mrtopf.de

As I understand it, it's everything except the people and the content.

by Tateru Nino on 21.6.2008 at 21:47. Reply #

I asked a lot of questions of Lindens about this at VW08 in New York, and you're not going to like the answer: the Second Life grid is basically anybody who connects to the Linden Lab servers.

Now, do people who have their own grids feel as if they have ceded their autonomy and become part of the "Second Life grid" merely for connecting to Second Life, i.e. the central asset servers?

No, of course not, they bristle at the idea, most of them.

Another way to look at this is "anyone using the Second Life software". I'm not sure if Lindens put it this way, but it opens up the question of those who use the software to work offline on their own hosted sims or on open-sim, i.e. they use the viewer, which is open-sourced.

What is "the software," after awhile, when it is adapted and changed, and if they open-source the server code, so that anyone could run it on any separate grid, and never connect up to anything owned by Linden Lab ever again, in theory?

Well, perhaps, they, too are all part of the family called "Second Life Grid"?

I'm not bothered by proprietary companies with proprietary code and private servers the way you are. I think in fact, as paradoxically as it may seem to you, these "walled garden" facets are part of what made it possible for Second Life to be as free and open as it is now, with an open and free economy and liberal society. Otherwise, it would merely be the private reserve of a cabal of open-source corders — few other people would be able to access it due to lack of knowledge or not being in the right IRC channel. It's like the way no average, normal person uses Linux on their home computer.

When you have things like Mozilla that are open source and "used by everybody," there isn't a business model to sustain it fully. It is sustained because "visionaries" like Mitch Kapor fund-raise and make it a non-profit that survives on donations of money and enthusiastic coders' voluntary time. It's not a way to pay for something far more complex like a 3-D streaming virtual world, however, nor a way to populate it.

by Prokofy Neva on 21.6.2008 at 21:48. Reply #

Tao, saying that something "never has worked" and "will never work for the future" is having a closed, non-scientific mind, and isn't conducive to an open, liberal, and democratic debate on a very complex issue like this.

Walled gardens continue to "work" today. AOL is one of them. Who has the largest network of teenagers talking to each other in the known universe? AOL, with its AIM, downloadable for free from this company with proprietary software, with a walled garden AOL network with enormous numbers of email users still, to this day, despite the disparagement of them by geeks.

Walled gardens have more gadzillions of customers than open-source or shareware or free — WoW, Habbo, etc. have the overwhelming lion's share of customers for virtual worlds and games.

Walled gardens aren't inherently non-growable or non-scaleable — look at WoW. And look at AIM, coming out of AOL. Depends on what it is you are scaling, and how intensive it is.

Virtual worlds are very heavy things. They are resource intensive and require high-end graphic cards to see; they require lots of computer space and ability to hold; they require enormous complex data bases and programmings to make interactive, with customized content. *That all costs money*. The stone-soup opensource tip jar approach isn't going to cut it.

If you like lighter virtual worlds and games, why not go play on Metaspace or look at one of the many other kinds of things out there that promises to be more open and more adaptable to all kinds of geeky customized widget-making, which is usually the concern for the anti-walled-garden gang. And yet you don't. You continue to bang on Second Life for not being open. Perhaps you are not engaged by 2-D characters and worldlets. OK, then see my above point *again* — making 3-D is heavy, expensive, complex. Costs money!

There is "choice" — as long as you don't mind the "choice" being Ruth, no inventory, no economy, and not taking inventory across sims, or whatever opensim limitations there are. Chose, then! And make those more robust with all the toys you are crowing about like RealXtend.

I don't feel the Lindens are making a lot of bad decisions. I'm seeing that they are making decisions to take themselves away from "thecommunity" which is merely the extremist early adapters who always bitch and moan when the love-fest beta-test era is over and the platform has to be mainstreamed. They have to secure their trademarks if they want to stay in business, have a viable mark, and make money.

How did you expect them to go on making software updates, Tao? Do you expect them to pull together a gaggle of teenage weapons makers in Mom's basement and obsessive corporate IT guys like IBMers with disposable time to play in SL even on the company's dime? Is that viable or practical?

In fact, I think LL and IBM and others are working overtime to make this as much on track toward opensource and interoperability as they can — in fact if anything, people like me criticize them for not minding the store and making issues like IP and permissions and land value paramount in their deliberations.

by Prokofy Neva on 21.6.2008 at 23:53. Reply #

Tao, most of the time you *are* talking about open-source, and "open standards" is in this context just code words for "interoperability" and that leads you to…open source, so that's a bit of sleight of hand there.

What are "open standards"? Standards that, in this context, one entity imposes on others that are smaller and weaker.

The Internet didn't just "evolve" because it was all open sourced. It wasn't. And whatever open *standards* came about from the Internet didn't happen on a short time frame; and happened with things that didn't involve having to endanger IP per se.

The open standards or universal standards for various protocols were made to enable people to link to each other's pages, to read pages, to search pages. Those are all laudable functions to have open standards about. But that isn't what a world is — a world is not a page.

A link on a page is a reference to enable you to press and go read that page. That's a different, lighter, and less IP-exposing process than interoperability to enable walking between worlds, having one avatar to visit many worlds, having inventory port, having expectations of similar functionality like land terraforming or gravity or physics or flying, etc. etc. VERY DIFFERENCE.

I think once you drop the constant insistence on making the metaphor for Virtual Worlds be "the Internet" just because it relates to the internet, and make the metaphor be actual real-life countries, you start to have less facile and insistent and accelerated oneworldism.

There is no universal passport. No global currency. No global standards even of metrics. No global government — and thank God for that. "Open standards" pushing on all those things would only erode the highest standards that some countries have in these areas, and cause demolition of the economies of others (that's why people criticize globalization, remember?)

"Everybody" doing software updates sounds like often it doesn't work, and becomes a nightmare of dysfunction, and that has been said, even by those who are part of the OS movement. And no, it's not a different topic.

by Prokofy Neva on 22.6.2008 at 00:54. Reply #

BTW, one way to simply define what the "Second Life Grid" is to log on and see the splash screen. And it says in the upper right-hand corner that this thing called the "Second Life Grid" is "up" or "down" and then it has its blogs, like "Resolved: Log-ins Restricted".

So that way, you know that that thing about which they are talking about is the thing that's the SL Grid.

If you follow me.

So that thing that's down, when it's down, is the Second Life Grid. If *your* thing isn't down when connected to that down thing, then you're not the SL Grid.

Right?

by Prokofy Neva on 22.6.2008 at 04:10. Reply #

@Christian @tateru
The relationship might better be put in a formula like
Second Life = Second Life Grid + Residents + Content

… currently

by Markus Breuer (Pham on 22.6.2008 at 17:28. Reply #