Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Goodbye, Emerald?

Written 25 August, 2010

Goodbye, Emerald?

By now just about everyone knows that on Sunday, Linden Lab removed Emerald from the list of approved viewers. The reason: shenanigans that amounted to a distributed denial of service attack on the website of a rival viewer. Yesterday Philip Linden released a statement giving the Lab's reasons for the removal (the DDoS). Philip said the Lab is working with the Emerald team to help it clean up its act. If that doesn't happen, and soon, without a doubt logins with Emerald will no longer be allowed.

The DDoS attack came, apparently, from one team member, who is no longer associated with Emerald. A earlier data mining was also the result of a single team member. According to LordGregGreg, who recently left the Emerald team, his reason for departing was because he could no longer see the code of other team members.

Emerald is by far the most popular Second Life viewer, accounting for about 50% of logins. I myself use it. It has a lot of great features not supported by either Viewer 1.23.5 or Viewer 2.0. But the Lab was right to pull the plug. Thank you, Philip, for a correct decision.

I hope the Emerald team gets its act together, and soon. If not, well, there's always Imprudence.

1 comment:

Brinda said...

Yes...I've gone to Imprudence until the Emerald code is rewritten...It still has a lot of features that arer what I want/need although I'm seeing texture loading faster with Imp