Second Life's best viewer ceases development. The "mad patcher" has had it.

Nicholaz "the mad patcher" Beresford who maintains a modification of the Second Life viewer (which, we believe, can pretty much no longer be called a Second Life viewer if Linden Lab's policies go ahead) is widely regarded to produce the best Second Life viewer experience to be had.

Now that seems to be over. Beresford is pulling the plug on his much lauded (even by Linden Lab) viewer project.

"I just one time too often stumbled over LL™'s inability to support their open source in the most basic way," wrote Beresford, when announcing his decision today.

Beresford, like many others, seems baffled at the continued inability or unwillingness of Linden Lab to even accept simple bug-fixes, and patches that plug up memory leaks. "When I started, I thought LL™ folks were just a bit overworked and with some outside help from a group of friendly open sourcers and code sorcerers the viewer would turn into a solid, stable and even sleek piece of software."

"There was a time when code submissions were readily accepted, then they were more and more cherry picked and these days, as far as I can tell, they are ignored at large, even if they are addressing the most basic and obvious problems like crashes (and I am not at all speaking of GUI changes)."

We here at Massively have never seen a viewer experience as good or as smooth as those provided by Beresford's patches, and we're going to miss that. Beresford's viewer felt like a luxury motor vehicle compared to Linden Lab's official viewer – and could be run for days without worrisome crashes or memory leaks.