Die englische Übersetzung meines Artikels Erfolgsfaktoren für SecondLife wurde im SecondLife Herald veröffentlicht: Taking Second Life to the next level
Das erste Flame ist auch schon eingetrudelt. Aber die Finger habe ich mir noch nicht verbrannt …

I am a programmer, webdeveloper and 2D and 3D graphics designer, with more than 25 years of experience. My focus when creating products is always on usability for non-technical end users, including extremely clear documentation.

I have been wandering around in SL for a while and have paid attention to the technical aspects, but automatically I also am forced to think about the (non-technical) user experience.

As a consequence I have to agree with the general points made by Steff Wade. Eventhough he is not speaking abut “open source” (which means source code included, free to modify and redistribute) he speaks of open technologies. The best term would be “open standards”, like all the internet protocols are open standards, like HTML and XML are opne standards, and so on.

The open standards are what makes the net tick. Nobody has a monopoly, there are no hidden features, and probably most importantly, it makes interoperability between vastly different architectures possible. I.e. The same webpage will display on a PC, a Mac or a Linux box. The same emails can be sent between these systems, etc.

And these open standards do not stand in the way of proprietary code, commercial applications, or any other business operations. The actually help facilitate them.

Integrating the web, email and ftp into Second Life is almost inevitable, because it brings the biggest portion of internet activity into the realm of SL. Fortunately Linden Labs is also aware of this detail. In 2005 they mentioned integration of the (open source *wink*) webbrowser FireFox into SL : http://secondlife.com/vote/get_feature.php?get_id=5

SL also has created a connection between in-world Instant Messages and email, so you can receive your Instant Messages in your email in-box and so your responses via email are received as Instant Messages in-world. All this will probably be expanded into a full fledged email system.

Since there are quite a lot of open source FTP programs for all the major platforms, it should not be too difficult to integrate FTP as well.

Next to that, Linden Labs has now open sourced its viewer application : http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3652796

The other important issue that Steff mentions, is “external access”. In slightly more concrete language, people need to be able to make their textures, sounds, prims, gestures, and all other assets with some program of their choosing, even when they are OFFLINE.

The reason is that this will make things more accessible to non-technical people, eventhough Urizenus seems to think otherwise. There already are a lot of people who know how to work with a great variety of content creation programs, although they can not really be called technical people. They are creative end users.

There already are some plugins popping up for use with Blender and 3D Studio Max, so prim building can be done offline, and then imported into SL. Personally I hope that this development continues.

One more note about user created content in SL. It is nice and dandy that the end user license agreement states that content creators retain copyrights of their creations. However, witout the option of saving your own creations offline on your own computers, that particular clause is almost meaningless.

By allowing people to export their own objects, it will further reduce the distinction between the virtual and the real world.

Personally, I hope that the use of open standards and integration of open source products will continue, and that Linden Labs will have the business sense to give end users (technical, non-technical and commercial) more leverage. Because THAT is what can make or break SL.

I hope that instead of petty namecalling, future posts will be about the actual content of the posts.

Perhaps you’re the one who needs the label. ‘The Disingenuous Labeler’. Yes. I think that fits.

Stef, Prokov is no tekkie nor he knows about what OS (open-source) and FS (free (as freedom) software) are. Maintain a discussion may be tricky because of miss-concepts.
Proprietary software usually match with closed source software.
Prokov, these terms are a bit complex to be debated without some tekkie knowledge:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source

The SL grid lives over a free software structure. Well, i am writing this post on a linux machine. I run SL on the Linux client. When Fugazi says:

“Prok brings some good questions to the table, but the truth is that the answers are pretty much apparent. You just have to pay attention”

…i do feel like posting a smile too
The inventory (etc) backup can be done without OS. A simple public API call can manage it.

Take this open source:
# Piett Code followed by a GPL license…
class Mixin
attr_accessor :a, :b
def initialize(a, b)
@a, @b = a, b
end
def >
puts “Yep!” if @a > @b
end
end
test = Mixin.new(2,1)
test.>

Now build or run that open-source code.
Or take a closed binary file:
./Mixin (Mixin.exe for Windows)

If i register that code with a, say, GPL license, you can use, change, copy, give it. In this case, someone could fork LL’s SL and create a 3L. But it would have to be GPL’ed too. And this makes the world evolve in a community way, and may the best win. Take profit out of it ? I can collect the same fees like LL’s SL. But if someone creates a 4L, better then my 3L, i may start to loose clients. Or not.

I’m too tired now, and maybe you are not getting to my point. The thing is, all these are *points*. You can use the strategy you want (LL in this case). This discussion exists for more than 30 years, and still no “consensus” was found.
Take Microsoft Windows and Torvalds Linux Kernel. Windows is closed source proprietary software, but they have API’s (Win32 API). Linux kernel is open source free software. I can build up a Piett Kernel based on Linux in 10 secs. But i have to say that it is based on Linux Kernel and print the license. I can sell it. I can give it away. I am free. Here, if quality is not assured, the product dies before it was born. Plus, it is given a chance to never die. Hard to read and understand others code ? You bet. Terrible. Highly complex, sometimes. Just for geeks. But as i said, the world is complex. You get features by adding complexity to objects.

Passing all this to SL. Have you heard about SETI@Home project ?
This is a distributed computing project. Berkeley Univ. had powerful servers choking radio signal data to find, simplifying, patterns. They were investing a lot to maintain those servers. Suddenly someone created a form of distributing the heavy task of iterating through the signal among the millions of home/enterprise computers, so that Berkeley servers only get the results to verify their authenticity and post/store. This made the processing power raise exponentially. This made the community gather around this project and embrace it, so that from single home users with no astronomy knowledge, to IBM/HP/…/Google like companies, there’s a huge will to make the project go forward, and even see who chokes more data. Who wins ? It’s a win/win situation.
LL can allow the creation of small, controled, personall grids, without loosing a bit of their business. They for sure will increase it, as i can serve a small local community on my small grid. All this controlled by a central LL grid. And finally all this with proprietary *or* non_proprietary software for the:
- Main Grid
- Client or Satellite Grids
- Clients

This, i bet, is the LL SL future. Then they can mashup services in and outside. I bet LL is brainstorming a lot to define *the path*.

Finally, this is a very nice discussion we could have inside.
Stef, Prokov, Csven, Fugazi, Tomas, shall we meet inside to have a chat on this ? We could even build a small conference named “SL::Next_Step.InformalTalks”, invite some Electric Sheep, MillionsOfUs,…, LibsecondLife, Linden guys/gals. Who’s on ?

piett.hesse@gmail.com

I sense some projected fears myself.

Firstly, how does a user who pays for content (E.G.: an avatar, a suit of clothes, a nifty gadget) carry that item reliably from independent server to independent server? What if the servers have different “rules” that disallow features and functions the person running the avatar paid for? Would you trust “Joe Anonymous” to host your inventory and transact your Lindens?

Maybe we solve these problems by making each server isolated. But if each server is an isolated “world” with its own set of rules and very limited interconnect between them, how is this a “metaverse”? It isn’t: its a bunch of isolated pockets.

What people calling for private/independent ownership of Second Life sims often do is call out how successful the Internet has been with privately owned HTTP servers. True, but browsers on the web carry no “presence” with them. Other people browsing a web page that I’m on can’t “see” me. They don’t have to know what I’m transacting, and do not view any form of stateful representation of what I’m doing. The content I view and access on one page does not need to be carried over to the next page and faithfully reproduced, stored, and executed there. These are non-trivial differences.

Personally, I like the idea of opening up the interface to permit different “views” into Second Life- perhaps customized clients, externalized mechanisms for building and managing content and the like. I am much less fond of the idea of splintering the world itself into thousands of privately owned and isolated “shards”.

* “Integration” and “connecting” and “working together” do NOT mean open source. The more you write, the more I get the impression you don’t know what open source is and what it is not. MS-IIS can server pages into the internet just as the Netscape server did, just like apache does. No problem for the internet.

* The point which lead me to stop this discussion is: Open-Source does NOT mean communism. I run a business myself. But this is probably not the forum to discuss that.

Yes, I realize the whole Internet is based on open source, and Ll uses open source too, but my questions remain legitimate.

When you say, “Open Servers: Do I need to have my Sim hosted at Linden Lab or can other servers be integrated into the metaverse? — that IS open-source. How did you think I would host my own server, yet connect that server up to LL’s server farm? With…what?

I would hope that whatever happens, SL will be sold with the stuff on it.

Yes, licensing is something they might do, too, and make people pay a bundle to be able to do that host-your-own thing. Essentially the emulation of that on private islands now is being priced out of the market for individual proprietors with no resources.

No, I didn’t “project,” I just read the same set of theses I’ve read 100 times before from tekkies about SL, over and over again. Google “open source” or “host server” with Second Life on Google.

Nobody, yeah, the answers are there, and they involve “having tekkie utopian socialists devalue my land investment and creations,” I realize that. And, no, that’s not progress. Merely in the name of training a legion of script -kiddies to work for the next big thing created by bigger corporations.

Yes, your Lenin said he would sell them the rope…

Prok brings some good questions to the table, but the truth is that the answers are pretty much apparent. You just have to pay attention.