More open-source metaverses...?

Not sure how this topic could be perceived as having nothing to do with SL. People have offered general comparisons of the OSMV to this. Attempting to steer it off topic...for whatever reason....is odd. So allow me to bring it back.

In many ways, The LL's lock on the SL metaverse technology is similar to any company's position on a technology they license but do not sell (sound familiar?). Take it, use it, but we own it, we do not distrib the source, and in the end, you are subject to all our rules and restrictions regarding the use of it, and we may terminate your usage of it at any time. You may not in any way alter the fundamental technology of the product; here's an API to do things with it (a la VBA and MSOffice), but otherwise, hands off. What is termed a violation is solely at the discretion of LL...you have no say in the matter other than if they are inclined to listen to you. It has always interested me that the strong open source community of SL users has never demanded SL-OS.

Portions of Active Worlds were indeed open source at one time (or probably more accurately termed, "shared source". So was There. I was really interested in that for a while but then the site you got it from went away (or became member only).

Adobe also has a product that made the rounds for a while, Real Time or something I can't remember. I have also seen people use Neverwinter Nights as a form of metaverse (since you can create objects and models and insert them into the world, even at runtime, just make everybody a DM...it's interesting to see people use that technology for NON RPG uses...I myself have used it to teach basic C-style programming/game scripting...it is a much better tool for that then SL).

Ultimately I do not think that a hosted environment of the nature that SL is building truly realizes the term "metaverse". There are simply too many rules and restrictions, the world is taking on a sort of enforced uniformity. This may be ideal for a hosted game/sl collaborative environment, but has the potential to stifle the apex of "metaverse".

A peer-to-peer product, similar to the original vision of NwN, which allows users to maintain a consistent identity across worlds, yet subject them to the rules of a given "world" depending on where you are visiting, would seem to be more on target. There are efforts of this nature out there now, and they are interesting; what they lack is an all-controlling force to mold the world to a preconceived vision (which SL very much does...in 2+ years, if you REALLY look at the fundamental aspects of what is being done in second life, nothing has really signficantly changed. I'm not talking about features here, but overall direction. If anything, it's become more restrictive than ever). Chinatown is totally paralel to the original Nexus Prime...fun to look, some shooter and gew gaw, but here today gone tomorrow. One could say this overseeing entity of admins and business-concerned management is SL's greatest strength insofar as commercialism and profitability (since the world is not the wild west), but is also it's greatest weakness, as you are not truly free to do whatever you want within your own demense.

I would not call SL a "metaverse"...perhaps during beta. I would call it a collaborative environment (collabenviron?). If you insist on the term metaverse, then it can not be deemed more than "LL's Metaverse", because it is their laws you have no choice but to obey; it is certainly not "THE" metaverse, which would be owned by nobody and everybody (a fundamental aspect of a real metaverse). If the technology were being used by many different developers, each implementing it uniquely, then we might see a form of the real thing (or virtual real thing....or not real but virtu...oh you know what a mean).

Put it this way. You did not get banned from what we all reference for the definition of "metaverse" for cursing out of bounds by somebody in flip flops named "Linden".

FYI I use Earthlink. I stream all my TV, typically have a server of some kind running, and have three machines hooked to an network. I run a CVS box for remote access to project code, typically run a game of some sort, music, video, you name it, I use mountains of bandwidth, and they recently REDUCED my rate. In the eightish years I have used Earthlink they have never, ever commented on my bandwidth, and when I complain about something, they actually CALL me to make sure all is well after the resolution. Now that's service!

Well, that's because "demanding" anything is clearly on a hiding to nowhere. The only thing that paying customers can rightly "demand" is bug fixes, and I think we're pretty loud in that area.

What the Open Source people *have* been suggesting is that in LL's own interest it needs to capitalize more on open source components, so that less of the development labour needs to be funded in-house. That's good for the finances of LL and hence also good for the long-term survival prospects of SL.

One should note that this view is totally in line with Philip Linden's own publicly declared position, and he even said that some of his new venture capital would go on extra staffing for overseeing open-sourced component work. That sounded extremely promising. (It must be said though that nothing seems to have come of this.)

In addition to reducing development costs, using more open-source components would ensure that more thorough and much faster bug-fixing is carried out on those areas of the code, and that is one benefit that nobody is likely to consider worthless in the light of the current 1.6 bug nightmare.

Finally, let's not forget that Philip said that the native Linux client was in one of the priority streams and projected for Q1 2005. OK, so that date has slipped, but there is no reason to suspect that there has been a change of heart, and this inherently brings open source into far greater relevance even if the client itself is closed binary.

So, the Open Source movement is live and kicking in SL. It's just that we're not violent.

The world offered by Adobe was Adobe Atmosphere (archive copy - dec 2004). It used to be available both as a stand-alone client and an IE plug-in at first, but then it was slowly scaled down into being just an IE plugin.

At the begining Adobe promised that using the software will be free and indeed it was available as a one-click download. These days however, you must register at Adobe's site as a member in order to gain access to the client download.

The original software was purchased from another company along with its development crew, and was rebranded as "Atmosphere". On an intresting note, some of the programmers behind the graphics engine were Ex-Apple (and it showed).

The design of the system was an attempt to breath some new life into the old VRML concept: Each atmosphere world was a .AER file that was stored on a regular HTTP service. A world could be viewed stand-alone. However, it was possible to specify a link in the world configuration to a "chat server" that would enable you to see and interact with other users in real time.

You could upload .AER objects such as in-world objects and avatars, and link them into the world. To assume a new avatar, you could just upload it on a website somewhere, and link your client to use that avatar from now on. The system used a Javascript style method to enable some pretty powerful scripting.

The world-building software was available for free as beta, but is now being sold as a triple-digit priced piece of software.

There were also some notes about the chat server being released as open-source, but these ideas have all but vanished in the mist of time.

Overall, Atmosphere is either on ice or pretty much dead.

Update: Its dead, Jim. Last "available" website was December 2004, linked above as an internet archive link. It was a good experiment, may it rest in piece. (or better, may it get open-sourced. Though, as we know with Adobe, the chance for that is terribly slim.)

The interesting part about Atmosphere is that it used to be another product called 3d Anarchy. It was very remarkable for the kind of product it was. It had static lightmaps and one of the best 3d editors I have ever used. Even more remarkable was the fact that the worlds did not need a specialized server, the worlds themselves could be hosted on HTTP servers and the chat and avatar interactions were handled through IRC servers. (while it was still going on, the makers of 3d anarchy provided a server for user made maps)

One day Adobe came buy and bought them up and nothing was heard of them for about two or three years until Atmosphere came out.

heheh Mendel. We posted the same stuff.

Good job on remembering the name though. I was fighting to remember that one. Funny thing is, some files in Atmosphere Player still used the old name.

I wonder where it "all went wrong" really.

It was corporate, and therefore its longevity was conditional on it being a thriving product, generating income, and enjoying current management's arbitrary interest. In other words, it was on a hiding to nowhere, all queued up just waiting for demise.

Any commercial product can be removed from the shelves at any time. SL too is on that shelf, just waiting for the plug to be pulled. Yes, I know it's a bleak picture, and there's certainly nothing to suggest that the current plan isn't anything but full-steam-ahead expansion. Nevertheless, it's 100% true, and this applies to any commercial product with the possible exception of a few where explicit guarantees of longevity have been given.

There is only one way in which SL could have an assured lifetime as long as there is community interest, and it doesn't need pointing out what that is.

It's not quite that simple with SL. Adobe is a big company with a big shelf full of alternative products. SL is the only product on LLs shelf that I know about. The company exists soley to create the SL software.

Open Source would be the death of LindenLab as a company simply on the basis that they'd be giving away the secrets behind their only product. However, a system of Open Standards, whereby 3rd party companies were given access to the core systems via an api or a desciption of the data protocols used, would allow expansion of the system beyond the doors of LindenLab. Maybe even 3rd party hosted server clusters.

Your anti-FOSS stance is clear from previous articles Surina, so I'm not going to even bother with this "give away secrets" thing of yours. I'm afraid I'm totally immune to FUD like that, as I've been in this game professionally far too long. And if you're looking for dumb people to fall for it, you won't find one in Philip.

Well this is a lot more amenable to discussion, the initial paragraph just wasn't needed. I'll answer this.

Sure, open standards are always good, and indeed they're mandatory if a system is going to involve a lot of independent parties who cooperate as peers without exclusive member clubs nor discriminatory licensing arrangements. Furthermore, cooperation through open standards is not just satisfactory but even highly synergistic when those open standards are truly open to all and unencumbered by licensing or patents. The success of the Internet testifies to that in spades.

However, not all "open standards" are truly open in this best sense of the term. Many are restricted (in their documentation) to clubs or cartels, others are encumbered by various kinds of exclusionary licensing or pricing, others have the ball and chain of patents firmly attached, and still others are perverted by embrace-and-extend practices that capitalize on openness with the intention of turning it into a mechanism for proprietary tie-ins. None of this is any news to anyone of course --- we've been watching the ups and downs in this area for many years in the industry.

That said, there are excellent open standards out there, and it would be wonderful if virtual worlds like SL could be based on frameworks that interface together via open standards of the very best kind. This raises the question of what would be the very best kinds of interfaces and protocols and open standards for them. Well, there are several preconditions regardless of the actual architecture involved, but one is key.

The primary precondition for open standards in this area is that interfaces must be public, non-proprietary, totally unencumbered, and not under the control of exclusionary vested interests. That's a tall order, and in practice we don't usually quite meet it, but one should at least try to get as close as possible. It's the only way of ensuring universal interest and huge takeup by parties large and small, and it's this that generates the critical mass that fuels the kind of rapid expansion that almost everyone hopes for, instead of creating just another small niche industy, or a proprietary master-slave serfdom.

What does this mean in terms of SL and virtual worlds? Well it means that LL must not control the interfaces nor the standards that relate to them, even if it is a key party in their creation and their subsequent development. The framework through which new worlds or new zones created by 3rd parties interconnect needs to be in the commons or simply fully distributed (although LL can of course handle a large part of it if it wishes), so that those 3rd parties can be genuine peers in a community of world providers, rather than satellites of an ever-growing central monolith.

We've actually already written quite a lot about this area and possible futures in many other threads, but most of it tends to be specific to the actual architectures adopted. It's certainly a very interesting area, and I have no doubt that a huge number of parties of all sizes will be watching it with interest in the coming years.

It's not open source and it's technically defunct, but I was a huge fan of The Palace when I was younger. It was similar to SL in many ways. Users had a ton of control over their avatars, scripters and coders were able to accomplish a great deal using an embedded scripting language, and people flocked to it in large numbers to chat, have av-sex, play games, etc. Of course it differed in that it was purely 2D and that the world was completely non-physical. Nonetheless, I consider SL to be the spiritual reincarnation of The Palace.

Edit: Apparently The Palace still exists, though it's form has changed from what I remember back in the day. Even still, it's a very crude piece of software compared to what we have today.

^ OMG I soooooo can relate Ardith. I was only on The Palace for a short period of time (I think it was version 3), but I really liked it because text-only chat bores me to sleep. Those are fond memories almost to the zero point of fading.

LL has discussed how and whether a Free Software or an Open Source transition for SL would be possible, and many LL employees are ultimately in favor of it while some are skeptical. In any case, there is a bit of work necessary to do before such a move, and we've all agreed that now is not quite the time to throw a lot of effort into it. Yet at the same time many of us (including myself) believe that SL will indeed be dwarfed eventually by an Free/Open metaverse if LL does not go that route.

The main obstacle in my mind is the protocol that SL currently uses. It has evolved into something unlike what we originally thought it would, and now has obvious shortcomings that we are scheming on fixing. I'm afraid that if we were to open it all up now it would snowball into an unmanigable mess like the open Netscape project before it was scrapped and reborn as Mozilla. The only way I think Free/OpenSL would work would be if LL were to clean up and stabilize the protocol so that it was easily extensible, then release a sample client implementation, and eventually the servers (which _really_ aren't ready for a sparsely distributed system yet).

An open, distributed, shared network was part of the plan from the very beginning when Philip was telling me about it over lunch that first week I came down to San Francisco, and as far as my opinions sway it is still part of the plan.

My recommendation: stick around and see what happens -- it might be interesting.

Incidentally, the back end of SL is becoming increasingly dependent on Free or Open Source software. Each simulator node now runs a squid, uses libcurl, and a few other FOSS components. It is possible that future nodes will be running MONO and jabber as well. It would seem a shame (it seems to me) to not contribute something back to the whole happy wonderful world of FOSS, preferably FS.

I'll speak for my own gut here, allowing that I'm sure this will be a long and interesting discussion in the years to come:

My intuition is that open source and open standards are the only way to go for SL long term - for us to reach the whole world in the way that the web has will probably only happen under this sort of model.

I don't think becoming more open would be a bad business move for LL, because there are so many central services that we can offer for a fair price - once SL goes to truly global scale those charges can create a very large and sustaining business.

Pragmatically, there are things that need to happen to make this possible:

We have to preserve some sort of system to protect the rights and permissions of content. This means that in some manner the servers must become untrusted - a 'man-in-the-middle' from a crypto perspective. Today, the SL servers are totally trusted - if you owned a server you could take all the money and copy all the objects of anyone who walked into it. I can imagine that long term you get a notice on entering insecure servers, and you can choose what objects and how much money you want to 'carry' when you go in. Coding this is going to be a big change, and lots of work.

Additionally, as also discussed here, we need to make the protocols between servers very simple, so that folks can start from scratch with server code if they like. HTTP got really widespread in part because it was really simple - you could write a basic server in a few hours. Ideally something like SL needs to be comparably simple - you should be able to write a 'hello world' server and connect it to the grid very easily.


Projects like OSMP are great, and something that helps us understand what priority we should give to these changes. Ideally I'd like to see the metaverse get built as quickly as possible, which means that everyone is working on interoperable code and content. If big projects get underway that are challenging SL in scale and capability, it means that we are doing something wrong - not being open enough fast enough.

Oooh. You had me until you said that. In the world of comic books, which is an eerie mirror of Second Life, "wait and see" translates into "you don't know what we're doing, so keep giving us money until we show you." In a world that's advertised as being one we make ourselves, this kind of statement makes me want to say "shill." Sorry, Andrew.

Isn't that what Microsoft says? "We love competitors, we call them 'market research' at meetings."

I'm calling you out, Philip. Post the communication schema somewhere. Let us users see what it looks like and offer technical feedback. It won't cost you a thing. It won't require you to change a thing.

Put up or shut up. If you believe that Second Life's ultimate end is an open system, then let us see what this schema looks like, so we can offer feed back, help weed out extraneous bits, and help make your schema as robust as RSS and Atom.

Jarod, I'm sorry to find you so jaded about Second Life after reading some comic books. I'm not certain that eerie mirror you're looking into is flat.

Yes, the SL world is advertised as one that you build yourselves, however that message as it stands now is about the content in the world rather than the platform underneath. Please let me rephrase and summarize my whole post above in an attempt to not rub your rash:

"If LL ever releases portions of SL as FOSS, then SL will be an even more exciting and interesting platform than it is currently. I think that such a move is likely to happen, but not today."

I think one of the things Philip was saying in regard to OSMP and VU was:

"If a FOSS metaverse approaches SL's feature set before SL goes FOSS then LL loses the race."

FOSS = Free/OpenSource Software

Thank you for your candor here. I am glad to see this is under consideration. I agree that LL should not give up it's market position for pioneering a system. Over the long term, hopefully FOSS can be implimented and I am impressed by the vision.

Masterful paraphrasing and summary, Andrew. And I couldn't agree more, on all points.

That said, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, or in the seeing in this case. Those who are predisposed to not believe (or who have abandoned hope) may not ever be satisfied, but I think the rest of us still have our eyes open ready for evidence of progress in this area.

Phrases like "but not today" can be genuine and honest, and sensible even. But this is not a Big Bang issue, with everything happening all at once.

Early discussions, examining background issues, openly researching designs, seeding the community with ideas for feedback, suggesting protocol elements for testing, even answering technical comments on blogs ... all of these things can be done way in advance of directly budgeted work, and they provide evidence of progress and indicate real determination to move in that direction.

That is what most reasonable people are hoping for, I think. Not full specs for an open metaverse right now today.

yes thank you andrew and philip for the candid replies. they're far more appreciated than the flippant generalizations you've posted in the past. hopefully we can move forward from here. andrew, i have to agree with morgaine that you missed jarod's point entirely by skipping over her itemizations and focusing on foss. netscape released their entire distribution too early and with too many untested, proprietary components. noone is expecting ll to repeat those mistakes.

publishing your communication protocols for examination and input, as jarod suggested, costs you nothing. it'll simply be a first, good faith step toward the day that we can construct our own clients to project our own interpretations of worlds from data stored on your servers.

I guess that's possible too, but it's not at all what I had in mind, Khamon.

You see, I think that the technical folks at LL now know for certain that some things in the existing SL simply cannot work in an expanded and distributed metaverse, at all.

It's not only because of inherent non-scalability for dynamic objects like avatars that irritatingly refuse to remain in their home zones where they have pre-assigned resource. That on its own is bad enough, and means point blank that huge chunks of the current design are on a hiding to nowhere, but it gets much worse when you start to consider issues of security like Philip hinted at above, and then issues of distribution of protected content, and then issues of efficiency on top of that.

Even just a cursory examination of these wider implications says to me that you have to start from scratch on the infrastructure, and merely preserve the forms of content and the dynamic approaches and some of the solutions that SL has proved can work very well indeed.

That's why I'm stressing technical dialogue and open research, hand in hand with a community of experts and enthusiasts far far larger than LL will ever be able to afford to pay, in order to work out infrastructure that *can* work well in a distributed metaverse, where the current one cannot for a multiplicity of reasons.

On the infrastructure front, this is a case of "You can't get there from here", but that's far from being a bad thing. SL has given us a remarkably good idea of where we want to go, and so LL can be instrumental in focussing our thoughts and efforts towards very concrete working solutions when otherwise they would probably have been pretty hazy and meandering.

We may not be able to reuse existing product, but we can certainly reuse the experience gained so far, and I feel that the synergy in the SL community and the interest that stems from LL's openly expressed intentions can certainly help to move us quite rapidly in the direction of an open metaverse.

Jarod, you might want to try the premise-inference-conclusion technique. It has a better pedigree than the unsupported statement one.

Better pedigree, yes; greater effeciency, no. You see, by my very nature, I am a Utilitarian. Value comes from utility, strength from effeciency. In my time on these forums, I have learned that the flowery words and logical arguments often fall on deaf ears. Therefore, to use the premise-inference-conclusion as you suggest, would be a waste of time.

I could spend, and have spent, several paragraphs, several posts, a grand total of many threads, detailing my reasons for wanting items such as open protocols, an API, a shrink wrapped server, a desktop server-client combo for prototyping designs. I have spent countless words laying out my premise, infering my ideas, and explaining conclusions, all thus far for naught.

The Utilitarian in me has thusly, and previous to this post, used said premise-inference-conclusion within my mind. The premise is that many words are pointless and waste effort. The inferense is that if I still wish to communicate in this forum and share ideas, I do have to actually post. My conclusion is that hyperlinks to places that do the talking for me, that have already laid out my ideas in nicely designed web pages and FAQ's, can speed up the process and make my arguments more effecient.

As for an unsupported statement, I disagree. My link goes to the "screenshots" section of the Open Croquet project, the section of their website that shows many pictures of, as Andrew summarizes, "a FOSS metaverse [approaching] SL's feature set before SL goes FOSS." If pictures are worth a thousand words, than with my one link, I have argued my point in volumes.

However, if my link to these screenshots goes above the Lindens' heads, and my pithy hyperlink text "You lose" is all they divine from my post, then I am neither worse for wear nor have I lost time in stating my case.

I wonder whether you've actually used Croquet. It's a usability nightmare, with an abyssmal learning curve and few notable features. I downloaded the application back when it was first mentioned here, and it hasn't improved significantly since then. You suggested that Croquet was superior to SL. Other than those benefits inherent in OS applications, in what ways do you believe Croquet to be superior?

I have used it, well I tried to use it. It was ultimately too slow to actually work, and crashed. It's young still, may not even pan out like I think it will, but it represents a coming change.

Smalltalk isn't the most widely used language around, and Squeak isn't the most known-about virtual machine. However, people have managed to bootstrap a prototype world that mirrors -- and surpasses -- the berth of Second Life's functionality. I point to Croquet not as the final contender, but as a harbinger of things to come.

The tools that would allow people to cobble together a virtual world within a month exist, and those tools are only going to get cheaper, better, and more available. If Linden Lab continues down the same road, wringing their hands about how difficult opening up the protocol would be instead of atually opening it up, then they will be surpassed.

Right now Croquet is terrible, true, but for how long? How long until it works? How long until some external stimulus causes people to begin working on it, or OSMP, instead of Second Life -- much like viruses caused people to start using Mozilla instead of IE.

It's easy to say, "Second Life is the best thing out there now." It's easy for the Lindens to say, "We expect to get to this real soon." However, both of those are hollow statements. Second Life is the best thing out there right now, because it's the only thing out there. The Lindens can put off opening the source or protocols, because they don't need to right now.

But for how long? Andrew said, "If a FOSS metaverse approaches SL's feature set before SL goes FOSS then LL loses the race." He didn't say "functionality," he said "feature set." Croquet has approached, and in many places surpassed, Second Life's feature set. Croquet may not be superior now, but by Andrew's own measure, it's evidence that it might one day beat Second Life.

Yes, OpenCroquet is an interesting Open Source project. It is an ambitious system and by design has more flexibility than SL. Nevertheless, the existence of OpenCroquet does not relegate SL for the history books just yet. Both SL and OC are largely experimental in the sense that they are not feature complete, are only beginning to show their potential, and may very well be fundamentally non-optimal for whatever a final metaverse might look like.

I may have misinterpreted Philip's statements in my rewording since I made my version seem a bit more prophetic and sudden. In the long term the future of persistent virtual worlds is bright. If SL ultimately fades from view it will only be because whatever replaced it was much better -- whatever it is, I think it will be FOSS which is why I think LL should ultimately move SL in that direction if we want SL to remain a contender.

Edit for spelling error.