Peering Inside: The silence of the lab
Two weeks ago it became widespread knowledge that upper-constraints on Second Life prim creation size were relaxed or disabled during a recent update. Initially, it appeared to most people to be an intentional move in-line with previously stated plans that Linden Lab had for Megaprim-Liberation.
Unfortunately, it turned out that the change was the result of a bug, and didn't represent an intentional policy change, and the prim-creation constraints were reinstated in a subsequent server-update. Under better circumstances, it would have presented a relatively minor disappointment for the builder community. Accidents, after all, do happen.
Linden Lab however, did about the worst thing it could do with the situation. It remained silent in the face of all queries and discussion.
Following the discovery, numerous queries were put to Linden Lab asking about the change, open source mavens discussed the topic on the SL Development mailing list in full sight of Linden Lab staff, we queried through official PR channels about the change, patches were developed, public JIRA items commented on and custom viewer code developed.
Throughout it all, Linden Lab did not answer a single query. Finally, not long before the initial rollout of the fix, Andrew Linden addressed the matter as a bug in his in-world office hours and said that a fix would be rolling out. Though news of that didn't really widely circulate until the server-update fixed the issue and we're not supposed to consider such statements by employees to be official policy. Reports of what Andrew Linden had said were initially dismissed as hearsay, in any case, as most of the reports conflicted substantively.
Only after the fix was complete did Linden Lab furnish any official response, branding the issue as a bug, and told us that "a fix will go out within a week". Timely, it wasn't.
All-in-all, what would ultimately have been quite a minor disappointment for Second Life users, instead engendered bitter disappointment, anger, resentment, and a reduction in trust. All Linden Lab had to do to avoid that was to speak up in the first place -- and that's the one thing they didn't do.
