Just in case you haven’t heard, the Emerald development team as we knew it (did we ever really know it?) has disintegrated. Or has it? Arabella Steadham has resigned. Or has she? The Lindens are coming for your viewer! Or are they?
Look, I think Emerald was/is the most feature-laden SL/OpenSim viewer ever. It really was/is quite fantastic in terms of keeping you abreast (see what I just did there?) of people near you — or two sims away from you! It has the Version 1 user interface (sort of). Fantastic viewer, really. Unfortunately the project was run by some folks who couldn’t seem to keep it together organizationally and who, on occasion, might have accidentally caused their users to participate in a distributed denial of service. It happens sometimes. People just explode.
So, they’re packing it up. Apparently the Lindens demanded that three of their developers leave the group in order to stay in the Lab’s good graces. Emerald leadership has known about these demands for a couple of weeks now but I guess it finally came to a head. All of this was initially very fun to watch but lately they’ve produced more drama than code.
The drama continues now in the comments on Arabella’s swan song on Modular Systems blog. Wait… I thought Modular had nothing to do with Emerald anymore. Maybe the server un-resigned or something. It’s all up in the air as far as anyone can know. Here’s a fine example from the comments section:
“…WOW LINDEN LABS.. YOU REALLY DID IT THIS TIME. I HAVE LOST A TON OF RESPECT FOR LINDEN LABS AND THIS ACTION TO SHUT DOWN EMERALD HAS DRAWN ME EVEN CLOSER TO SAY GOODBYE TO SECOND LIFE AND FIND ANOTHER ONLINE WORLD.”
To the anonymous ALLCAPS whiner: OMfG! Yes, the Lindens and their (metric? imperial?) TON of respect literally forced devs on the Emerald team to act in ridiculously irresponsible ways until even they could no longer turn a blind eye to the miscreants building SL’s most popular viewer. Shame on the “LABS.” FOR SHAME!
(That was sarcasm, by the way.)
Calm the hell down, go to the Third-Party Viewer Directory and select again. I’m guessing there will be even more choices showing up there over the next weeks and months. My goodness, nobody died!
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