Over the course of the last year or so, more and more people have chosen to use the Emerald Viewer; so many in fact, that it is now the most used third party viewer in Second Life. As a result, it is undeniable that even the most incidental of changes in Emerald, when multiplied by the sheer amount of users, can cause drastic effects on the grid. We thus felt it was necessary to work more closely with Linden Lab to prevent any serious issues from occurring.
As some of you may already know, for the past several weeks we have been meeting with representatives from Linden Lab for the purpose of discussing issues that impact the Second Life service and the Emerald Viewer. By initiating and maintaining direct and frequent contact with Linden Lab, we have access to the information necessary to ensure that our improvements and features do not disrupt the service. This allows us to make certain that the changes we implement, when scaled up to the tens of thousands of people using Emerald, will not cause anything to explode. ;P
What this means is that in the future, if we feel that a potential improvement to Emerald could harm the service, we can communicate with Linden Lab to avoid the possibility of releasing a feature with undesired effects. Conversely, if Linden Lab were to discover a problem caused by Emerald, they can contact us in real time in order to get the issue resolved as quickly as possible.
As a result, this cooperation should help ensure the overall stability of the grid, and of the features you've come to depend on, whether they are features of Second Life, or just our particular additions to it.
EDIT: FYI, nobody is buying/taking over Emerald kthx
Source: [Emerald] Meetings with Linden Lab