Open Source Meeting/2008-03-27

Open Source Meeting
== Agenda ==
* Update from the Lindens (standing item) - Rob Linden
* Copyleft/share-alike permission for SL Items (http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2571) - Opensource Obscure
::Related: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2909, http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-701 Gigs Taggart
* VWR-729, "Viewer's Locale handling pretty much sucking in fundamental ways", any suggestions from the OSS community on what to do and how to improve the situation with locale handing? - Michelle2 Zenovka
* OLPC lightweight client, education, health, economic development...--Grampy Weatherwax 10:53, 26 March 2008 (PDT)
* Small prim culling thing. Gigs Taggart
== Transcript ==
* [14:02] Rob Linden: hi folks
* [14:03] Squirrel Wood: Hellu
* [14:03] Squirrel Wood: And good to see you are well again Soft :)
* [14:03] Rob Linden: transcript from this discussion will be posted to wiki.secondlife.com, so please consider that as you type
* [14:03] Rob Linden: (eventually....I still need to post the transcript from last week)
* [14:04] Soft Linden: Hey hey!
* [14:05] Rob Linden: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Meeting/Agenda
* [14:06] Rob Linden: first item: Update from the Lindens
* [14:06] Rob Linden: who wants to go first?
* [14:06] Soft Linden: Nothing but the ongoing source release work on the OSS front for me. Shortest update evah.
* [14:08] Soft Linden: Going to be like that for a couple weeks unless something stands up really needing attention. Wrapping up some end of quarter Blacklight work
* [14:09] Rob Linden: my update (of stuff I can talk about) - we're kicking around the idea of making a separate purely open source version of the viewer to make life easier for Linux distros and others for whom that matters
* [14:09] Rob Linden: our vendor has some more work ongoing to improve performance on wiki and jira
* [14:10] Rob Linden: that's the main things from me that I can think of now.
* [14:11] Liana Linden: I'm doing a lot of work on licensing issues and giving a hand with CMake. Nothing ready to announce this week, though.
* [14:11] Rob Linden: Liana: how was OSBC?
* [14:11] Liana Linden: Terrific.
* [14:12] Rob Linden: (Open Source Business Conference for those not aware of the initialism)
* [14:12] Liana Linden: Several Lindens got a crash course in open source methods and best practices, and the response from the attendees was really positive.
* [14:13] Liana Linden: I've never been in a room with so many lawyers and MBAs.
* [14:13] Rob Linden: :)
* [14:14] Rob Linden: well, any questions, or should we move on?
* [14:15] Rob Linden: needs to get better at pacing this meeting
* [14:15] Grampy Weatherwax: I have, at various School of Management meetings.
* [14:15] Rob Linden: next item: * * Copyleft/share-alike permission for SL Items [(http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2571)] - Opensource Obscure Related: Gigs Taggart
* [14:16] Michelle2 Zenovka: Yea this has been banging around for a while
* [14:16] Carjay McGinnis: for some months I think
* [14:16] Michelle2 Zenovka: add a must share optiion to the existing copy permissions was the most basic implementation tabled with othe rmore complex examples given too
* [14:17] Soft Linden: While GPL and similar licenses are of interest to open source developers, is this an open source issue? I'm wondering if this would get more traction with the community team, or where else we could push this idea.
* [14:17] Saijanai Kuhn: it also gets into cross-grid permissions issues
* [14:17] Soft Linden: True, has AWG implications
* [14:17] Rob Linden: yup
* [14:17] Gigs Taggart: Yes I don't see this as an open source issue so much as a need for creators to be able to specify a license. The current permission system really isn't working.
* [14:17] Michelle2 Zenovka: Yea its not specificy an open source developer idea so yes it should go wider
* [14:19] Rob Linden: the two issues above are related, though I think SVC-701 is higher priority than VWR-2909 (and one of the comments is right....VWR-2909 should be in SVC)
* [14:19] Gigs Taggart: VWR-2909 is a client issue
* [14:19] Rob Linden: and this is not so much open source, though has a natural home here because open source people think about copyright nuance more than most other people do
* [14:19] Soft Linden: The texture one also affects notecards and sounds, as referenced by scripts.
* [14:19] Gigs Taggart: in that the client still shows textures as having permissions.
* [14:20] Gigs Taggart: and "obeys" them
* [14:20] Gigs Taggart: It's part of that whole "fake security on the client side" problem.
* [14:20] Rob Linden: oh, wait, I meant VWR-2571 belongs in SVC
* [14:21] Rob Linden: this could be its own meeting, methinks
* [14:22] Rob Linden: I think the most productive thing for Residents to do now is to agitate on sldev for a dedicated discussion on this topic
* [14:22] Saijanai Kuhn: at least. WWE kicked around the idea once of having simply an index to one of the sites that lists all the different kinds of licenses
* [14:23] Soft Linden: Gigs: Yes. Strong vote on eliminating user hostility from the client. Shouldn't stop you from doing anything the server allows. Bad security thrives in the current model. But that's a big separate discussion.
* [14:23] Gigs Taggart: I wrote an article about it Soft :P
* [14:23] Soft Linden: Then it's a big separate blog discussion. *sage nod*
* [14:23] Gigs Taggart: but lets not discuss my article right now :P
* [14:24] Rob Linden: would anyone here be willing to write up a meeting proposal that I could forward around Linden Lab?
* [14:24] Saijanai Kuhn: I support Zha's take that permissions are a shorthand for distribution license
* [14:25] Gigs Taggart: That's the root of the problem, they are too vague right now to communicate intent.
* [14:26] Gigs Taggart: Any proposal should probably approach the problem that way, that they are a shorthand for license intent, but they are not doing a good job right now.
* [14:26] Rob Linden: well, I don't need a volunteer right away, but my recommendation is that someone request a public meeting on the subject of permissions design, highlighting these three issues
* [14:26] Saijanai Kuhn: hang on zha or an alt wants to TP in for this meeting
* [14:27] Saijanai Kuhn: Hey David
* [14:27] David Levine: Hey Saij
* [14:28] Rob Linden: Hi David....I actually wanted to move on from this topic :)
* [14:28] Saijanai Kuhn: LOL oops
* [14:28] David Levine: is just listeing
* [14:28] Rob Linden: I'll post the transcript
* [14:28] David Levine: k
* [14:28] Rob Linden: promise
* [14:29] Rob Linden: the action item for a TBD resident volunteer: at someone request a public meeting on the subject of permissions design, highlighting these three issues
* [14:29] Rob Linden: next item on the agenda: # VWR-729, "Viewer's Locale handling pretty much sucking in fundamental ways", any suggestions from the OSS community on what to do and how to improve the situation with locale handing? - Michelle2 Zenovka
* [14:29] Rob Linden: this is one I wish Alissa was here for
* [14:29] Michelle2 Zenovka: Uk that was 2 weeks ago are we going over it again
* [14:30] Rob Linden: (though...did we discuss this last week?)
* [14:30] Rob Linden: ok....we just need to clear the agenda. got it
* [14:30] Rob Linden: anything to add on this topic, or should we move on?
* [14:30] Rob Linden: going once
* [14:30] Rob Linden: going twice
* [14:30] Michelle2 Zenovka: think its ok, there is a way forward
* [14:31] Rob Linden: next up: OLPC lightweight client, education, health, economic development...--Grampy Weatherwax 10:53, 26 March 2008 (PDT)
* [14:31] Gigs Taggart: I'm with Zero, i think it's pretty unrealistic to even talk about SL on OLPC :P
* [14:31] Q Linden: zero made a good comment today
* [14:31] Gigs Taggart: Maybe OLPC 2 whenever that comes out, if it has 3D :)
* [14:32] Michelle2 Zenovka: Yea it needs to be a totaly stripped viewer, like sleek?
* [14:32] Carjay McGinnis: though SL in Python would be cool :)
* [14:32] Q Linden: I think there's interesting potential someday for a thin client approach
* [14:32] Q Linden: but it's a 600 mhz (approx) box with no 3d
* [14:32] Rob Linden: this one comes up every so often....might be useful to have a JIRA issue as a discussion repository
* [14:32] Saijanai Kuhn: Well, iif I ever get teh python IM script working, you can use that for anything you want
* [14:33] Grampy Weatherwax: 433 MHz
* [14:33] Grampy Weatherwax: Real slow...like a Cray 1
* [14:33] Saijanai Kuhn: and since Squeak smalltalk is bundled with it, its a no-brainer they can get something working
* [14:33] Carjay McGinnis: whole pipeline would need to get stripped down, lots of changes
* [14:33] Gigs Taggart: Once we go to a standard protocol for IM then standard IM clients could talk to SL anyway.
* [14:33] Soft Linden: I'm going to be the wet blanket guy again. This one hasn't really been discussed extensively on list. Is there something this needs a live discussion for - any kind of blocking issue, something we should be pushing Lindens on?
* [14:33] Saijanai Kuhn: SL IM isn't THAT hard. I'm just obtuse
* [14:33] Q Linden: squeak isn't really well integrated with the olpc -- etoys stands alone, really
* [14:34] Saijanai Kuhn: huh. So they've got a VM with all the jjuicy parts hidden?
* [14:35] Q Linden: they have a sandboxed approach to applications
* [14:35] Saijanai Kuhn: ah, OK
* [14:35] Q Linden: "activities"
* [14:35] Saijanai Kuhn: so squeak might not have access to http and the like
* [14:35] Grampy Weatherwax: IM--That's where our developers would get interested.
* [14:35] Grampy Weatherwax: We can provide 3D on a school server.
* [14:35] Grampy Weatherwax: Everything is Sugarized.
* [14:35] Rob Linden: so, in case anyone is interested in filing a PJIRA issue, you can link it to LLJIRA as SL-37805
* [14:35] Grampy Weatherwax: Etoys does have http access
* [14:36] Squirrel Wood: 2.5D isometric view might be doable?
* [14:36] Q Linden: at low frame rates, anything is possible. :-)
* [14:36] Harleen Gretzky: What's thepoint since children are not allowed in SL anyway?
* [14:36] Squirrel Wood: => teen grid
* [14:36] Grampy Weatherwax: Fits with our style.
* [14:36] Gigs Taggart: hehe harleen good point
* [14:36] Grampy Weatherwax: Way better than nothing.
* [14:36] Rob Linden: thinks he's with Soft in wet blanket land
* [14:37] Harleen Gretzky: I assumed most are not even teenagers
* [14:37] Q Linden: / most who?
* [14:37] Grampy Weatherwax: We would need a separate world.
* [14:37] Saijanai Kuhn: side scroller would have its uses in some sims
* [14:37] Harleen Gretzky: OLPC reciepents
* [14:37] Gigs Taggart: this is pretty far out blue sky stuff
* [14:37] Gigs Taggart: I'm not sure anything is actionable
* [14:37] Rob Linden: agreed
* [14:38] Grampy Weatherwax: There is a side scroller development kit for the kids.
* [14:38] Rob Linden: action item: file PJIRA feature request
* [14:38] Rob Linden: link it to SL-37805
* [14:38] Soft Linden: I'm making the turn-SL-into-side-scroller JIRA now.
* [14:38] Q Linden: lol
* [14:39] Rob Linden: ossm
* [14:39] Grampy Weatherwax: Thanks.
* [14:39] Saijanai Kuhn: tower defense in Second Life
* [14:39] Rob Linden: next up: Small prim culling thing. Gigs Taggart
* [14:39] Soft Linden: So I've been talking with the graphics guys about this in the background here.
* [14:39] Grampy Weatherwax: We have Doom on the XO.
* [14:40] Soft Linden: There's not occlusion culling happening server side, but interest list reduction is done based on distance from the camera and size of prims. Smaller prims vanish at nearer distances
* [14:40] Q Linden: doom is 2.5D, barely, with embedded content and no requirement for a 3d accelerator
* [14:40] Gigs Taggart: yeah, there's a handful of bugs, and dozens of forum posts about that small prim culling
* [14:40] Gigs Taggart: it's a very annoying and unexpected behavior
* [14:40] Soft Linden: The kink in this is that the interest list is generated based on the camera position, but the prim size is determined relative to avatar position. It sure sounds to me like the size should also be relative to camera position.
* [14:40] Rob Linden: (btw...I love this agenda item from a procedural standpoint....big discussion on list, now realtime)
* [14:40] Gigs Taggart: is there any huge benefit to doing it that way vs just leaving it to normal pixel area culling?
* [14:40] Soft Linden: So this is worth a JIRA and I wouldn't be surprised to see it fixed.
* [14:41] Gigs Taggart: let me dig up existing jiras
* [14:41] Gigs Taggart: 
* [14:41] Squirrel Wood: linden trees are rendered at low quality way too close to the camera
* [14:41] Gigs Taggart: this one is proposing a workaround
* [14:41] Gigs Taggart: 
* [14:41] Gigs Taggart: this one is proposing an ability to turn it off
* [14:41] Gigs Taggart: I'd rather not see this turn into a preference
* [14:42] Gigs Taggart: just fix it :P
* [14:42] Soft Linden: A JIRA specifically asking for the interest list to cull small prims based on camera instead of viewer position is all it should take to address this problem.
* [14:42] Gigs Taggart: alright, I'll make a new one and related the existing ones I found
* [14:42] Rob Linden: xlnt
* [14:42] Soft Linden: Sounds like a plan!
* [14:42] Gigs Taggart: VWR or SVC?
* [14:42] Harleen Gretzky: Is this teh reason behind 
* [14:42] Soft Linden: SC
* [14:43] Soft Linden: SVC
* [14:43] Gigs Taggart: harleen, probably
* [14:43] Gigs Taggart: it's a very unexpected behavior :P
* [14:44] Rob Linden: cool...well, that's the end of the planned agenda
* [14:44] Soft Linden: Fixing the size-over-distance culling to be camera based will also help with examining things at a distance without having to crank up your draw distance.
* [14:44] Gigs Taggart: cool
* [14:46] Gigs Taggart: .
* [14:46] Saijanai Kuhn: admires teh slience
* [14:46] Rob Linden: well, anyone have anything to bring up?
* [14:46] Squirrel Wood: Cake!
* [14:46] Gigs Taggart: plug GSOC
* [14:47] Rob Linden: oh, righto
* [14:47] Rob Linden: we've gotten one proposal so far
* [14:47] Saijanai Kuhn: whats the status with the license change for things like llvolume.cpp?
* [14:48] Rob Linden: plug: 
* [14:48] Rob Linden: please tell your school-attending friends about it
* [14:49] Rob Linden: re: relicensing. still discussing what to do. we could probably go more quickly if we *only* wanted to address llvolume.cpp rather than "things like llvolume.cpp", but we don't want to keep revisting this one file at a time
* [14:50] Squirrel Wood: subtasks ?
* [14:50] Rob Linden: we've got a lot of different licensing options on the table to sort through
* [14:50] Gigs Taggart: Small prim culling new jira: 
* [14:51] Michelle2 Zenovka: Speaking licencing there is also the SA-2.5 ->SA3.0 issue on the artwork files
* [14:51] Rob Linden: oh....righto
* [14:52] Rob Linden: I think that's purely a matter of execution at this point
* [14:52] Michelle2 Zenovka: cool, on the face its a trival change but its a subitilty that could cause a debian reject from main
* [14:52] Gigs Taggart: what of GPL3 for the whole thing?
* [14:52] Rob Linden: Liana knows a little more about status on that, I think
* [14:52] Gigs Taggart: is that still on the table?
* [14:53] Rob Linden: Gigs: still on the table, though not one of the more pressing issues we're kicking around
* [14:53] Liana Linden: Hmmm....
* [14:54] Soft Linden: Is the GPL version of our license strict GPL2, including the clause about being able to opt to use later GPL revisions?
* [14:54] Liana Linden: At this point, I haven't seen a compelling reason to move to GPL3.
* [14:54] Gigs Taggart: strict GPL2 no later allowed
* [14:54] Saijanai Kuhn: I've been researching protocol documentation for the past few days. There's no standard for how to talk about graphcis as far as I can tell
* [14:55] Squirrel Wood: graphics... creative commons license?
* [14:55] Gigs Taggart: liana it would allow APR use without FLOSS exception, also compatibility with any GPL3 licensed code.
* [14:55] Rob Linden: Gigs: is there actual GPLv3 code that you're specifically interested in?
* [14:55] Squirrel Wood: like on deviant art when you upload... you can pick between several options for the type of license...
* [14:55] Saijanai Kuhn: so, documenting things like llvolume will be... interesting
* [14:55] Gigs Taggart: no, mainly I'm interested in apache license compatibility without FLOSS exception.
* [14:56] Rob Linden: Gigs: why does that matter so much?
* [14:56] Gigs Taggart: it's not a huge issue.
* [14:56] Gigs Taggart: but the FLOSS exception makes the viewer incompatible with *all* GPLed libs
* [14:56] Gigs Taggart: 2 or 3
* [14:56] Rob Linden: no, it doesn't
* [14:56] Rob Linden: it's GPLv2 compatible
* [14:57] Soft Linden: It only creates GPL library headaches for us, not for people using the GPL license :)
* [14:57] Gigs Taggart: the GPL2 isn't compatible with licenses that allow additional restrictions, the FLOSS exception allows the application of additional restrictions.
* [14:57] Soft Linden: That's going to remain an issue so long as kdu, fmod, etc exist.
* [14:57] Michelle2 Zenovka: we are a long way to killing them
* [14:57] David Levine: GPL librady headaches are *so* much fun
* [14:58] Rob Linden: Gigs: we can't relicense APR, for example, so there's no difference between us using GPLv2+FLOSS-ex or GPLv3
* [14:58] Rob Linden: the incompatibility is created by using APR
* [14:59] Rob Linden: not by our choice of GPLv2+FLOSS-exception
* [14:59] Gigs Taggart: well the difference is that GPLv3 is compatible with GPLv3, GPL2+floss isn't compatible with any GPL :P
* [14:59] Rob Linden: wrong
* [14:59] Soft Linden: What are we using out of apr anyway?
* [14:59] Rob Linden: ask the FSF
* [14:59] Gigs Taggart: I can, if you want.
* [15:00] Rob Linden: please do. if they say it isn't, I'd love to talk to them to find out why
* [15:00] Saijanai Kuhn: David, got Eben's number for Giggs? ;-)
* [15:00] Gigs Taggart: alright
* [15:00] David Levine: grins
* [15:00] Gigs Taggart: we can leave it at that :P
* [15:00] David Levine: He's at Broadway and 67th You can look him up
* [15:01] Soft Linden: Eben's got some small interest in SL. You may be able to catch him in-world too.
* [15:01] Rob Linden: okee dokee, that's the end of our hour
* [15:01] Liana Linden: Bye, all.