In the red

In light of EmeraldGate, I went searching for new Second Life viewers. And after installing and uninstalling a few, I've come down to two:

* Imprudence, which allows me to log into Inworldz as well. (More about Inworldz below.) Purple tag color.
* Emergence, which is a scrubbed version of Emerald. Red tag color.

I have both installed, but I may be using Emergence in SL primarily, for several reasons: a) It has the Emerald features that I want and it generally feels more stable than Imprudence. b) It has LordGregGreg Back's personal guarantee that the code is safe because he only included Linden Lab code and open source code that he had personally reviewed.

I have interacted with LordGregGreg only once because of an Emerald bug that affected my customers. I don't know much about him. But, after more than a day of reading countless blogs and forums and watching interviews and listening to voice chats in YouTube, it seemed to me that LordGregGreg had the most integrity in the whole lot. Even though his name is mentioned in the Phoenix project, he's not the only developer there.

So, I've gone in the red.

Now, about Inworldz. I've been invited to bring Mer Betta there twice. And mfpwtff also tried to convince me to try it. Well, I've tried OpenSim and I haven't logged in there again. Same with Blue Mars. But, LL's upcoming Display Name feature seems to be going forward anyway, in spite of a large number of people bringing up serious concerns about identity theft and its effects on the reputations and businesses we've built inworld, I'm starting to look elsewhere again. I might even just close up shop. I don't know yet. For the measly amount we earn inworld for the tremendous amount of work we do to earn it, is it worth the additional stress of worrying if someone is out there with your name over their head and wreaking havoc and ruining your business? We have enough trouble with copybots and copycats, do we need one more thing to keep us awake at night?