I talked with some SL insiders on background about the recent controversy over the alignment code from ex-Linden Karl "Qarl" Stiefvater, which Karl donated to the official SL viewer, but implementation of which has been delayed, provoking accusations of personal animus. The insider perspective, unsurprisingly, was quite different:

The request for improvements to the alignment code was not motivated by any personal animus against Karl.

Rewriting the code as-is to Linden specs would require significant company resources.

A Linden engineer who submitted the same code would have received the same response.

It's very rare for open source contributions more than a few lines of code to be quickly accepted as-is.

The Lindens do want to integrate the alignment code into the viewer, which is why they assigned Oz Linden to the task.

So there's that. Without taking sides, my sense is the Lindens do want to work with Karl's alignment code and Karl's mesh deformer, and that personality clashes like these are fairly inevitable when an open source project intersects with the needs of a for-profit corporation, even if both sides ultimately mean well. In any case, I hope the conflicts (technical and personal) are resolved, and Karl's considerable brilliance is made part of the official viewer as soon as feasible.