Op/Ed: Why I’m not looking forward to OpenSim
by Jessica Holyoke on 10/12/07 at 9:31 pm
by Jessica Holyoke
I was sitting in Robin’s office hours and looking around. I came to the realization that I am not looking forward to OpenSim.
OpenSim is the eventual program where the Grid All Hail the Mighty Grid exists as a centralized land. Instead of everyone coming into Linden Lab’s jurisdiction, residents can host their own servers/land that are branches off of the Grid. Supporters of the idea argue that if a resident does not like Linden Lab policy, wait to host your own land and you can do what you want. So if you like gambling, build a server that’s not hosted in the United States. (Even though that does not take care of the payment issues that was part of the reasoning behind the gambling ban. The Credit Card companies had as much an impact on the Lab banning gambling as US law.)
But instead of opening up our shared internet experience, OpenSim promises to sequester us more. The Goreans will be on their own servers. The Furries will have their own lands, which may be separate from the Babyfurs. The business people, the fashionistas, the licentious, the educators can all be sectored off in their own areas.
In many ways, SL is already sequestered, even if you don’t fall into one of the sub-cultures mentioned above. If you don’t make the effort, you can see the same people day in and day out. You don’t know about the Turk that’s studying astronomy in Greece. You don’t discover the Spaniard that’s lost his way in a house store. You don’t find out about the people who decided to create a motorcycle gang in a land where you don’t need motorcycles. The people that go to technical office hours, hang out at Bondage Playground or want to recreate a caliphate are hidden if you stay on your own little plot of land, which can be good or bad depending on your point of view.
OpenSim promises to make that situation worse. The ability to mix and match, to see Rockefeller Center beside a Gorean enclave, is part of what make SL interesting. Its our diversity and individually unique imaginations, not any one person or group’s shared views, that make Second Life a better experience than other virtual worlds.
Which brings me back to Robin’s office hours. Perhaps because her office hours are more about the community as opposed to coding, you see a wider range of residents. At an office hour you can see me sitting next to a furry, a warrior woman, and Prokofy Neva. The ideal proposed by OpenSim is that we would never have to sit down with each other and discuss the future of SL as a community. Which we, as residents, are no matter what the corporate-minded Lindens would have us believe. And working with people that you disagree with is better than trying to create enclaves which contain only those who agree with you. Eventually,instead of a shared internet experience, all you will have is yourself on your server.
Blinders Off
Dec 11th, 2007
To the UPPERCASE poster above with the goofy name:
Someone who doesn’t have the brains to not type in all upper case doesn’t impress me. The Patriotic N*gras don’t impress me (the spam filter won’t even let me type their name because of its abusive concept). They’re a juvenile, imbecilic group without a shred of maturity or respect for anyone. As such, they get no respect from me and the goons who belong to such groups I consider somewhere in the area of subhuman. So if your post was supposed to impress anyone with your wit and intelligence, I recommend you dive back into your collection of porn tapes and leave the posting to the adults. LOL
Remy
Dec 11th, 2007
“Prokofy Neva – did you ever stop to think – Some of us might already be in a business that would be complimented by the system, but not have to profit from it.”
No, she never stops to think.
She just goes on accusing people of the sinister shit that SHE thinks of.
It really IS classic projection. SHE thinks that way, so she expects that everyone else does. It’s similar to why people who cheat on their partners many times suspect their partner (and sometimes the person they are cheating with – oh irony that)of cheating.
All this “evil” and “zomg communists” crap is the product of a malfunctioning brain that dwells in the past, nothing more, nothing less.
Allana Dion
Dec 11th, 2007
I am a supporter of the OpenSim project and I look forward to the opportunities I believe will come from it.
That said however, Jessica, I do understand what you’re saying and there is a part of me that feels the same sense of loss.
Some people here are being too harsh I think. I thought your article was well written and I do see where you’re coming from.
dandellion Kimban
Dec 12th, 2007
“What all the people who are all “ya let’s make our own grid” don’t seem to realize, is that setting up your own grid will cut you off from just about everything that makes SL ‘cool’ and worthwhile. It would be like moving to the North Pole. Ya you have all this free space, but not a whole lot to do there.”
What you don’t realize is that if I run my own sim that doesn’t mean it is disconnected from the rest of the grid. If you tp there you don’t see the difference.
What other anti-open-source-SL activists here forgot is that LL announced opening of the server’s code. So, second life will be open source with or without OpenSim. Yes, that would be a strike to feudalism of second life.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 12th, 2007
dandellion, you are forgetting that a) the cost of hooking up may be steep; b) the requirements for hooking up as trusted may be more stringent than you script kiddies will tolerate and c) that people speak openly of wanting to have their own *separate* grid that never connects up.
And we all know that LL announced they were going to open-source…and then what? It was a year ago. And…well? Where are they on it? What’s the time-table? Cory Linden’s departure is very likely related to this.
Blinders Off
Dec 12th, 2007
Hold it… Cory Linden’s departure? I missed something bigtime. What’s that about?
Anonymous
Dec 12th, 2007
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW
Anonymous
Dec 12th, 2007
BAAAWWW.
QQ moar
Jamie David
Dec 12th, 2007
Cost of hooking up is not steep. Server for daughters cost 45$ per month with no set up fees. 40$ a month if I paid a 40$ set up fee which is way I went. One server happily handles 16 sims. The sim, grid, asset and user servers.
There is work being done on a intergrid teleporter that will allow a user to click on an object on the SL main grid and wiz, bang wallop you are on another grid and sim. Another I know is working on a bot that you can leave behind on the main grid that will relay chat and friends list.
OpenSim has a IRC connectivity to allow people to use IRC client to chat.
There is no need to hook up with SecondLife and LindenLab at all. If users can teleport and communicate the hook up would only add in SL asset server and finance (Lindens). That poses HUGE problems as content then could be moved and used on OpenSim servers and that would not be acceptable to the content creators. Especially scripts. It is also problematic in the SL asset servers have issues a lot.
The OpenServers will link up in near future I believe and with 10 or more grids running it is possible for the land area to be bigger than SL it’s self. I was testing on a dual quad core and got 1000 sims going. Best I have managed so far was 20 users per sim. I am sure that will increase as code is cleaned and optimized.
Will Opensource Servers be coming any time soon from LindenLab? That I am not sure about. To me it sounds very dangerous. I am not a coder or programmer. But would think that if people could see how the server runs they could find the holes that normally can only be found by blind luck. With the code it would be much simpler to find the ways to hack.
How long to clean the code and make it safe and presentable? No Cory, 1 year, 2, 3? We have been waiting on Havoc for how long? Windlight and voice are other company products that got layered on top. Havoc needs to be coded into server and client as I understand it.
Better start brushing up on using linux if you want to run a stable server. Download the compiled server ( http://ruth.petitbe.be/build/ ) and play with it so that you are not left behind. Technology is driven by the users not the creators. Can make the bestest software out but if the users don’t understand, like it or adopt it it will not fly. The number of systems that felt they were going to rule and live for ever yet died either in the starting blocks or later due to low loyalty of the consumer is long. Compuserve, AOL, FirstClass, Hotline, Napster, Palace, Netscape Server, ICQ, PageMaker, Primere, COBAL, Floppy Disks, ……..
Currently most of the web is driven by opensource servers. Linux (OS), Apache (HTTP web server), MySQL (Database), Sendmail (Email). A few use commercial software due to company policy or because they are looking for something easy to instal manage or to do something specific that is not offered by the opensource equivalent, but they are fewer and fewer.
“So long and thank you for all the fish”
Douglas Adams, “Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy”.
Are the creators of OpenSimulator the vogons?
PS thank you Cory for all your wonderful work and ideas. Good luck.
um
Dec 12th, 2007
ok stupid question, as this is the first I have heard of opensim and don’t know too much about it. It isn’t connected to the main grid’s financial system, correct? So you can’t make money on a sim run by someone other than LL? So wouldn’t that make it pointless for all business owners?
Blinders Off
Dec 12th, 2007
@Jamie: OK this is driving me nuts. I’ve seen 2 references to Cory leaving Linden Lab. Read ZIP in the LL blogs (of course). What’s up? Why did he leave and more importantly, where’s he going to? Inquiring minds GOTTA know!
Regarding OpenSim. You stated that one server can handle 16 sims, but that you can’t get more than 20 users on a sim. To me, that sounds like one server can’t handle 16 sims. LL stacks 4 sims to a server and still boggs down. How is OpenSim able to handle more sims on a server than SL… and more importantly… why would we be limited to the traditional concept of “sim”? Is the 256x256m limit so etched into the code that such can’t be overcome? I would love to see “sims” consisting of 4 times that land area. I believe single quad server could handle a mega-sim such as that, but considiering the current status of code, I would have to see to believe any more than that.
One of the major deterrents of SL to date is not being able to get more than 20 people on a sim with any reliability. If we can manage to get 50, 75, 100 people on a sim without maxing out its assets and lagging to a standstill, I would consider that an accomplishment.
Of course, the major accomplishment is getting out from under Linden Lab’s financial thumb. They have only themselves to blame for the extreme dissatisfaction people have with their board. No matter what LL propaganda claims, they lose 95% of all potential customers. That is just plain pitiful. They have a shoddy platform and charge Porche prices for bad service. They’ve just been asking for a competitor to put them out of business through simple poor service and flakey coding. They charge people ridiculous amounts of money and then stack their sim on a server– and then have the gall to blame the customers for lag. They’ve had this coming for a long time. But if it’s coming, I’d like to see it come in an intelligent, right way meaning… we need to get more than 20 people on a sim. That means imo, NOT stacking 16 sims to a server. Just my thoughts, nothing more.
With Cory leaving SL, two things will happen: either things will improve (because after all, someone was responsible for programming that mess), or things will greatly mess up. Will be interesting to see what happens in the future.
Blinders Off
Dec 12th, 2007
Um, I don’t know much about OpenSim either, but yes, it’s disconnected from LL, which means SL commerce won’t work on OpenSim, which means that unless OpenSim has its own method of commerce, it’s of little or no value to merchants. More on that to come, I’d guess.
However, the really great idea about it is people being able to host their own sims without the financial or authoritarial thumb of Linden Lab. It means their being able to moderate their land as they see fit, being able to ban grifers at computer ID level, not having to wait for LL to get around to fixing absurdly simple bugs (such as group chat not working), and especially not having to pay Linden Lab NEW CAR prices just to run a silly piece of virtual land.
For all those reasons and more, I 100% support such a project. OpenSim sounds like it’s in an infancy stage and as such, it will have some rough startup periods. But once it’s established, I would guess it will pass up Second Life and leave it sitting in the dust. I wouldn’t put it past OpenSim to develop its own financial system an merchandising method. But the great thing about it, the really great thing, is that people won’t be forced to merchant or rent land just to pay for a sim. The cost of a sim will basically be equipment and a net link. People won’t have to work at merchanting just to make sim payments. More people will start creating just for the joy and reputation of the thing. We’ll see entire freebie sims set up just because people can AFFORD to set them up.
Once VR is out from under the opressively financial thumb of LL, just like the web itself, there will be no restrictions such as currently exist… and it should be a whole lot more secure and a whole lot less frustrating. No more pulling our hair out waiting for LL to not fix a bug. No more knee-jerk, self-serving corporate decisions. No more charging ultra-dedicated server prices and delivering stacked servers. And especially, once they get the bugs ironed out… NO MORE LAG.
Hey, I don’t see any negatives there so far.
Lao-Tzu
Dec 12th, 2007
@ Prokofy : “archipelago of egos” ? lol wow your excellent thoughts are surrounded by useless words and phrases. Clear and concise comments are 1)Read in full by people and 2)Have more lasting impact. Trying to impress people with your style of writing only bores them
(Just some free advice)
@ Taft Worsley: Your choice of words are clear yet your “5000 word-count minimum rule” is WAY overboard. Your comments border on needing a PDF file to efficently contain them. Bottom line: people begin to nap by the time you have made the point in your conclusion sections of each of your dissertaions.
dandellion Kimban
Dec 13th, 2007
Short introduction to OpenSim: http://metaverse.acidzen.org/tag/opensim
Jamie, “if people could see how the server runs they could find the holes that normally can only be found by blind luck. With the code it would be much simpler to find the ways to hack.” is security by obscurity principle. Usually, it is implemented by Microsoft and the others whom security is not a stronger point.
And Apache takes three minutes to install or five if it’s your first time.
BlindersOff, as has been said a hacker can forgot his/her mom’s date of birth, but would always recognize number 65536. Yes, there is a reason to keep with 2^16. And, I don’t see what keeps you away from setting four or 16 sims one beside the other. It is actually much better than one of the same size.
Um, yes, the money and assets and names will be problem one day when OpenSim stand in broad use. But at that moment open grids will be big enough so negotiations may be easier. Btw, in one interview Philip stated that one of two problems with opening the server’s code is how money and assets will be dealt with in that scenario. Somehow, there will be a solution by then.
Stupid Article - I think she is more afraid of having to learn technology.
Dec 13th, 2007
Plain Stupid. Go OpenSim, have it loaded locally just waiting for the day.
Blinders Off
Dec 13th, 2007
Dandellion, what I’d like to see is not 4 sims set beside one another, but one huge sim of say, 512x512m (or 1024×1024 if my server can handle such). Reason: to get away from the [expletive deleted] sim border crossing.
dandellion Kimban
Dec 14th, 2007
I would like that sim border crossing is not so dangerous activity
Blinders Off
Dec 15th, 2007
Yeah Dandellion, that’s the primary thing. But what I mean is, rather than setting up 4 256m sims as 4 separate lands (sim crossing dangers or not), I’d like to be able to name them all one land, consider them all one land, and them act as one land.
Aside from server issues, I’ve never seen the need for LL to limit land area to 256 x 256m. Even if they still held prim limits to 15,000… why can’t my actual land area be 512×512 with builds spread out over the countryside rather than all jammed together?
If I want one huge, 512×512 sim named Metropolis with no sim borders and plenty of “walking room”… why can’t I do that? Maybe this “your own server” concept will allow us to remove that 256×256 limitation forever… not by stacking 4 sims corner to corner, but by literally eliminating land size limits and giving sim designers more flexibility.
If that’s not really feasible under current code considerations… that’s ok. I’m still all for bypassing LL entirely. I wouldn’t be if they’d done the job right and charged reasonable amounts of money for their service. But as things stand, at this point they deserve what comes. Users have been telling them for at least 3 years this day was coming and they paid no heed. Instead of reducing prices as their sim numbers went from 400 to 10,000+, they actually increased them. That level of stupid knows no end and deserves to have the platform pulled out from under them. GO OPEN-SIM! RAH RAH RAH! Can’t come soon enough.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 15th, 2007
>Do you think anyone will give a shit about Prok or Anshe or Jessica once open sim is around? The land barons’ businesses will drop dramatically since they aren’t actually providing a service but rather putting their name over LL’s name and being middlemen leaching off of LL’s hardware and services. The focus will potentially shift from giving these people money so they can pretend they aren’t pathetic to more creative people with actual skills and resources who are more interested in building than making money.
DaveWhiner is in his usual hostile troll mode, and of course he himself never attempts anything of any significant in SL, so he posts from a fundamental lack of confidence and insecurity.
Land barons don’t leech off the Lindens; they pay them a lot of tier, and they take care of the customers that Linden Lab itself doesn’t want to take care of. Every tenant who becomes the job of a landlord to orient and take care of is one less customer directly interfacing with LL.
Making rentals is actually pretty creative work, I find, commissioning builders, designing how areas will look, selecting pre-fabs, works for me. Not everyone can be a stellar content creator in the top 10 percent, but you can gain a lot of pleasure from SL learning to do simple builds and modifications and working with others to make beautiful areas, that’s what it is all about.
There’s nothing to stop anybody from giving any money they want to more creative landlords *now* in fact, and many do.
I don’t see why OpenSim magically removes all the hard work of being a landlord, and most geeky script-kiddies will not want to do the scut work involved in rentals and landlord services and might be happy to just invite some of those landlords they used to hate to come in and do the work for them so they can build their OpenSim empires.
I can see from a lot of the hostile comments here that I hit the nail BANG on the head: a lot of these hacker geeks are totally talking out of their asses if they imagine they can do things better than the Lab.
Re: “Some of us might already be in a business that would be complimented by the system, but not have to profit from it. Prime example, my personally business is already a collocation and data hosting facility – all cisco and IBM – i would put my facility against anyone of those the lindens are renting floor space in – Its a Class 1 Tier 2 facility.”
Again, I will laugh and laugh, frankly, at arrogant asses like yourself who imagine that just because they have a few servers and already run a business from that they can run something as complex as a virtual world. So you can host your own sim. So? so what? Who will bother to come to it? What will it have on it? Giant chickens scratching in the dirt?
>they used 22 regional companies as opposed to one company – maybe you should do some homework because you obviously haven’t clue of what your talking about in this area of the conversation.
Um, unfortunately, I do have a clue on this, and my point remains valid: that despite the idea that the regional companies and baby bells would break it all up, you still had some very big players remaining like Verizon and some others.
What I find absolutely over-the-top fucking hilarious is this analogy of Palace (!!!). It’s a perfect example of how a company open-sources, everyone skedaddles off, runs their own servers, ignores the parent company…and then it dies. And you claim that “10 years later, the servers remain.” And then…uh…so where is Palace today? Uh…could you show us the uh, world-burning Palace community that is leading the charge into the Metaverse *cough*?
Again, so you can knock 16 sims together for $40 a piece. Who will bother to come and sit on a boring bunch of sims run by arrogant and hostile tekkies that can’t serve people and have no user-friendly content — or anything much of all?
See, Linden Lab itself went through the geeky and hostile period, and frankly, they reached the point where to grow their world, after their big layoffs and rethinking of 2003, they had to drop their communism, and go capitalist, and make IP protections, and a land market, and emulation of private property, and encourage ordinary socializers to come, and business, and many things that as geeky socialists they loathed. And that’s the bottom line, everyone who imagines they are going to start their own world out of can will have to recapitulate these exact same phases.
The other very big shock these hostile geeks have coming when they all peel off is that there won’t be these masses following them. They aren’t angry at Linden Lab; most of them are happy. Most of them log on and socialize, they don’t fret because textures don’t pick right or because the ping box is covered up in the right hand corner, or because some Linden looked at them cross-eyed in an Office Hour. They are in another world, and these hostile geeks don’t command their attention.