"But is a matter of perspective how one looks at it. "It's a rather unique situation for sure," Jessica agrees. Which like I said, is pretty unprecedented. In other words, an unpaid volunteer development team is providing the software for nearly the entire userbase of a highly profitable company. I've no idea what that metric is like today but I suspect it's higher now as many third party viewers around back then have dissolved." By a conservative estimate, 80-90% of SL users now use Firestorm.
Two years ago, project head Jessica Lyon tells me, "Firestorm was carrying somewhere around 72% of SL users. So popular, in fact, that any update Linden Lab makes to its platform is effectively irrelevant unless it's supported by Firestorm. How popular? Far more popular than the official SL viewer put out by Linden Lab the company. Firestorm, updated and debugged by dedicated team of volunteer SL users - has become the most popular. It's probably the strangest symbiotic relationship in Silicon Valley: Linden Lab, the startup that's highly profitable from Second Life, open sourced its SL viewer software 12 years ago, and over time, various open source viewers have increased in popularity, among Second Life's user base.
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