New Logo for SL? Or New Business Model?
by prokofy on 22/04/07 at 7:54 pm
By Prokofy Neva, Kremlindenologist
If you look closely at the new SL Brasil web page that will launch the Brazilian community in Second Life with official Linden support tomorrow, you’ll see an interesting new logo: “Second Life Grid”. It’s a logo separate from the Kaizen Games: SL Global Provider” to the left of it, and appears to be a logo made by Linden Lab itself (although this could not be confirmed).
What is “Second Life Grid”? Well, if you paid attention to what Joe Linden said at Virtual Worlds 07, in his somewhat hastily flipped PowerPoint slides, there was this comment, which he reiterated, which went like this: “Second Life will not succeed if LL is the only company on the Grid.”
Mark Wallace at 3pointd.com quoted it differently: “SL cannot truly succeed as long as one company controls the Grid.”
I’ll bow to Mark’s superior gaming conference note-taking and blogging skills, but getting the doctrine coming out of the California cultists does matter (on the grid or own the grid?), because it points to their future business model of Linden Lab, and our fate, if we own or use land (server space) in SL.
UPDATE: GLOBAL PROVIDER PROGRAMME
I’ve learned from talking to knowledgeable Europeans that when Robin Harper visited Europe recently, she spoke of an “SL Global Provider Programme”. Basically, if you subscribe to this program, you get a reduced purchase price for sims, and use of the logo. It’s designed for larger communities who can bring in lots of new customers quickly and take care of them. The communities are still housed on LL servers. (Naturally, those of us in SL who take care of thousands of customers on sims we pay full-freight for would like a provider program like this, but that’s another story).
Kaizen is evidently a subscriber to this new Global Provider Programme, part of the new concept of the “Second Life Grid” which is basically a new marketing tool — for now. In time, these will be the nodes of host-your-own that will be spun off, but still remain on the GrID.
WHEN WILL THE LINDENS OPEN SOURCE…AND HOW?
Mitch Wagner has done the most consistent analysis of the Lindens’ intentions about OS, riffing off Hamlet nee Linden Au, but I felt it necessary to add some important contextual points in the comments.
Mitch reported Hamlet’s interview with Henry Jenkins (yes, this is recursive, and involves 3 concentric blogs/websites) as “news” that the Lindens are open-sourcing the servers, not just the client. I pointed out it isn’t new news, but with the Kremlindens, you have to read each new spin about each new story of a successful harvest and and the overfullfilling of tractor production norms for signs of success or failure behind the pat propaganda.
Are they hurrying more toward open source than they were six months ago, six weeks ago? Have they prepositioned their claxons like Hamlet to “prepare the public” for something sooner rather than later?
I did drill Joe Miller on exactly what he was talking about after his talk at VW 07. I asked him if LL would ever consider parallel grids that were a kind of better SL 2.0 for businesses or universities. Wouldn’t the temptation be too great to make a less laggy and less blingy SL for professional use without the rest of us? He looked at me and began talking about “host-your-own,” which isn’t what I meant. I mean the half-way house on the way to host-your-own, which would be licensing this revolutionary, world-famous, fabulously exciting software to a select list of companies for large fees, i.e. making bank before open-sourcing. I had to keep asking the question different ways.
‘NOT PHILIP’S BUSINESS MODEL’
Finally, the grey-templed Joe, who is one of three grown-ups now at SL (I was told officially by a junior Linden, the other 2 being Robin, and a new Linden named Claudia), looked off into the middle distances of a 512 m2 draw that simply is not possible on my laggy blingy sims with my not-optimal graphics card. “It is technically feasible,” he said, cautiously. “But it’s not Philip’s business model.” That suggests that it is an article of religious faith that could be dispensed with if the founding father moves on or if the religious doctrine changes (now that the Pope has decided to deprecate Limbo, I figure it’s more than possible that the Lindens might change their doctrines about All Hail the Central Holy Hail Central Grid — did I get that right, Khamon? — or more importantly, their doctrines about Unity in Diversity).
WHAT IS THE SL GRID?
So what is the ‘Second Life Grid”? The “Second Life Grid” that is shown in this little checkerboard logo with the middle panel opening like…well, I couldn’t help thinking right away of those panels that opened when Hal was losing his memory, right before he began singing “Daisy, Daisy…”
We’ve gotten used to thinking of the Grid as the thing that the Central Asset Asshat Server has to feed, for better or worse — often worse these days. If you are on the outer edges, on the Texas servers, at peak concurrency, not only do you have boots up your ass you’re likely unable to open a notecard or rez a damn thing. People assume “The SL Grid” is the “LL Grid” and think that if there is an open-sourced SL it will be, well, just the Internet Out There, not “A Grid”.
But what if the Grid weren’t connected from an asset server, but strung along various server farms around the world, each of which had their own asset servers. How would they connect? When I asked Philip himself the question at VW07 about whether he could consider having that bling-free SL 2.0, he immediately said “No” (and didn’t say it was technically feasible). He began talking about prims, about prim permissions, about stuff that wouldn’t transport.
DOES MY STUFF COME WITH?
“But…who is really going to want to transfer *that stuff,* Philip?” I asked pointedly. I mean IBM or Sony doesn’t need my 17,000 pieces of inventory including prefabs and freebie t-shirts and my monacle, which I think has 250 prims in it. They’ll *make their own stuff* and they *don’t need stuff to transfer from the rest of us*. I ask this pointedly as someone who has lost thousands of items of inventory lately, as have many others. How can they care? How can we care, about the transfer issue anymore?
Of course, it would go against the egalitarian “we are the wu’ar’ld” and “commuuunity” and “we don’t help companies” sort of philosophy the Lindens have promoted since Word One. But you know, they may not have that luxury any more if they can’t scale the thing! And people might be willing to say, “I don’t care about my inventory anymore, just give me an SL 2.0 that works!”
THE VIRTUAL GRID
But what if the Grid was a different, virtual Grid? Not actually connected wires/servers whatever, since people will be hosting their own most definitely, if Mitch Kapor and Joe Miller and Philip Rosedale have all said this in the last 6 months, even without a timetable.
What if the Grid was a kind of Concept in their minds, a Culture, that could range from standard protocols (something IBM has been interested in) or standard operating procedures for how you set up basic welcoming areas, or any of a host of things that go into world management. Or what if it was a political philosophy, that consisted of that wierd amalgam of California hippie anarcho-syndicalism, Soviet-style state capitalism, and Snow Crashian anarcho-capitalism that the Lindens lurch around with? What if the Lindens went ranging the world and finding their technically/culturally/politically like-minded comfort-level kindred folks, and made a GrID that doesn’t require an assert server literally, but virtually assures that the replication of their mindmemes will continue until the heat-death of the sun?
Well that’s what they’re already doing, duh. The Lindens are busy now roaming the world, opening up offices, and making foreign non-English language editions. There’s a Dutch one (not clear if that is with official blessing or not), one to open in Korea as we understand, or so on. The world versions of SL offer the perfect opportunity to lay down the tracks for the GrID (I’ll call it that to emphasize the *identity* that the Lindens want it to have) as distinct from the Grid as commonly understood to mean just these server farms that talk to each other).
LINDENS COMPETE WITH THEIR OWN CUSTOMERS
As I noted on Mark’s blog discussing the Brazilian version to launch tomorrow, there were already 2 Brasil islands packing 100 people constantly on their sim without camp chairs, that evidently had nothing to do with the Lindens or their global providers, and which simply took off like a rocket due to socializing in groups and event planning. Russians at TechInvest Island also made their own welcome area and website without any Lindens actually being harmed in the process lol.
The non-US and non-UK population is soaring. Americans and British who were the early pioneers have eaten their fill of laggy servers and non-performing sims and quite a few have left in disgust or cashed out because business has just gotten too hard for a lot of reasons (end of subsidies, uncertainty of customer flow, poor sim performance, casino advertising ban). But a surge of people from other countries are pouring in the door, on the media bounce overseas, and they haven’t gotten discouraged yet, in part because some of them come from cultures that simply have more patience, less demand for quick cause-effect and ROI, and well, more culture. The content explosion from Japanese, Brazilians, Germans is starting to be seen, and will constitute a significant competition to Americans who thought they pwned the place.
I’m still wondering what the numbers are for non-American *concurrency* because I see that number go way down in the hours when Europe is asleep. But I know from the flood of German, Brazilian, French, Japanese, and Russian customers in my rentals and other rentals that there’s no turning back, Americans are not the significant portion of the population any longer.
WHAT IS THE NEW LL BUSINESS MODEL?
Yet the GrID will be forged with American cultic ideologies, drawn from a hodge-podge of secular humanism, Stephenson Snowcrashism, Silicon Valley hubris — with enough anti-American disestablishmententarianism and lefty ideology to make common cause with Europeans and Asians.
Can the GrID sell as a kind of glocalization scheme? What ARE these services the Lindens will sell? I remain curious by this, though I can imagine that keeping a kind of Grand Central Station style mainland open for orientation, prototyping, market sampling, load testing, version testing will be likely — but not essential (it could be done with a fraction of the size it is now).
Mitch Wagner rightly speculates that becoming a not-for-profit is an option, helping other companies adapt and making the software upgrades, or becoming a services organization like any other metaversal agency. Then, as I would put it, they’d be in competition with their own hellspawn, the metaversal myrmidons. These are quite distinct possibilities.
I’ve always said that if they don’t morph to become a non-profit (they’re well suited to become one, as they have not made a profit in 7 years), they will spin one off, for educational purposes, with 501-c-3 status. This will be vital especially for the ideological component of the GrID. And the venture capitalists they have now are very idealistic men who also engage in philanthropy, so it’s not too hard for them to convert a VC infusion into a grant.
There is that ah…liquidity event that Mitch talked about, and for that, we could expect that they’ll just sell the SEARCH functions to Google.
Transatlantic telephone cable, jet plane travel, faxes, email, the Internet, all shrunk the distances in the Global Village. Yet shrinking the distances arguably has led to greater cultural friction and even greater warfare in some places. We may be able to p2p to a French sim, but if we don’t speak French like a native, we’ll likely encounter the same chilliness we could experience on the streets of Paris itself. The ugly American doesn’t get prettier, being streamed in 3-D.
Ah, but there will be the Lindens, smoothing the way, moderating, modulating, modifying, making the GrID. People who have made the future have always been those skilled at conversion and translation, and I don’t think LL will disappoint in whatever version of the Grid or GrID they create. There is that ominous image of the Titanic, however, as a somber reminder of what happens when you cut technological corners, go too fast, and get too arrogant about the crossing.
Eric Rice
Apr 22nd, 2007
I want my own grid. It will be open to all. Those interested in its content would visit and/or stay.
I might visit other grids if there’s something there that I want, but yeah.
My grid, please.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 22nd, 2007
But can you make a tree look good and wave it in the wind like the Lindens do, Eric? Youth wants to know…
Baba
Apr 22nd, 2007
Very thought provoking Prokofy. Six months or a year or two. Something is going to happen and things are going to blow up(copybot x100 style).. “The Grid” might look very different afterwards.
Eddy Stryker
Apr 23rd, 2007
“But can you make a tree look good and wave it in the wind like the Lindens do, Eric? Youth wants to know…”
Not sure if that was metaphorical or a direct question, but the simulator represents trees using only a few bytes of data, and the viewer is responsible for making a good looking tree wave in the wind (where the wind is a few more bytes of data for the simulator, all of this already supported by the OpenSim project).
Prokofy Neva
Apr 23rd, 2007
Screenshots, or it’s not happening, Eddy. and yes, you’re answering literally.
Nicholaz Beresford
Apr 23rd, 2007
I also think, years from now The Grid will be an open net like the 2D internet is now and sims will run the way, HTML servers like Apache are running today (that is at home, on provider’s CPU farms, etc.). There may not be an Open version available today that is as good as SL, but eventually there will. Not this year, not next … but either Linden will make it Open or they will eventually be surpassed by someone who buys them out (IBM, Google, MSFT, …) and/or does things up from scratch and learned from their errors (Crochet, OpenSim, …).
The crucial point will be centralized assets, but with an open grid, there will eventually be the same problems the software and music industry has now, that is: there is no such thing as content protection but business will still work (it works in the software industry, it works for music, it works for video … despite the copying). CopyBot and GLInter**** already are rendering the central asset approach useless and since it’s the biggest limitation to the growth of the grid already, I’m sure it will be remembered as one of dead ends by grid historians.
The business models then will most likely be grid hosting, sim development and content, just the way it is in 2D now. If LL embraces that development, they may be one of the big players (like AOL , MySpace, YouTube in the 2D world) offering content and experience which people will like. Their mainland will be one “country” in the global grid, the islands may be sims hosted by Linden-Grid-Hosting and there will be many other countries and islands hosted by whomever.
Well, none of that will happen exactly like that, but that’s what my crystal ball shows.
Huh?
Apr 23rd, 2007
Very interesting article. The thing that immediately leapt out at me about your indepth analysis was… that you have a 250 prim monacle?! what?! how?! why?! Tell me it’s a magic rezzing monacle with 248 other prims inside?!
Prokofy Neva
Apr 23rd, 2007
Nicholas, you read SL-related forums too much. Your head is filled with this idea that people will be endlessly able to grab content for free, and people who make content — big companies will magically be able to keep making it for free. You’re also completely exaggerating when you say that even with copying, it all works. It doesn’t. The companies fight copying. They go to huge lengths to fight copying! They sell their stuff! Don’t confuse the fact that some people get away with copying with some notion that it will become the norm.
In virtual worlds, it’s even easier to copy but…try turning the world insider out and watch how people will stop making content. Oh, and don’t trot out these chesnuts like the CC corps do, like “Oh, I know this guy in Africa who published a book on the Internet and then he still managed to sell some books anyway, isn’t that wonderful?!” because most people can’t do that, and structuring economies on the basis of everybody constantly being asked to pass the hat and pay the tip jar for the nice African book writer doesn’t scale.
I don’t think LL will ever be like AOL or Sony or Google. They will either go off on a tangent and do something more wonky as I described, attending to the GrID culture and harmonization, or they will be subsume by something bigger while retaining studio-like status or something. But you can’t make giant companies out of things that function like cults.
Khamon
Apr 23rd, 2007
Close enough Prokofy.
And I think the proper question for Eric is “can you provide reasonable services to your paying customers 24/7/365?”. If he can build a gR1d of a hundred sims and consistently support a community of a few thousand individuals, it’ll essentially function like a small town. Granted we’ll eventually need some open protocols, plus real world norms and laws to protect IP rights and economic interests, so that we can shop and transfer items just as we RL podunks visit and shop in large cities.
But the concept is sound. We might actually even see groups of people incorporating townships GRid5 and electing councils to “serve the public interest.” It will be a far cry from some single individual *having* to own the land because that’s the only way LL are willing to bill.
Nicholaz Beresford
Apr 23rd, 2007
Prok,
I don’t read SL forums at all, just this blog and comment and a few other related blogs. I’m just applying what I observe on the 2D internet with software and music and such.
Well, EMI went non DRM on ITunes recently despite all the P2P and software still sells, despite what you find when googling for Warez or Edonkey. In fact I know this quite well, as in RL I am a software developer, our programs are copied (you can find key gens for each and every of our products as Warez) and we still sell enough of them.
I remember another thread, where you said that most people on SL are mom and pop not even able to operate P2P and who do not have gig drives full of MP3s. It’s exactly those people who you will be able to sell stuff to.
Copybot and GLInter**** is there and still material for 2 millions US$ is sold every day on the grid. I know how to operate GLI and I still spend 1-5 US dollars on the grid every day.
From my own software, I know there are enough people out there knowing how to get our stuff via Wares sites and they still buy because they think it’s the right thing to do. In the past we went to some lengths to fight Warez and it did not do anyhting for us except wasting time. People who pirate, will always pirate and will always find ways to do so. These people never buy.
My point is, that central asset servers will fail to provide protection the same way that DRM failed to protect digital media and seems to hurt sales more than it helps.
I’m not saying everything will be available for free. There will be commercial items, despite client side or distributed asset handling (like it happens with software which is also client side copyable) and there will be lots of CC based stuff as much as there are commercial and freebi items on the Grid now. Copyright is commercial, CC is intended as a tool for people who want to do open/non commercial stuff, not to create a magic way to make money for bedside buiness.
But I agree that LL with the structure and people they have today will not be AOL/Google, not unless they are bought by someone who knows how to run a big operation (which LL clearly does not know). Philip Rosendale is not Larry Page or Sergey Brin (Google). He may become the head of a starndardization organization like W3 or maybe a virtual politician for a 3D land on The Grid, but if LL survives as a major player, it will be the name, not the people in charge there now. If the names remain in charge, LL will probably be remembered the same way, CompuServe is remembered today … a big guy who’s got plowed under.
Nacon
Apr 23rd, 2007
I still wonder how it will affect the SL market itself if you can’t transfer your own products across the grids.
Khamon
Apr 23rd, 2007
I don’t think it’ll affect the SL markets at all. They will be effected by the facilitation of transferability as that will introduce a “foreign” trade balance. Without the possibility, people will simply continue trading within the world as we do now. The fact that there are other grids out there doesn’t change the fact that people live and work in Second Life and want their clothing and clubs and beachside mansions full of furniture and poseballs.
Eric Rice
Apr 23rd, 2007
Would I use the default trees? Sure. Khamon isn’t able to export out of the SL Grid to another grid, be it Atari’s, Sony’s, or XBOX’s.
And just because I have a grid, doesn’t mean I need to make money. Amazon.com and I both have web servers and databases but use them for two different things.
Also, to clarify: Creative Commons is a layer on top of copyright that grants certain permissions up front (if you choose to). As a copyright holder, I still own the work. Yet, I want to tell you what you can do with it so you don’t have to try and figure out how to find me and contact me.
If I take a picture of a beautiful sunset, I personally will upload it to Flickr, say Attribution required, derivative work OK and share alike, etc. That particular Creative Commons license is my choice as the copyright holder and pretty clear what you can do with. Yes, you are allowed to copy my work and do stuffs to it.
It doesn’t replace anything and CC is often misunderstood when it’s quite simple.
One more example: In London a couple weeks ago, I took hundreds of photos around the Tower of London. Cracks, bricks, roads, grasses, etc. I’ll be uploading those and putting extremely liberal CC licenses on them, so if you wanted to use them in a build or make a shirt or whatever, you can, you know I’ve allowed it up front. Everyone is happy. Well everyone except those that don’t believe anything should be shared, in which case, other photog/texture creators would hate me. But that’s not my problem.
Back to the issue at hand, one drawback to disributed grid software… I love Kham’s trees but there’s no way to get them because there are no standards (hackery not withstanding, I mean normal-people-methods). Kham’s work (and it’s great work) only exists in one place– the SL Grid. That’s really a tragedy of closed systems. And as much as I love the open standards kool-aid (multiverse promises this), I just don’t have faith it will exist, because there’s a competitive advantage to not being open.
Anyway, that’s my $4.32 worth of commentary. Heh.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 23rd, 2007
Eric, I don’t “misunderstand” Creative Commons, I just don’t believe in it, and I criticize it, that’s all. It’s quite obvious how it works because you click on it and it tells you stuff. But then…those things are conventions anyway, and common practice anyway. I think these “bold” declarations that someone will allow their work to be used in “derivatives” are probably predicated on the assurance that few people will ever bother to do that.
>My point is, that central asset servers will fail to provide protection the same way that DRM failed to protect digital media and seems to hurt sales more than it helps.
Nicholas, I don’t know what setting you are in that you believe this extremism, but it’s just belied by most normal practice in RL. DRM indeed protecst a lot of digital media, and indeed, central assets servers or closed systems like WoW have millions of people in them, and that’s how many people would prefer their Metaverse. Don’t confuse your own tiny class of tekkies or lefties or whatever and what you wish to be “reality”.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 23rd, 2007
http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Zero_Linden/Office_Hours/2007_Apr_05
More from the Lindens and Khamon Fate and Jarod Godel, who bring you the Distributed Hosted Gr1D!
Nicholaz Beresford
Apr 24th, 2007
Prok, I think your guess is as good as mine here, and I was just looking into my personal crystal ball, but I was not speaking of millions of users like WoW.
I was speaking of the 3D internet with billions of users, the way 2D internet is now. You may think this is extreme, but if internet will go 3D in a way similar to how SL now and a similar proportion HTML is now, there is no way of keeping the asset side server side for all. There may be partial closed systems (like apple with ipod and their itunes store now) and there may be copy protection of one way or another that (as with software nowaday) creates a basic layer of protection, but I see no reason why billions of users should have their assets handled centrally when first, this is a huge bottleneck and second when it does not offer any better asset protection (as CopyBot or GLI shows) and third when you pay for this with tons of other problems (performance, legal liability, personal rights, personal data) … I am not speaking of items as in SL where they just say “sorry” if they happen to wipe out your inventory or you can’t access your stuff, because you do not own it anyway.
But time will tell … prognosis is especially hard, when it’s about the future.
Prokofy Neva
Apr 24th, 2007
Nicholaz, the 3-D Internet *is* WoW, and other proprietary games and spaces that will remain closed, and not open-source. That’s what I’m trying to get across to you.
I’m not at all thinking “it’s extreme” that there will be some 3-D Internet with billions of users just like the 2-D Internet with billions of users. Many people like to think of that Internet as “free,” or “open course” because it incorporates those two features of it widely. But most of us don’t spend any significant time on the “free open source” part of it, being on either news sites, our company’s sites, shopping sites that are closed, proprietary, and *paid for*.
Please, don’t lecture me about this widget or that gadget or this thingie or that thingie that make up the Intarwebs. I know all about that. And same for worlds. But it’s also stuff people PAY FOR.
There’s a lot of electricity usage, band width, and staffing required for the 3-D Internet. It requires businesses paying for those resources, which are not given free out of Howard Rheingold’s ass. Try to use common sense and logic here, Nicholasz. Whatever freebieness and opensourcery are involved, I can’t figure it will be any different than existing Hollywood and big media now — because it needs PAYING FOR and those things that are willing to PAY will have to CHARGE to make mass entertainment.
Your willingness to write off huge chunks of the Metaverse like big companies or WoW lets me know that you are like those people in the Well or other various geeky outposts in Web 1.0, not getting that it could only grow if it commercialized significantly.
People want worlds, and user content needs protection — from other users. And those companies that supply those things will win.
The Metaverse is not going to be Creative Commons with hippies in Birkenstocks eating granola and earnestly having seminars about clean energy. It’s going to be like a strip in Vegas. Hell, it’s already like a strip in Vegas.
Benjamin Duranske (avatar 'Benjamin Noble')
Apr 24th, 2007
There’s a big hint as to what this logo is going to be used for here:
http://tinyurl.com/283skf (Official Blog, comment #22)
In response to an unrelated question, Chadrick Linden writes: “The grid, comprised of Private Islands. The Mainland will always be considered Second Life and run by the Lab.”
Prokofy Neva
Apr 24th, 2007
Benjamin, I saw that, and saw that it was a statement of the concept Chadrick Linden has about the role of the mainland, at this time — and nothing more.
It’s like the statement that Jack Linden once made to me, which I have emblazoned on my profile, “There will always be a mainland.”
Well, yes and no. The Lindens can and do change the mainland in very substantial ways:
o removal of telehubs
o decision not to put roads on the southern continent
o decision to start selling some land that was previously “not for sale”
o decision to stop building things that help orient/zone/make look better some continents
The TOS doesn’t say there will ‘always be a mainland’. Nothing says that. Instead, it says “expect constant change”. For any reason, or no reason, they could close it tomorrow as not working.
Obviously, it can’t scale, among other problems with it. At any time, Chadrick or any of the others may declare the mainland to be “Linden Village and orientation islands and some landowners we like” and there will be nothing that anyone else can do.
Nicholaz Beresford
Apr 25th, 2007
Prok, yes there will be protection for items because creators will want that (some creators at least). My opinion is only, that the *additional* level of protection offered by central assets is far outweighted by it’s disadvantages.
So, in a nutshell, what I was trying to say is that I believe for the web to become a 3D multi-metaverse, there will be an open-standard 3D protocol (3D-HTML or whatever), there will be an availability of open/free servers and clients (akin to Apache and Firefox) as well as commercial ones (akin to IIS and Internet Explorer). And that I believe that client side assets will be the norm (with and without DRM style client side copy protection, the same way that today we have DRM and DRM free music and copy protected and free software).
I do not doubt that there will be metaverses in the multi-metaverse (Web) which will require centralized assets and the big players will try to get it that way, because they will try to lock you into their systems.
But only time will tell … I don’t want to lecture or convince you or anybody of anything, just sharing my ideas.
Montana Corleone
Apr 25th, 2007
Well Creative Commons is nothing special, and indeed not a layer on top of copyright at all. It’s essentially just a standardised set of license agreements that you can choose to use. Boilerplate licenses…
Interstingly, Chadwick Linden had some comments on the Estate Governance entry on the Linden blog. He started calling the Grid the collection of private islands, with the mainland still being run and AR system to Linden as the “Second Life Experience”, so clearly he let slip about something in the future, and he seems to feel there are already two separate entities.
But in the same way the client has been Open Sourced, it’s no secret they want to see the server side Open Sourced too, with the possibility of linking other servers to the grid. Good for Linden as they’ll still be able to charge tier in the form of connection fees, not so good for the Land Barons, who might start dealing with cheaper comptition, or even the prospect of us all having our own private sim… My heart so bleeds for them all
science news
Apr 29th, 2007
I think there is a 2.0 bubble right now and many of these 2.0 companies are going to fail. Look for lots of fallout!
Prokofy Neva
Apr 29th, 2007
But in the same way the client has been Open Sourced, it’s no secret they want to see the server side Open Sourced too, with the possibility of linking other servers to the grid. Good for Linden as they’ll still be able to charge tier in the form of connection fees, not so good for the Land Barons, who might start dealing with cheaper comptition, or even the prospect of us all having our own private sim… My heart so bleeds for them all
Um, you may sarcastically sneer at land barons, but you’re forgetting that when you sneer at them, you sneer at their customers, who have cheaper, more zoned and regulated and better-managed rentals than they can get by buying directly from Governor Linden.
Everybody loves the idea of sticking it to Mr. Money-Bags in their facile anti-capitalist memes on the Internet with their warmed-over treacly Marxist ideologies. But…when you start seeing that in fact you’ve harmed “the People” who are the overwhelming majority of residents who RENT and not BUY, you may re-think it. What happens to all those people?
Do they now go to host-your-own, who are merely the new barons, or the same barons now hosting their own but with HIGHER prices because THEIR COSTS WILL BE HIGHER DUH? or did you think getting a couple servers and a T1 line or whatever to run the thing, plus maybe programming help or having to rent space in colos — do you think that will be as cheap as $295 a month per sim as we now pay to Lindens? Hello? That’s when all these smug tekkies who’ve been yammering for ages about cheaper servers and ranting that the Lindens overcharge will now have to shut up, because the actual costs for doing this, when it involves streaming worlds and taking care of people, not just pages, on them, will suddenly loom large.
As for Chadrick and his masters in the Second Life Experience, I have no doubt that when they reinforce their control, ideology, and culture on the remainders of us who are on the mainland after they spin off islands, it will be even more unbearable than it is now.