2 as a base, we feel the LL code for v3.2 has matured greatly beyond v2 and v3 and we’ll of course make our own modifications to it to make it more “purple” in flavor. It is also our intent to finalize the name change from Imprudence to Kokua, Imprudence and Kokua are separate viewers and the project has historically been called the Imprudence project. The intent was to switch from Imprudence to Kokua as the next generation client was released but it has been dragged out for quite a while now and caused confusion, so we’re going to finish the change over to Kokua.

It’s also our intent to give a fresh face to our web presence, to update the look and feel of the blog and forum, and possibly eliminate some section like the rarely used Q&A sub-site. Our hope is that this will make it easier for users to navigate our online infrastructure and find the information or support they need. This may include the addition of a few simple tutorials about how to use the client and how to connect to grids besides Second Life proper.

Windows 32bit, Linux 32bit and Linux 64bit will be the three platforms we focus on primarily. We’ll make an effort to get out a Windows 64bit and Mac client down the line, but right now we need to focus on getting things rolling and these best fit our users demographics. We’re supporting two flavors of Linux because our devs use both Linux 32bit and Linux 64bit, plus it’s a big PITA run the 32bit client on Linux 64bit so we’ll continue to make a Linux 64bit client available. Regarding Windows, at first we’ll only provide a 32bit client (With SSE optimizations) as we have been doing already, the necessity of a 64bit client on Windows is questionable as the client can’t quite make use of all that ram (Yet, but that can change), plus Windows 64bit OSes can easily run 32bit programs. Still we would like to release a Windows 64bit version at some point to try to see if it makes a difference. Unfortunately we still don’t have a Mac developer and thus can not support the platform, we’d like this to change but it is the state of things for now.

There are other matters besides these that were discussed at the meeting, I encourage you to read the meeting transcript on the wiki if your curious.

• Focus on the next generation Kokua client rather than Kokua & Imprudence
• Continue to support Linux 64 bit
• Keep it easy to explore alternative grids (ie not Second Life proper)
• Mesh support in Second Life and OpenSim
• Support older hardware
• Experimental builds

I think my favorite comment was from Chaniyth, simply because it made me laugh out loud, literally. Here’s what Chaniyth had to say (Emphasis mine)…

First and foremost, please don’t be asses [...] listen to your end users, do the respectable thing and listen to what your end users want and need, and in a timely fashion [Experimental Builds]!

That would make a great company slogan wouldn’t it? “Please don’t be asses”, perhaps even better than Google’s “Don’t be evil”. Could we live up to it I wonder? Haha

It brings up a good point though, in that it’s important to listen to what your users want. Granted sometimes there are things we just don’t have the manpower to do. Ideally we’d love to make a viewer every month with a completely revamped UI that is fully customizable and adjusts to a users tastes (Are you a builder or a shopper, a dancer or a socialite, a machinima maker or a sailor etc). Unfortunately there are limits to what we or any developer can do, but  we’ll try to work out what’s best and try things from time to time. Experimental builds are a great step along this line, as suggested be several people, as it allows the public to test out new viewers before they’re really “ready” and give us feedback, allowing us the opportunity to make changes to things before we put too much time into them and it’s too hard to change course.

And so we’re going to try to release more test viewers, starting today. We’ve set up a special page on the wiki were we will post test viewers as we can, they may or may not be announced here on the blog. Please understand that these are not Beta viewers but Alpha viewers and are generally only tested internally. We’re going to make an effort to put more of them up on the blog though. They may not be available for every platform (ie it may be only Linux 64 or Windows 32 and nothing else). But if you want to see what’s “brewin in the pot” this is one way you can do it, just be sure to read the instructions on the page and take whatever necessary precautions are recommended (This is the knife’s edge folks, you have been warned).

On The Wiki – Kokua: Experimental

Here at Imprudence we’ve been juggling several issues, trying to develop two different clients at the same time (Imprudence and Kokua) for three different platforms in 32bit and 64bit flavors. not to mention supporting not only the Second Life grid but all the various OpenSim grids as best we can. We think we’ve made some pretty awesome viewers but lately we’re also become stagnant as we’ve been weighted down by trying to juggle all these various things. It seems we may have over extended ourselves a bit and to fix that we need to refocus and simplify. Thus in the coming weeks we will be holding an all-hands team meeting for all Imprudence/Kokua team members, be they Dev or Support, where we will discuss what’s working and what isn’t and what we plan to do about it (Details have already been sent to all team members).

But we’d like to hear your input as well, as we make these viewers for you our users after all. Tell us what makes Imprudence special for you, what draws you to this particular Third Party Viewer over others and what you would like to see going forward.  How do you use Imprudence, and how do you use other viewers even the official one? What do you like about them, what don’t you like, and how is that similar or different from Imprudence. Do you use OpenSim, Aurora or any other alternative grids, even your own local grid? Is there anything you think that Third Party Viewers are missing that would make them easier or more productive for people? What about the site itself, this blog, the forum, the wiki and etc, how can we improve it?

While we can’t make any promises about addressing every issue, we will try to discuss any points made here in the comments.

All of us on the Team would like to wish you all Happy Holidays. Whether you celebrate Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, or simply New Years we hope you have a wonderful time this end of year with family and loved ones. We’ll be back next year with more Imprudence/Kokua goodness to come.

Our weekly meetings will resume on Wednesday January 4th at 20:00 GMT. We have changed Google Calendars and you can subscribe to the new calendar at this address, if you want to keep abreast of any changes to meeting times.

Thanksgiving at the Trolls by martha_chapa95

It’s Thanksgiving this week in the United States, and while not all of the team is based in the US a number of us are. And while we’re with our friends and loved one’s this holiday, we wanted to wish everyone the best this week, whether you celebrate Thanksgiving or not.

As an update; work on the Kokua client continues and we’ve had Mesh view working for a little while now in this very alpha client, and now we have Mesh uploading working as well (On both Second Life and OpenSim 07.2+ based grids). The client is still very alpha though and we don’t yet recommend people testing it out as we can’t guarantee a stable experience (We hope to have something stable enough for people to test soon, and we’ll announce it here on this blog when we do). Further we won’t be having our usual weekly meeting this week due to the holiday, but will be returning next week, at the same time but on a new day (Wednesdays at 20:00 UTC on the 3rd Rock Grid as always). Meeting logs will continue to be posted to the wiki for those who can’t attend but wish to see what was discussed.

So be safe this holiday everyone, and we’ll see you next week.

As announced two weeks ago on JustinCC’s Open Simulator Blog, the 6 month development barrier between opensim and viewer code has been dropped in favor of a new policy.

The original policy was put in place near the birth of Open Simulator due to legal concerns over derivative copyright issues. The policy stated that no developer contributing code to OpenSim could have looked at or worked on viewer code within the last six months prior to submitting any code to the Open Sim project. This effectively divided the development community into those working on third party viewers like Imprudence and those working on OpenSim. This made it difficult for developers are the respective projects to squash bugs that not specific to the viewer or the server, but that bridged across both (For example the 4096 ‘hg’ bug). Now that this policy has been retired for something more liberal it will be possible for developers to look at and work on both the viewer and Open Sim server code to better optimize both projects.

According JustinCC, under the new policy developers on the Open Simulator project make interact with viewer code and still submit to the OpenSimulator project so long as the code is either under 100 lines in length (And strictly a bug fix not a new feature), or if a new feature or over 100 lines that the developer agree to a contributors agreement. Said agreement is modeled on the one developed by the Harmoney project, it asks for an explicit copyright license but not transfer of copyright ownership ant it further asks for a patent grant, like the vast majority of other such agreements out there. What this means for projects like Imprudence in the future is better integration and more stability with Open Sim and visa-versa, as well as possibly broader developer support as devs will no longer have to isolate themselves to Open Sim or 3rd party viewers but can now work on both at the same time. Now that this step has been taken there is no going back, as it would be nearly impossible to reverse course on a decision such as this, so developers need not be tepid about wading into the waters of the respective viewer or server projects. And while the effects from this may not be immediately felt, it is a very positive step forward for both Imprudence and other 3rd party viewers and the Open Simulator project itself.

It should be noted however that the 6 month exclusion policy was specific to the official Open Simulator project and competing projects did not necessarily have the same restriction. Other restrictions or policies may apply besides those listed here, this article is merely a summation of the recent changes to Open Simulator in relation to 3rd party viewers.

On the client front, we’ve recently released Imprudence 1.4 Beta 2 which fixed a great deal of bugs from the first beta and we continue to work on the next release (No timeline yet, but I’ll try to post something as we get closer). On that front we could use some help. If you have programming experience with C++ and the Mac or Linux 32bit platforms and would like to volunteer please get in touch with us. We’re of course interested in anyone who wants to volunteer, but we’re in particular need of developers for those two platforms. So if you have a passion for Virtual Worlds, C++ experience and can compile the client on Mac and/or Linux 32bit and would like to help develop the future of Imprudence/Kokua, then by all means drop us a lines.

Please send inquiries to me directly for now, I’ll set up a form on this blog to make it easier in the future.

zatzai (a) kokuaviewer.org

The answer is something of a mixed bag, and to get into it I’ll first have to explain a little bit about licensing and how licensing works. If you already know this stuff, please bear with me as I’ll get to my point soon.

As many of you know, Imprudence is licensed under the GPLv2+FLOSS Exceptions. The GPL is basically a software license that allows for free and open code. It’s because of this that we can easily share our code and incorporate others’ code in turn. Even so, the GPL doesn’t allow us to do whatever we want. There are certain restrictions, such as:

• You cannot change the license of any line of code unless you are the original author, you hold copyright on that code, or the license permits it. When we get a patch submission, the author must license their code in a compatible fashion.
• You may not distribute works based on GPL code that violate any part of the GPL itself. Doing so leaves you open to legal action.

So, how does that impact us, exactly? Imprudence is opensource. Second Life is opensource. Why can’t they work together? Here’s where the restrictions of the GPL come in: a bit over a year ago, Linden Lab decided to change the license for the Second Life viewer from GPL+Exceptions to LGPL–a similar-sounding but ultimately different license. While the LGPL is compatible with the old license, there’s no way to go from LGPL to GPL+Exceptions. This put a massive hurdle in our way as far as porting features from the Second Life.

For example, say someone submits a viewer 2/3-based patch to Imprudence.

While the GPL and LGPL are considered compatible licenses, we don’t own the copyright on the LGPL code submitted to us. Thus, we cannot change the license of that source to include exceptions. Whatever code was licensed as LGPL must stay LGPL (or equivalent) and that distinction must always be made clear wherever that code is used.

This might not sound like much of a hurdle (and at times it isn’t–we switched over to the LGPL version of our Quicktime plugin ages ago) but consider the Inventory Links patch that’s currently in most other viewers. It contains ~43K lines of code, and is made up of an unknown mix of GPL+Exceptions viewer 1 code and LGPL viewer 2 code. The two licenses are not made distinct, so the patch is clearly a violation. There’s no way we could legally use it as is.

However, if we could figure out which lines are compatible with Viewer 1 and which ones are compatible with Viewer 2, we could add the appropriate licensing and include the patch. Needless to say, this has felt like a daunting task to us, especially when we’ve been more focused on bug fixes and finalizing 1.4.0 (if you’re using 1.4 and aren’t on beta 2, I strongly recommend upgrading) as far as Imprudence goes. But, these are features you guys need. We want to include them.

My plan is to start looking at these patches one by one and sorting out which lines we can use and which lines need refactoring. As I mentioned in a comment on the beta 2 post, any volunteers who can help us with this process are welcome. Codie and I will be starting on this later tonight, and we’ll see how far we get. If you’d like to join us, please email me at mccabe@kokuaviewer.org and I’ll tell you what you can do.

You might find yourself asking, why go through so much effort for something like a little licensing issue? Why be so concerned when the author of the patch didn’t seem to be?

Our answer has always been–almost from the project’s inception–that while sometimes doing things the right way isn’t easy, these concerns are important to us. It’s thanks to licenses like the GPL, as well as the rules that accompany them, that opensource software has matured to the level it has today. Free and open software gave us the ability to start Imprudence (and later Kokua). We feel an obligation to respect that.

Anyway, I hope this clarifies for people where we’re coming from, and why we’ve done some of the things we have.

EDIT: I’ve updated this post a bit to try to make things clearer.