Posted on UgoTrade is a long and fascinating dissection of Tribal Net‘s OpenSim for PC, as well as a long interview with Tribal Media’s two founders, Darren Guard and Stefan Andersson.
UgoTrade notes that Tribal Net has brought the concept of a decentralized grid to OpenSim. This means that areas of the grid are not hosted at server farms, but rather on each individual PC. Says Andersson:
“Everybody brings their own computing power [to Tribal Net] and we’ve packaged it for end users. I mean that basically joe schmoe can install it, set it up, and run it… Also we’ve done some work on the map so that now when people go online their regions show up on the map. When they go off line the region disappears [it can also be persistent]. That is also a radically different approach from Second Life.”
In the interview Guard and Andersson go into technical detail about OpenSim and Tribal Net and about how the regions will work with SL.
UgoTrade is interested in how the Web 2.0 can assist people at the local level – how those in the know and with tools at their disposal on the grid can help build self-sustaining communities off the grid, akin to the microlending phenomenon.
UgoTrade is one of those must reads. While I figure that an “open source SL” is one of those sacred cows I need to think about, it’s evident that letting the coders mash up a platform gives you everything from Deep Grid to RealXtend and now Tribal Net. Let the geeks play and the smarter ones will embed a business, computing or community model in the code. Now, the idea of distributed grids isn’t new, and supposedly that’s where the Lab is headed. Croquet has been puttering around for ages on its P2P architecture.
Some of these will rise and fall with the energy and finances of their founders, with their ability to establish credibility and trust with users, and whether companies will trust that the mini grids will still be around in a year or two. But the ability to host your own takes one level of pressure off – at least if the plug gets pulled you still have a copy of your sim, it just might not be connected to a code base that’s updated very often unless you find your own scripters to keep it going. The same can’t be said for Second Life – it’s nearly impossible to have a clean copy of your build, and while no one expects Linden Lab to shutter its doors any time soon, all it takes is one killer app for an exodus to begin.
Which is where the problem is – because I wonder whether incremental improvements have legs. You can argue that a decentralized grid isn’t incremental, but you can also argue that there’s nothing game changing on the horizon.
What if someone were to develop a Spore-like model where virtual worlds were procedural rather than object and avatar based? What if someone builds a Wii world, where it’s the interface device that drives the world rather than the world space itself being the foundation of the grid? The platforms built on OpenSim are reverse engineers of Second Life with a few business curve balls thrown in to the mix. Open, sure. Incremental, probably. The main grid doesn’t need to panic because of a bunch of small players around the edges. The main grid needs to look deeper into where the next leap forward might arise – whether it’s mirror worlds like a Google Earth, or some game changer where a virtual space arises from a different conceptual model altogether.
