Virtual World Platforms

Cracks in the Open, Source of Frustration for OpenSim?

OpenSim is open source - a reverse engineer of the Second Life platform, and while the idea is to let others build on the source, there’s also an expectation that there’s a quid pro quo at play. That’s the point of open source afterall - do what you want with it, but give something back, it’s a community afterall.

RealXtend, which has received a lot of play over at OS promoters like UgoTrade, may not be giving back what it takes according to Justin Clark-Casey:

Unfortunately, to the best of my knowledge, the amount of code OpenSim has received from realXtend so far is precisely zero. None of the realXtend developers have submitted patches to our Mantis system. Although their code has been released under BSD license and can be found on Sourceforge, it appears to be based on an old version of OpenSim at around version 0.4 (it’s hard to tell for sure). This means anybody extracting features from it without a very good knowledge of the code would often face the same uphill task as before. We largely don’t have the manpower or, as volunteers, the inclination to go and do that.

Now, I want to make it clear that I have absolutely nothing against realXtend and wish them every success. After all, under our BSD licensing there’s absolutely no obligation for them to contribute code to us. And we’re also very keen to enable other organizations and individuals to build on top of OpenSim, whether their code is proprietary or open source. However, it does seem a big shame when realXtend talk about a base track to fix stability issues that none of this basic infrastructure work, at the very least, is finding its way back into OpenSim to benefit the community as a whole.

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