Gwyneth Llewelyn slipped a New Years present under the door last night with a post on OpenSim that may well stand as one of the definitive “must-reads” for the year to come. Not being terrible technical (OK, not at ALL technical), I may be missing other summaries with more geeky goodness. What Gwyn has managed to accomplish is to take all the threads, posts, technical summaries, and her deep insight to create a readable, compelling and articulate summary of OpenSim.
In addition to explaining what OpenSim IS, Gwyn has provided a readable technical summary that can serve as a master document for making decisions on OpenSim deployment. She has very neatly summarized the history of OpenSim, explained the importance of modular versus monolithic code, and has gone deep in explaining the features, functions, pros, and cons of OpenSim virtual environments.
This should be required reading for, well, all of us. For the Lab (print out copies and give it to new employees), for residents of Second Life considering the leap to OpenSim-based worlds, for developers, for enterprise, and for anyone considering hosting their own OpenSim servers.
Finally, I have a better understanding of the different terms around deploying OpenSim hosts, including decisions around:
- Choice of physics
- Prim and avatar limits
- Coding language (LSL, Java, C++, etc.)
- Chat options and why IRC is so important
- Load balancing
She also reminds us that OpenSim is the technology, and hosted grids are the worlds, attempting to clear up the confusion that there is a choice between Second Life and OpenSim – there isn’t. It’s the choice between SL and a range of worlds based on the OpenSim platform.
Her post is also filled with useful links, including to Prokofy’s overview of the “user experience” and the various ‘worlds’.
Thank you Gwyn, for such an insightful, articulate post.
OpenSim and the Lab
Gwyn closes off her post by discussing the implications of OpenSim development to Linden Lab. Much of the focus on this has been and will be around open grid protocols and the ability to move between ‘worlds’. As Gwyn summarizes:
“The future is interconnection, and LL has been quite good at promoting that idea. They have always envisioned a metaverse of several interconnected grids, with LL at the core. However, it seems that they have underestimated what this actually means: the interconnected grids using LL’s protocols and looking just like SL are already there and have 30 or 40 thousand users. They will grow to the point where LL is running just one of the many SL-compatible grids, and the only one that is not interconnected, which is absolutely ironic.”
But I’m going to take slight issue here with the focus on interoperability. I’m not convinced that allowing or disallowing interoperability is going to make much of a difference to the success of the Linden Lab “Grid” (and I use that term very specifically, as compared to Second Life). It may have an impact on the success of the Second Life mainland, but that’s a different issue entirely.
What discussions of OpenSim as a competitive threat to Linden Lab neglect is that regardless of all the innovation and modularization and so on, Linden Lab isn’t JUST left with one big grid that may be disconnected from the many little mini Grids sprouting up on the OpenSim framework. The Lab is clearly moving in the direction of “grids in a box”, and by moving in this direction will offer an enterprise-grade solution whose technological underpinnings remain unclear.
If it’s true that the Lab is launching “separate servers” (as indicated through the discussions around Rivers Run Red’s Immersive Workspaces and Mark Kingdon’s comments indicating the same), then there is likely more under the hood than just plugging in another server in California. These servers are ‘ready to ship’ – which means that the technology has somehow been unplugged from the rest of the Grid architecture, which may also mean that the people who will soon be able to host their own “SL servers” may have far more control over how those servers are expressed.
Many of the features that Gwyn is enthusiastic about regarding OpenSim may have parallel “plug-ins” for the Lab’s “private simulator” plans. Options for voice? Sure, why not? Unplug the Lab’s solution and plug in your own. Estate-level control over prim and avatar limits? Again, why not? If it’s privately hosted it’s no longer part of the contiguous “mainland”.
But these are niggling points. The main thing to remember is that many of the current advantages of OpenSim as a user would describe them, (or a business) can be matched relatively easily by Linden Lab: firewalls, privately hosted, estate-level avatar and prim limit control, customized voice plug-ins, and integration with external systems.
This doesn’t deny that OpenSim may have a more thoughtful technology in the long run, because of its modularized approach, and may thus be more scalable and stable given time: on the other hand, those same features may lead to ‘user confusion’ – all of this teleporting from one “world” to the next, all of them based on OpenSim, and each with their own blend of physics, limits, permissions, rules, policies, and code – well, it may be a wonderful form of innovation but for the casual user it COULD also get pretty confusing. Time will tell.
OpenSim: Where We Can Go
What excites me about OpenSim isn’t that it may end up being a “slightly better cheaper” Second Life. What excites me is that it can allow innovation that simply isn’t possible on the Grid. Now, maybe some of these things have been done, or thought about, or simply won’t be practical. I have faith that OpenSim will be more than a ‘better engineered’ SL and be able to take innovation paths of its own. But here are a few of the things I’d like to see to convince me, or that I think are otherwise needed:
Policy Framework
I’ve blogged about this in the past. And here’s the typical response: OpenSim is like Apache. OpenSim is a technology, not a world. Policy comes from worlds, therefore, policy is the domain of the people who host those worlds not the code that allows them.
OK, you know what? Cut the crap. This attitude is a total abdication of the opportunity to innovate. You mention policy and immediately people think you mean ‘content protection’ (which is one HUGE component) and then want to wash their hands of it.
Give me a break. This is narrow-minded, feeble, and shows a stunning lack of imagination.
Raph Koster thought long and hard about content protection, avatar rights and commerce before he started coding Metaplace. HE gets it – what, are you better than Raph Koster??? His coding decisions and architecture were informed by thoughts about policy and community. The OpenSim developers have lost an incredibly meaningful opportunity to contribute to the place of virtual worlds in the wider domains of knowledge and meaning by generally ignoring these discussions, slamming people who bring them up, or defending themselves with all kinds of linear arguments about what code will or will not allow.
So what’s the solution? On my wish list: a thoughtful discussion of these issues in which everyone agrees to a multi-step process:
1. Determine the domains for policy: simply come up with definitions of what domains may play a role in the expression of virtual worlds based on OpenSim or other platforms. These domains would probably include identity, commerce, intellectual property, content protection, governance, etc. Surely we can all agree on what the domains might be.
2. Determine the range of options, regardless of what technology allows or doesn’t allow, within each of these domains. Again, surely we can agree on what the range might look like.
3. Do a gap analysis between the range of options and what is currently possible. For example, absolute content protection may not be currently possible. But identify how wide the gap is.
4. Identify, broadly, the opportunity costs for the gaps. If the gap could be closed, what opportunities would that open up? If the gap wasn’t closed, what negative consequences might follow? Try to think long-term as well as short-term: how might this look a year from now, 5 years from now?
5. Brainstorm solutions to the gaps. Brainstorm them from the perspective of “If we were building this from scratch” and also from “If we were adding to what we have”.
It’s step four and five, I imagine, where the fist fights might break out. But surely by taking the first few steps we could come to some broad consensus of where some of the issues and opportunities lie, and you might get some focus on the things with the highest opportunity.
A World without Avatars
One of the things I’d like to see is whether OpenSim can be deployed without avatars and to understand what options might look like for viewers and navigation.
Now, that might sound odd: what’s a virtual world without avatars? But there’s so much innovation happening in the fields of design, architecture, and visualization that I can’t help wondering whether virtual world technologies aren’t missing a significant opportunity.
Take the virtual factory floor:
“The Coperion Group is planning and producing plants and systems for the plastics industry. The presentation at Coperion’s booth at K Fair in Dusseldorf consisted of Fraunhofer IGD’s multi-touch table and an impressive 8-meter wide high definition projection mirroring the table’s image. With this application Coperion demonstrated their core-competencies to the markets and complex processes in a plant for bulk material handling via Virtual Reality. InstantPlayer and InstantCluster were used to render the interactive real time 3D visualisation.”
I can think of a dozen use cases where the ability to access the 3D content of SL or OpenSim for the purposes of product modeling, design collaboration, etc. doesn’t require avatars at all. It’s unclear to me whether you could host an OS server, remove avatars, and end up with something that’s faster, or that could be done in a browser, like Adam’s Frisby’s Xenki:
Microtransactions
I hesitate to put the word commerce. Every time commerce is mentioned on one of the OpenSim or developer lists, it’s as if you yell “fire” in a brothel: you’re spoiling their fun and you’re welcome to take it outside.
Commerce is a thorny issue. But it’s a thorny issue on the wider Web: OpenSim may not be the place to solve it, but this will certainly be the year where we start to see really innovative work done on micropayments, whether on the Web in general, or as a test in OpenSim in particular.
Frankly, I think that Linden Lab would be better off trying to solve this issue and turn the Linden into a proper micropayment service for deployment across multiple platforms than to worry about teleports, which they’ve put a hold on in any case.
HTML On a Prim
I’ll race you: whoever gets true clickable HTML on a prim first, wins.
How about a link to the article?
Have you looked at Edusim? the “A World without Avatars” section is very similar to what Edusim is doing (I believe one of the early version did not have an avatar) and Alot of the 3D factory floor
Opensim is a very interesting platform which is driven by 100′s of people from all over the world who keep working at it each and every day to make it a robust platform which can function as an open source virtual world platform software system.
People get more freedom with opensim and can develop their own projects if they wish.
Rose- link is in the first paragraph but here it is again…
http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2009/01/01/opensimulator-the-choice-for-2010/2/
Thanks VWO….hearing good things about Dreamworld, keep us posted.
And Eric – hmmm, no on Edusim, but thanks for the tip. I’ve been following Open Cobalt a bit, seems to be getting traction.
Heh. Dusan, I have to think that the brutal fact is that talk is cheap and flimsy, and code is (relatively) expensive and durable. I’ve seen any number of proposals/discussions fizzle out on the OpenSim lists (and others) for want of implementation. Only when somebody presents some implementation are we forced to consider whether we want it in core or not (and even if we don’t, it can always exist as an external module).
OpenSim is a disparate group of corporate/entreprenurial/hobbyist coders (and the hobbyists are often best of all). I don’t believe that there’s any way that we could get policy concensus within the group even if we wanted to, short of some preventative measures (such as, we will not develop a core money module).
The policy you talk about can only be done outside, I should think by a group which is prepared to take reliably working software and discuss a set of rules for living (possibly with some custom code thrown in on top).
I think that we are simply incapable of predicting the future accurately enough to make it worth while to try and plan everything before we write a single line of code, even if everybody were so inclined. At this stage we’re ‘doomed’ to evolve rather than be intelligently designed.
Justin:
Thanks for the intelligent response. And I’d like to clarify a few things, if I could, about my perspective on this.
First, I don’t hold believe it’s the coders responsibility to have this discussion. Those who have enterprise stakes however, would greatly benefit by these kinds of discussion. I believe that these discussions would lead to opportunities for innovation that would sufficiently motivate people to start taking action, which would then involve coding.
Second, I am not asking that these things be in the core. I’m not even saying they SHOULD be coded. I do believe that with a robust discussion that sets aside (at first) the actual code in question would lead to ideas for modules, secondary services, partnerships and, sure, maybe some change to the core code.
Example: identity authentication. As I understand it, this was handled by many grids with OpenID? I can’t remember. But one thing that strikes me as a possible source of innovation, which would arise around a stakeholder discussion around trust and identity, is the idea of some sort of approach to managing avatar names and registration across grids. Maybe this is a Lab thing, who knows – but at least have the discussion and, as a result, perhaps identify third parties and approaches to this – it probably wouldn’t even impact the core module at all.
I never said we needed to predict the future before writing code. But I’m saying there has never been a better time for the serious stakeholders in virtual worlds to actually have this discussion. Instead, the response is always similar to your own: “we coders will deal with it when there’s sufficient demand or a use case that requires it, otherwise we’re hobbyists and are making out the best we can.”
So fine, don’t show up. But I’d like to see a business issues/use case forum then where these issues CAN be discussed, the coders can stay at home, and once we’ve found the innovation opportunities we’ll get back to you. There are enough people out there who WOULD fund implementation if only they didn’t feel like it was like banging your head against the wall just trying to have the discussion.
Oh don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against discussions on policy topics and in the long term I think they will yield valuable insights. It’s just that I’m always somewhat distrustful of the notion of trying to design the future before it gets here – it seems reminiscient of trying to design a standard before it’s clear what is actually needed (which to me often seems to come about through evolution).
Within the heterogenous terrain of OpenSim it seems inappropriate to impose direction. The views of the stakeholders are simply too divergent. People will have very different ideas of what they want their grids to look like, and others aren’t primarily interested in using OpenSim for public grids at all.
Indeed, the modular nature of OpenSim speaks to this – we’re going down the route of allowing people to write plugins to make OpenSim do what they want, within reason. The core should try to be as small as possible.
Perhaps the focus of this debate is really on virtual world protocols (which OpenSim could be part of along with completely different vw implementations, much as Apache and Microsoft’s Internet Information Services both speak HTTP).
Justin: You may be right on where the most appropriate forum might be. Mind you, I’d personally rather hook some of this up to OpenSim discussions because it’s a more innovative platform right now and other ‘standards’ and ‘road map’ discussions are having difficulty gaining traction, in my opinion.
Again, however, I can not stress enough that I am NOT advocating for coding policy into the core. I am advocating for a definition of what types of policy people might find advantageous, figuring out the opportunity value, and then looking at different ways to execute. I also believe that this MIGHT lead to insight that would be useful to the core, but not necessarily. I’m really not dogmatic on this.
(By the way, I’d be just as happy to take content protection off the table during the first ’round’ just so it doesn’t become a flash point and leave it for later).
I do like your point about protocols – maybe the language I’m using is the problem. I am NOT advocating for direction or rules. I AM advocating for a few agreed upon protocols that might speed up innovation across the implementations of OpenSim because they are developed in the context of broader business challenges.
Finally – on the issues of code before standards or standards before code, can’t we meet on the middle on this? I’ve never advocated for standards before code, ever. I’m advocating for a meaningful emergence of standards before the code base becomes so entrenched that it’s difficult to back-track. Surely we have enough under our belts right now that a few key protocols can start to emerge? I mean, I know they have but just at least keep them coming.
Sorry if I mischaracterized your arguments Dusan – I shouldn’t really have written when I was tired _and_ hungry. I do think you have a point about trying to avoid baking in mistakes – the earlier we can catch these the more it’s to our advantage.
I do think it’s a little early for standards, though. So many things are in their infancy (intergrid architectures, viewer and intersim protocols, content import/export, etc.) that I think it is going to be around another year or so before any useful formalization can take place.
A very good point about the flexibility to operate as a “A World without Avatars”, especially for business uses. Corporate users, particularly at the higher levels in an organization will just not be comfortable using avatars for the foreseeable future. Avatars (even realistic ones) are just too “cartoony” for them to take seriously. Removing the avatar from the equation breaks down a huge barrier for adoption and integration of these environments into the business world. There are many opportunities for “avatarless” virtual spaces, especially when virtual spaces are combined with the real world, when the users are fully present and visible to everyone involved.
I offer an example with the Teliris InterAct TouchTable and TouchWall collaboration options for telepresence systems: http://interactivemultimediatechnology.blogspot.com/2008/11/teliris-interact-touchtable-and.html
(* full disclosure I am a Teliris employee and work on this project, shameless plug I know, but relevant to the point)
We are creating a single virtual space (the table and walls) mapped onto two or more real world spaces (surfaces in the telepresence rooms). Shared virtual workspace, no avatars required
I see no reason why OpenSim would prevent avatarless interaction. I believe most avatar rendering would be on the viewer side anyway, but it is something I hope the OpenSim developers keep in mind as they move forward with this amazing project.
>OK, you know what? Cut the crap. This attitude is a total abdication of the opportunity to innovate. You mention policy and immediately people think you mean ‘content protection’ (which is one HUGE component) and then want to wash their hands of it.
Give me a break. This is narrow-minded, feeble, and shows a stunning lack of imagination.
Raph Koster thought long and hard about content protection, avatar rights and commerce before he started coding Metaplace. HE gets it…
Bingo. That’s it EXACTLY. Now have the courage of your perceptions and convictions, Dusan, and don’t be a pussy. You let this opensource thugs then discourage you from discussing COMMERCE and the need to have law supercede code.
And guess what.
Commerce isn’t something that is vague and undefined. And law doesn’t inhibit creativity, it protects it.
Commerce is defined by people in business often as this: “when a willing buyer meets a willing seller over a price”.
The buyer must be willing, and that means having cash, and fraud protection. The seller has to be willing, and as we know, that means IP protection. And they both need cash, currency, and the rules that go with keeping value in currency.
That means private property, not communism.
It means not code-as-law as under technocommunism, but the rule of law as in regulation of business so that it is accountable, and guarantee of the rights of consumers. Most of all it means the legalization of private property which Adam and Justin and these other techocommies think they can jump over and leave in the last century as uncool.
Justin and his lazy laissez-faire code kiddy friends raise issues of “diversity” and “confusion” and “lack of consensus” and all kinds of bullshit to avoid being ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PUBLIC.
You don’t get to just code up a nuclear weapon, and then narf-narf that it went off all pretty and blew up people. You have to work with civilians to make sure your invention is not destructive and harmful to *people*. *People*. *People* and their society is above code, which is merely an inventor’s instruction to a machine. Code is not magical. It is the aggregation of the will of one person or a group of persons; it’s not special, it’s just mechanical, and needs to be brought to heel, just like automobiles on roads need stoplights, traffic rules, etc.
The code kiddies on these opensim grids are like assholes building cars and then saying “oh, we don’t care if people drive around in them and crash and burn and kill each other, in fact that’s kinda fun lulz”.
No. Policy doesn’t “have” to be made outside. It has to be made inside. And if these coders won’t make it under the rule of law under international and universal norms of common sense, then they’ll find that governments and international agencies will do it on top of them and push them aside as the lawless fucks they are.
For you to say that code shouldn’t submit to policy and law, Dusan, it really quite atrocious, given your awareness of what is missing from these worlds.
Essentially, what Justin is saying when you tentatively scuttle away and abdicate to this licentious freak the right to rule *your* world at his *whim* is that his “freedoms” to “innovate” are curbed if he has to think of these “hard” things now and he “doesn’t wanna”.
He shrugs it off to “modulars” on other grids, and merely helps spawn the licentiousness and lawlessness.
Of course you can code policy and law into code, Dusan. Linden Lab, after a torturous route, has been forced to do this themselves.
Example: group tool reforms. They begin with a happy-go-lucky hippie group in which all property is collective, and all property can be sold by anybody regardless of their payment. This seemed like the perfect collective — but it went wrong as such communism always does because it relied on the dirty little secret of code-as-law — tribal understandings.
So they went back and built in checks — founders could now designate who got money and who didn’t; who could put the land to sale and who couldn;t; who could even access the land and who couldn’t. The rule of law, put forth over code and inanimate structures to make a decent human community, where before there was chaos and crime.
Here’s another example: permissions for copy/mod/transfer. Yes, they are hackable. Yes, they are imperfect. But no, they don’t merely signal intention, they work as a mechanical check on theft. Adam and co. couldn’t concede this. But it’s a good example where criminality can be avoided just by good and simple code that doesn’t make it easy for people to steal.
Both of these examples — and there are thousands more — are *coded into the code*, Dusan, so stop being so skittish and politically correct about not touching the blessed Code All Hail the Sacred Code and impeaching on some snotty code kiddy’s precious “creativity”.
Here’s a baked-in-mistake: opensource software and forcible conversion of proprietary virtual worlds into opensource server and client code. It’s not necessary to have interoperability; it’s not necessary to make them grow. The Internet didn’t grow because of Linux or Apache or whatever; it grew because ebay and amazon had proprietary code enabling people to buy and sell safely and retain valuation of property. Virtual worlds can’t skip that step.
At this stage we’re ‘doomed’ to evolve rather than be intelligently designed.
Doesn’t that sum up the fuck-you hedonism of the code kiddy *perfectly*? Good Lord!
In fact, even evolution as portrayed by hardcore Darwinisms is full of examples of how those “evolving” were wiped out completely by an intelligent design they couldn’t acknowledge that privileged, say, thinking animals that evolved tools and made civilizations and worked out rules to prevent mindless survival killing as in the jungle, rather than remaining as monkeys.
If Darwin was right about Darwinism, human beings would have become extinct long ago.
>(By the way, I’d be just as happy to take content protection off the table during the first ’round’ just so it doesn’t become a flash point and leave it for later).
Too bad content makers can’t be dragged along on this expedition of yours.
@ last commentor:
Is it possible for you to use a respectful tone? This is an interesting topic and insulting language and uncalled for attacks ruin the discussion. It seems every other line in your comments are design to inflame rather than ad anything useful to the discussion.
Dusan, great article, thanks for sharing your thoughts with us.
You honour me with your article, Dusan; thanks very much!
Some comments popped up in my mind as I read it, though. “Interoperability” is actually slightly more important than that, IMHO. I actually was unaware of LL’s forthcoming “grid in a box” product (I just heard about “running your own LL servers behind your corporate firewall, which I now understand to be more than I thought, e.g. having your own set of asset servers, inventory servers, login servers and so on), but it so totally makes sense as a new business product to be launched for 2009. As someone said, giving the choice of getting a complete solution to run your own grid totally independently of LL, getting support from a team that does it for 5 or 6 years, and technology that had been field-proven for that time — or start from scratch with pre-alpha software with little real use, well, I guess that the choice is quite obvious of what corporations (and some universities!) will pick! Also, getting good “gridmins” (grid administrators) with enough expertise to run even a small OpenSim-based grid is hard at this moment in time.
Gwyn: Thanks for the thanks and back at you. The ‘grid in a box’ idea is speculation, but public statements by M and others on the Lab side, remarks by Zha at an Orange Island event, and Justin’s comments all point in that direction.
This whole discussion is fascinating and, at times, a little infuriating.
Prok, I don’t mean to sound like content protection is something I’d want OFF the table. I’m willing to test the idea of having policy discussions on another topic, if it would ease anyone’s anxieties. However, the only purpose in doing that is so that a model can be developed which could then apply to content protection.
In any case, this isn’t my expedition, and I don’t intend to drag anyone along anywhere. I’ve stated enough times, I think, that openSim is missing the opportunity of a lifetime. Someone, somewhere is coming up with their own virtual world technology that isn’t based on how to code prims, but will be based on developing something that builds on ideas around policy, trust and protection. Maybe Microsoft haha.
Time will tell, but I guess I’m on the record now. They’re blowing it. And ironically, the people who clean up the mess will be the big corporations which the open source types so typically deride.
Karl – thanks so much for the link.
No.
I will not be using a respectful tone – especially the sort of net-nanny tone you wish for in sanitized discussions, making your call from an anonymous avatar. Why? Because those attempting to control the metaverse and its contents aren’t respectful of diversity and freedom, either, and only the strongest possible pushback is what they will understand, to understand that they cannot steamroll over people’s concerns.
Even Dusan is forced to say “cut the crap” — and rightly so. Cut the goddamn crap. Dusan is politically correct even in his forcefulness and talks about an, um, “stunning lack of imagination”. I call it “fuck-you hedonism” — which is, “I get to do WTF I want and fuck you”. Same thing. Deal with it.
Justin isn’t respectful of private property, IP, business, and commerce — except for his own, his friends’, and his RL job’s, which of course he’s happy to privilege. He shrugs off the need to create a regime that such commerce as he enjoys with his RL client is enabled for all.
This is war, and it is war that needs fighting, and I will use as much force as I need to verbally in fighting it. If you are troubled, shield your eyes. Of course Dusan may block me from his blog but that will only call more attention to my posts as I will simply put them on my blog and link them.
Dusan, you’ve copped out here, as I indicated. Giving these thugs a pass is morally wrong and has terrible repercussions. And you aren’t as robust as you need to be on copyright protection precisely because you’ve joined the mad rush, with all the shills and stupidities of Creative Commons and so on, and are adopting the politically correct posture on this as all modern cool dudes want to adopt.
You’ve made another point that is worth contemplating as it unfolds: that so often, opensource is a terrible fraud perpetrated by big business that exploits the hopes and dreams of young people throwing themselves under the bus coding their eyes out. It’s a cynical way to get cheap labour and have no accountability. It’s no accident, comrade, that IBM is all over this like a cheap suit.
yep.. what the she/he said:)
Whats really “funny” is that the “open source” mantra is one of the key things that Killed vr worlds and web3d in the 1997-2000 go round called VRML/web3d. AND these new 20 year old “braniac” vr gurus–who so openly attacked the old guard of vrml, are doing the SAME exact things that made the old guard, well old and obsolete..lol
Open standards = good open source= scam. IP protection= REQUIRED!
So funny, so sad, so true.
c3
Hmm…Prok, your comments are appreciated. Last thing I ever want to do is cop out.
With regards to shills and mad rush, um…well, I’m not sure where that’s coming from? Which part of my posture is it that you’re calling politically correct?
My posture is basically the following:
- OpenSim is losing a tremendous opportunity to innovate because it’s ignoring policy as a source of insight into ways that the code can be developed to provide enduring, lasting value.
- In the absence of this, per Gwyn’s comments as an example, trust will be difficult to establish, and the ‘genie will be out of the bottle’. What’s interesting about how that plays out, is that it is the large companies, the IBMs or Ciscos of the world, who will most likely step into the breach because they understand BUSINESS, they can establish trust (with wider enterprise, etc), and they’re not shy about patents, law and IP protection when it suits them.
I’m not sure if this ‘posture’ makes me a CC shill, it certainly doesn’t feel like it. And I don’t remember ever posting my detailed thoughts on all that – I’ve fairly consistently argued that IP protection, commerce, business innovation, and paying people for work done are all good things. I’d also argue that open source has distinct domains in which it’s valuable, but I ring warning bells the best I can, where I feel knowledgeable enough to comment.
When Harvard Business Review ran a cover story that was basically titled “How You Can Take Advantage of Open Source” and then laid out a 5 step plan or whatever on how companies can lure free talent into coding software – well, that pretty much says it all.
The above is just a theory. We’ll see how it all plays out. But let’s face it, the motivation of people coding openSim is the challenge, or maybe little dreams of becoming the next Linus or getting a primo job somewhere coding protected, patented software. Otherwise it’s hobbyist stuff, and my main argument is that if you ARE one of those hobbyists, keep your eyes open because this isn’t going to turn out as you intended.
Most likely a few “top coders” will end up privatizing, the rest will be left with dribs and drabs, and the platform will “truly innovate” when a company that cares about the business opportunities around identity, security and IP protection steps in, creates proprietary systems on top of or as an adjunct or based on the lessons learned of OpenSim, and walks off with the win.
OR. its not theory. but history repeating.
youll see.
c3
Dusan Writer wrote “… the platform will “truly innovate” when a company that cares about the business opportunities around identity, security and IP protection steps in, creates proprietary systems on top of or as an adjunct or based on the lessons learned of OpenSim, and walks off with the win.”
Mr Mitch Kapor believes Linden Lab going to walk off with the win. I believe him. SecondLife the only one with a working economy. Without that then I think that any other alternative world based off the SL/OSim code just going to be a game played by enthusiasts who just in it for the fun or the codey cred like you say.
One of the things Ive noticed is the new efforts from what little Ive seen of them just doing what SL does already more or less. Sure can get more stuff like prims etc but is just more of the same stuff we can get already in SL without the economy and the LL reputation behind it.
The worldview itself hasnt changed in those efforts a whole lot. I think maybe that anyone looking at what might be possible with the OSim base could think about creating an alternative worldview to that already offered by SL. Otherwise is a bit like trying to outAnse Ms Anse Chung. Mr Desmond Shang come the closest to this and so has USS. But they have different worldviews to Ms Chung and is why they having success.
Codey stuff is great and all that. But the user doesnt really care. Well I dont anyways. SL code OS code OG code yada yada so what really. As long as code goes I really dont care how.
Is a bit like my car. I just hop in and turn the key and go. As long as it does that I dont really care about anything else really. Except for the colour.
LL sell me a white car. It goes quite good. But I dont really want another white car even if goes better than the one I got already. I want a blue car or a red one even =) and maybe I get one oneday hopefully. Because I look way better driving down to the mall in colour =)