Second Life has been benefiting from open source contributions since 2007. However, our program is in need of some modernization. Contributors' changes often languish unreleased for months (or sometimes years) PRs can experience a lot of churn, and there is no official venue for real time communication with maintainers.
Let's solve this!
Open Source Changes:
  • Provide a medium for real-time communication between maintainers and contributors (Discord or similar)
  • Improve contribution documentation, encouraging earlier collaboration on project ideas
  • Provide a list of "help needed" issues
  • Consider a bounty program for high value security and bug fixes
  • Streamline user group meetings, combining the Open Source Developer and TPV development user groups
  • Establish a SLA for reviewing contributions
Development Changes:
  • Move to a calendar-based release cadence so that contributions are released frequently (Currently, many OSS contributions have been waiting close to a year to be released)
  • Publish nightly viewers so that user and contributors can more easily try newer changes
  • Move more release and promotion infrastructure into open source CI/CD so that our release process is more transparent