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.

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.

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.

@ 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.

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.

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.