The big green mess

At first I wanted to write something about the lowering of the age limit for access to the main grid and the closure of the teen grid. I will still do it but since it is a bigger issue and I thought of the emerald mess to be more urgent now I thought to put my attention on this for the moment.

So what has happened?

It seems like the main developer of the emerald viewer and person behind modular systems got hit with a severe case of scriptkiddie delusion and thought to simply let his boredom take over his common sense. The result was, that something that looks like  badly executed distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) and a large breach of trust so many people have put into the viewer they came to like and love considering the strange mess LL has been providing even since SL has started. But the differences between the viewers are not the topic right now. The actions of the emerald developers are and the fact that LL has taken the most popular viewer off the approved list of viewers that are allowed to connect to the grid. A very understandable move actually and even when it would not be LL to do it, the recent changes in the emerald developer team would make it a good idea for them to ask LL to take the viewer off themselves pending the renewed set up of the download servers and website. After all those need to happen since the main developer and team leader has stepped down and everything has now to be moved to a new domain and new servers. I think that is a good move with the old owner stepping down and the remaining team of the emerald viewer now being able to do a fresh start by cutting the old drama and garbage out. I am happy about that even when it is sad that it took such a event to make them realize that they have to behave like professionals if they want to keep the trust residents have put into them. I met some emerald developers once and while I can't take them as a representation of the entire team, their behaviour has been less then good from my standpoint of expecting that a good product like this viewer is actually represented by some people who understand that in any interaction with their users they have to stop acting like scriptkiddies on a sugar high.
Interestingly that is nothing that would be exclusive to them since other viewers had their share of drama in the past, with the Cool Viewer (one I have used and liked a lot) being one of the more prominent victims of it, and it will for sure happen in the future. Emerald had it's big hit now and what they did to move ahead has in my opinion made them go on the right track again:

http://blog.modularsystems.sl/

Cutting all ties to Modular Systems is a bit much, but I don't know the ownership structure and with the head developer go it might be something necessary. Maybe it is even necessary from a 'image' kind of way with the blame being put on Modular Systems and left there while the viewer moves on. It is however interesting to see what will happen with the two lindens that have recently joined them and if those two will be with what is going to become of Modular Systems or if they will be involved with the viewer. I suspect that it is the former and that they will now have to use their reputation to clear out the name of that company so that when the dust clears it too can move ahead like the viewer. In a different direction but at least this way it wont need to be dissolved and stopped with a permanent mark left on all such upstart companies or open source developers. Some deserve a permanent mark on them, don't get me wrong but the overall work that has been done and the quality of it is something I think don't deserve to be dragged down with the drama resulting of the wrong doing of one or even several people on their team.

In some way that point towards a bigger problem on the internet in general. I mean, aside from a comparatively small number of people, we have no idea about what the different code is doing. We put trust into the professional behaviour of those people who put that code out to not scam us in any way. And there is nothing really wrong about that considering, that those people play with their name and the good reputation of their product and services. There are some who don't care but those tend not to be around for long and for sure are not around in any form of a business related service. Emerald is of course a free open source project … or at least should be and I suspect will be again to a bigger extend in the future … but the same what is true for a business is true for them. Even more so since in the open source community the name and reputation is all that matters and I am sure that Emerald will see a drop in their log in numbers now. And rightfully so given what has happened and how important trust is for such a project to be successful.
On the other hand I need to say that all those self declared emerald critiques that are now laughing about the fall of the, mostly self declared but still very and rightfully popular, giant are not really in any different position. What happened to the one viewer can happen to any other including the one made by LL. It is more unlikely there, but exploits have happened and will happen and what most people forget or don't even know is, that one does not need a viewer to copybot products from the grid. However it has been a great move for the emerald developers to include the possibility to detect other viewers. It was however countered by hiding viewer tags and changing the viewer ID by the users of those systems but this is the ongoing struggle between the attacker and the defence that will never stop.

Nothing is foolproof and human nature will always show trough.

What now will remain to be seen is what the new emerald team will do in the future. They messed up, they potentially damaged their product beyond repair but they still have a big following and the reputation of actually delivering what many people describe as the best viewer available. Now of course there are those who will scream and belittle everything out of principle because they believe that their system is best and nothing else but in the end it is all about what runs best and what kind of viewer is most comfortable for any given person. I have for now switched from Emerald to Imprudence as I wanted to test it out for some time. I am not that pleased with it since while the functions are all there and the viewer seem to work smoothly, Emerald is a bit more comfortable in use and offers better access to it's features. But it is now off the list until the new developers can submit it again with new owner names and contact info on it so it is a great opportunity to look around. I switched from Cool Viewer to Emerald in the past and I can switch again in the future with Kirstens viewer being one I think I might try out next. But not now since the future list of Imprudence and Emerald is more to my liking. Viewer 2 however is off the list for me and I rather want to wait and see the implementations of that code by other developers before I put up with it. I guess most Emerald users who want to switch will opt for Imprudence given the similarities in features and function but what we see is by far not yet the death of Emerald. They will get out of it unless more drama happens but that will then be their own fault and show that while they had the chance and opportunity to turn around they have wasted it with scriptkiddie behaviour.