Cool VL Viewer forum

As many of you probably know, I refused to enlist in LL's Third Party Viewers Directory (TVPD) for a long time: the only reason was that LL required me to provide personal RL data (for the "Contribution Agreement", which was a prerequisite to enter that list) which was excessive for the purpose, according to the French law "Informatique et Liberté"...
Since the CA signing and the TPVD enlistment were not requirements anyway, the only drawbacks were a lack of publicity for my viewer and, for LL, the loss of the useful contributions I could have brought to their own viewer code...

At the end of last year, LL suddenly changed their stance (I would suspect a side effect of the GPDR, as well as of the changes in the manning of the team in charge for Open Source at LL), and with the move of their viewer code to github, made it a very simple, and privacy-respectful task to digitally sign a CA; I immediately signed it (and contributed some code in the process), and on 2022-11-22, I officially asked (via SL's JIRA) to enlist in the TPVD. It took (quite) some time (4 months) to be processed, not because of any issue with the code (it was already and has always been fully compliant with LL's TPV Policy, and I did not need to change a single character in the sources or documentation), but because the Linden(s) in charge was(were) apparently overbooked; there also has been an issue with a faulty naming in the TPVD list ("CoolVL" instead of "Cool VL Viewer"), which took a few more weeks to fix (well, spaces are still missing, but at least the words making up the viewer name are all there !).

So here we are, and you can now find the Cool VL Viewer in the TPVD and this Wiki article.

Congratulations Henri! It's about time they came around.

This is a great announcement. My one and only avatar turns 15 next week. I have used Cool VL Viewer as my main Second Life conduit for many years, well over a decade. When Linden Lab ceased offering a Linux option, I sought others. Cool VL Viewer was by far the best option for me. Lightweight, robust and quick. I have since upgraded my hardware a few times, gaining significant improvements due to Henri's continued efforts. I appreciate them and will likely always use Cool VL Viewer to enjoy my Second Life. I hope others will now discover it and give it a try. Thank you Henri.

Belated congratulations!

I was helping out someone today in-world by posting a list of TPV viewers, and preparing myself to send both the link to the SL Wiki for the "official" page, but also the link for the Cool VL Viewer page, with the usual explanation about privacy issues etc. which made the oldest TPV in continuous existence not to be listed... and to my surprise, it was listed!

Then I saw this thread, and, of course, I had to congratulate Henri

Also, I was actually very positively surprised to see on the LL Feedback forums that there is a strong suspicion that LL might actually reuse parts of the Lua client-side scripting abilities of the Cool VL Viewer in their own, upcoming viewer. The "surprise" was two-fold — first, seeing LL at least admitting the possibility of starting to incorporate more open-source contributions (as we got with emojis ... after five years though). And secondly... the surprise at seeing that they would grab code from an unofficial TPV!

Well... now finally everything makes sense again

Congratulations of getting the recognition that you deserve for the work done for the past 17 years... better late than never, I guess.

I doubt so... They are on the route to "reinvent the wheel", and will likely come out with an incompatible implementation of their own, that won't even achieve half of what the Cool VL Viewer can do with Lua...