Second Life OPEN-SOURCE awards!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Blog to bring you news of the "Second Life OPEN-SOURCE Awards".

As everyone is aware, Linden Lab OPEN-SOURCED their client-side code for the viewer a while back and since then, the open-source community has been sending in bug fixes ever since. Amazingly, if you look thru the bug fixes sent in by the Open-Source Community, you will see there are fixes for things like Memory Leaks and other obscure, hard to find bugs. Which really puts a big dent in Linden Lab's contention that if a bug report doesn't have REPRO steps it would take too long for them to find it and run it down. Must be dis-heartening to the bug squashers at Linden Lab to know that an Open-Source Community member, who most of the time is coding for the sake of coding, not for pay, is able to do the bug squashing job better then those getting paid to do the same job at Linden Lab.

Anyway, the reason for today's Blog Entry is this, Nicholaz Beresford is probably THE BEST bug finder and squasher who's been working thru the Open-Source Community. He not only has submitted over 40 patches by himself, some of those patches quite frankly have been what's made the Linden Lab viewer as stable as it is today. Nicholaz has run down most, if not all, the Memory Leaks in the viewer, and has discovered countless other "obscure" bugs that those "other guys" thought would be impossible to find.

So, why do I tell you this? Because if you are reading this, you should follow the LINK above and vote for Nicholaz Beresford as the BUG HUNTER of the YEAR and the OPEN-SOURCE Contributor of the Year as well. If there were a CODER of the Year that included both Linden Lab and Open-Source Community Members, Nicholaz would still be a shoe-in, and Linden Lab should seriously make an effort to hire this man as HEAD of the Coding Department. At least then I would know there was someone overseeing Second Life that could provide Leadership and lead by example.

Keep up the good work Nicholaz, perhaps with your help, and the help of other Open-Source Community Members, we can save Second Life, despite the efforts of Linden Lab!