The issue with libsecondlife is that, while the tool itself may be considered “morally neutral,” the same cannot be said of its creators and their applications of the tool…as your own examples point out. I’m no big fan of camping myself, but wholesale fraud against casino owners–not to mention effectively stealing resources that the casino owners have intended to use to help newbies–is not a Good Thing.

Of course, with the opening of the source to the client, things have radically changed. The libsl people, of course, will say that their scope is different (their code is in C#, for instance, while the client’s code is in C++), so their efforts will continue unabated, and they may even be able to use the published client source code to gain additional insight into the communication protocols and refine their own code. But I can’t help but wonder if the move by LL “stole their thunder,” so to speak.

>Some of my best friends are griefers. There is a very simple solution to 99% of the griefing problem.
>I’ll tell you what it is,Don’t be grieved.
>The next time you see a griefer, wrap your arms around him and give them thanks for showing you the folly of your ways.

This sarcastic and nihilistic quote says it all. Why the Lindens can remain in a group with this sort of noir narf-narfing is beyond me.

>libsecondlife:
understands sitting, campbot is born

So libsecondlife *is* involved in the creation and exploitation of the Campbots draining the casinos now in Second Life?

I’ll agree with you that libsecondlife is, fundamentally, only a tool, the same way, for instance, a .357 Magnum revolver is. Both of those tools can be used for good or for ill. The issue is the people behind it, and what their intentions are…and, right now, the perception of your group is that it looks a lot more like the Montana Militia than like the National Rifle Association. Never mind that, for all I know, you guys are just a bunch of harmless developers with no intent whatsoever to grief anyone; perception defines reality a lot of time in this business, you know that as well as I do.

See also this telling quote from Ms. Ordinal Malaprop on the possibility of libsecondlife being used to develop a “land swoop bot”:

I have spoken at length about the fact that CopyBot now epitomises [the libsecondlife team's] output, and from those that I have spoken to, I believe that this is accepted as a situation that was Not Necessarily Handled As Well As It Could Have Been. libsecondlife as the originator of both CopyBot and LandSwoopBot…well, if anything is going to have the inventors’ castle burned to the ground, it would be that, and one can argue until one is blue in the face that such things would have happened anyway and nothing is safe on the Aethernet blah blah blah but it won’t make a bit of difference if you are identified as the group who did it first.

I’d say, ignore what she says here at your peril.

The official sponsorship of the project by LL that I was advocating would, I think, at least bring some appearance of “responsibility” on the part of the group. Now, that appearance might be as nebulous a thing as the group’s present appearance of impropriety, but, again, perception defines reality much of the time.

Tools don’t need credibility, you’re right there. Projects, and the organizations that run them, however, do.

One more thing…it’s easy to say “don’t be grieved,” by which I interpret you mean “don’t take griefers too seriously.” However, suppose you are in the middle of an event at your club, and teleports start failing due to the increased load put on the database by a griefer attack, and people can’t get to your club. Or, money transfers start failing due to those same reasons, rendering your contest boards, your Sploder, etc. virtually useless. Or, LL has disabled scripts to try and deal with griefer objects, meaning none of your scripted objects work.Or, LL has disabled logins while they clean up after a griefer, meaning your DJ, who has just crashed out, can’t get back in-world. Sound unlikely? All of those have actually happened to us. When griefers cause problems that interfere with our ability to run our events, that makes it my problem…and it makes it rather difficult to just follow the advice of “don’t be grieved,” to say the least.

There are allegations that many of libsecondlife’s project members are little better than griefers, or, worse, are griefers, or members of various griefing groups, and that they sit back in their private IRC channel and laugh while their tools are used to wreak havoc on the Grid.
…
How does their association with griefers and griefing mesh with this mission statement? Is this not a concern which should be addressed, post haste?

Some of my best friends are griefers. There is a very simple solution to 99% of the griefing problem.

I’ll tell you what it is,Don’t be grieved.

The next time you see a griefer, wrap your arms around him and give them thanks for showing you the folly of your ways.

I still think, as I originally stated, that the ultimate solution to restoring libsecondlife’s credibility is for LL to assume administrative control of the project, setting up a sponsored “foundation” to manage the source tree, hold the copyrights (with availability under the same licensing scheme that libsecondlife uses now), and serve as an umbrella for development work on the project.

This might be a viable option in the future, or maybe not.

The core of libsecondlife is basically a bunch of people who hang out and try to make Second Life do interesting things. This lead to a good number of projects cluttering our source tree. Lately though the move has been to restrict commit access to a few core members and we prompt people to submit patches and bug reports.

libsecondlife is growing up just fine without a corporate sponsor, though we would be glad of any contributions anyone wants to make to the project.

Doubtless there will be more controversy, be it generated by libsecondlife directly or just one of our users, as libsecondlife gains new tricks.

libsecondlife:
understands avatar appearance, clonebot is born
understands objects, copybot is born.
understands animations, dancebot is born
understands avatar controls, followbot is born.
understands sitting, campbot is born
understands images, imagetool is born…

Everything new we learn how to do leads to someone making something that can use that feature. It will always be that way no matter who has control of the source.

So, credibility? You don’t have to like our people or our users. We provide a tool, and it’s only a tool. Use it or don’t. A tool doesn’t need credibility.

However…even assuming there isn’t and that the client can be jiggered into never timing out, a workstation would only be able to run one or two copies of the full client–but that same workstation could run far more copies of this “virtual CampBot client,” hence could control far more camping avatars. Jiggering the idle timeout would be cheating done retail; this would be cheating done wholesale. Whether it is really “cheating” though, I suppose, all depends on what your view of camping is…

The client decides when you’re idle and when you fall off the server. So you can just turn that off.

In the default client.

Sorry, campers.