Today, Emerald underwent a complete restructure of the Development Team.
The most obvious result is that there is no specific individual Project Leader – we have determined the best course is to operate democratically and with clear transparency.
This series of events has ocurred because of an intolerable abuse of trust. From today forward, Fractured and Modular Systems will have no association with the Emerald Viewer. Due to his own actions, he was left in an untenable position and was given no option but to resign, which he did.
For users, we anticipate a smooth seamless transition, however if there is a hiccup or two please be patient with us as we move the viewer to its new home.
We ask for your understanding and patience during this time, and ask you to put your trust in this move, as we put our trust into you, the user.
Please contact Emerald Support via the Emerald Viewer group if you have questions. You can also contact any of these people in world:-
Lonely Bluebird
Jessica Lyon
Arabella Steadham
Thank you for your continued support,
The Emerald Rebirth Team
Post Script
As at Sunday 22nd August, 6pm SLT:
The Emerald viewer project and its development team have undergone a massive and necessary restructuring in response to recent incidents caused by the project leader.
This restructuring is designed in such a way as to prevent anything like this from ever happening again.
From this point on, there will be no ONE single person running Emerald Development.
We are all going to be on a level playing field. All decisions, changes, and alterations to any code or anything at all, will be done transparently and democratically.
Part of this restructuring process also involved the necessary removal of the developer who is responsible for these past incidents; as a result Fractured was invited to resign and has done so today.
As of NOW, All affiliation between Modular Systems/Fractured Crystal and the Emerald Viewer have been permanently severed. A new domain has been purchased and we are currently getting our new website online.
The website will be hosted at EmeraldViewer.net and should be online and operational shortly.
Ownership and control of the servers used to host the Emerald Viewer downloads and website have been transferred to Arabella Steadham who will maintain the hosting as a neutral party for the project.
Aside from the downtime of the website, our users should experience no changes that will affect them directly.
Also today, as a result of the incidents in question, Linden Lab removed Emerald from the TPVD. We expected this might happen and have since provided the Lab with information regarding our new changes, structure and goals. We hope to be back on the TPVD soon.
Our two biggest regrets are first and for most that these incidents ever took place, and second, that we failed to take this radical action sooner.
We sincerely hope that these significant internal changes will help us restore some trust and faith from our users and from Linden Lab in regards to the integrity of the Emerald Viewer Development team.
Thank you
The Emerald Team
4 comments
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August 23, 2010 at 3:15 pm
GoSpeed Racer
I have faith that you can get things straightened out and pointed in the right direction.
August 23, 2010 at 8:17 pm
Vaneeesa Blaylock
Good Luck Arabella!
Yes it’s sad… yes trust has been betrayed… yes dramatic change must also happen…
BUT… it’s also true that we live in a new world now. This sort of “problem” it is reasonable to assume, will occur more and more in our future. Not just SL future, but 2 billion wired humans, slowly moving to 7 billion future.
So the many solutions to this are worth exploring first to fix the complete lack of faith in our former favorite viewer, but further to consider how to negotiate our lives in this century.
I hope we are not moving to a 2 class world where those who are not developers are second class. BUT, what seems clear, is that the old mode of “citizenship” in physical nations, where for many active participation meant pulling a voting lever every few years…
Whether or not we’re capable of verifying and compiling the code we use or not… and clearly from the early days of the PC when you actually could manage your OS to today where you can’t move anything because you have thousands of unidentified components… clearly it it’s just Modular Systems that’s moved toward opacity, technology as a whole has.
How does a “citizen” respond… well I really don’t know…
My point, not to get any further off your blog post Arabella, is that I’m grateful for your efforts, and I hope that “we” can help you find not just the future of Emerald… but some clue to how we can manage the myriad, complex, opaque technologies of the 21st century.
Good Luck & Thank you.
August 23, 2010 at 11:10 pm
annotoole
Can you read code? Know how to diff? Going to analyze the entire code base before every release to certify it? No? Then how will you know that no unauthorized code has been added? You will have to hire a build manager that can read all the code and let the build manager decide when to release.
August 24, 2010 at 9:55 am
arabellasteadham
Any code changes go through the svn, all code changes will be looked at by all other devs. All the dev’s will keep check on all the other devs: everyone checks everyones work