Wanting to reward the open source programmers who worked on the open source client for Second Life, Linden Lab has launched a nomination process for The Jesse Malthus Award for Best Community Influence nominees - 2008 Hippo Awards for Open Source.Incredibly, it seems that our dear SL creators can't handle an award right. They opened the process, took nominations and closed everything. All was well, wasn't it? That was until they decided to add names after closing nominations.Without surprise, some questions were asked about the fairness of such a work method. "So nominations are 'OPEN' again or only allowed to 'add' people after it is closed if you are a Linden? I now consider this award rigged and Linden Lab's credibility on this issue compromised", responded Renee Faulds on the award nomination page at JIRA.Linden Lab had a strange explanation to give to the community."One thing we looked at was the fact that the descriptions for many nominees did not match the category, as if the person nominating maybe made a mistake in filing", said Rob Linden, who describes himself as Open Source Busybody at Linden Lab."So, we had two choices, adds Rob Linden. We could have slavishly adhered to the exact nomination process, and said tough, wait until next year. Or, we could have done what we're doing, which was to make sure that we considered the existing nominees for the categories they are most suited for. We all felt like it was more important that we get the end result right than it was to rely exclusively on an imperfect process."There are two problems with this. The first is that they did not manage an awards nomination process right, admitting it was imperfect. The second one is that they changed their minds about their own rules yet again.When you think of it, there is a continuity in this. Linden Lab has often said it did not want to police SL but it reversed its decisions on plenty of matters such as banking and gambling. It seems to be a work method to do policy shifts, leaving people wondering how decisions are made.How do you spell incompetence?
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