This is very cool, too: Intensifying Open Source Efforts

Very, very.

It's been sad in the past that LL has not done right by the many skilled and generous developers who willingly donated many hours of time to improve the viewer. This sounds like efforts are being made to rectify that.

In the past the complaints I've heard were along the lines of: LL never gets around to/takes ages before incorporating fixes, it doesn't acknowledge/seems not to care about the effort expended in its behalf, that incorporated third party patches are busticated over and over by LL code until the patchers throw up their hands in despair. It could be that a general looseness caused things to happen not just to volunteer code but company code, too, I don't know. Volunteers don't take kindly to that treatment, though. If things are being tightened up so everyone's work is considered and knitted into the whole if appropriate as things go along it will be less wasteful. Knitting, not sewing, is the model.