Is the Metaverse Dead?

Or at least LL's version of it? A discussion that some of you guys may find interesting.

http://www.sluniverse.com/php/vb/general-sl-discussion/19024-linden-lab-no-open-grids.html

I read the quote and the first paragraph of the first post, and stopped there. The quote isn't about a metaverse as such - it's about the SL part of it, and how some of what's in SL stays in SL. It seems quite good to me.

Thanks Phil. I make ONE thoughtful post, and you go and wee all over it. Thank you , so bloody much! *Jumps up and down, shaking her fist a la John Cleese.*

LOL Sorry, Brenda. Tell you what - if it'll make you feel any better, I'll show you my lure

No need. I'd say you've been fairly well exposed on these forums.

the asshat server can hardly struggle with SL itself, we won`t have any assets left if they would allow outside connections from other worlds...

I don't honestly know how they're going to STOP anyone running their own login and asset servers if they want to. Of course, they won't have the SL assets on them, but that was anticipated from the beginning.

Better to live in a walled garden, than a scorched and barren desert.

If they open SL to any and all comers, in a way that allows your avatar with all their attachments and inventory to travel freely, but also to be copied rampantly, what possible incentive will there be for content creators to continue their efforts in SL?

Why spend effort making new furry avatars, or new vehicles, or new clothes, or any other products, if you know that your hard work can, and will, be stolen the instant any of your custoners steps outside of that "walled garden"? Stolen, and turned into freebies? Or sold by competitors, who profit from your work and pay back nothing to you?

How many real-world businesses would last even a week, if they were told they had no recourse to IP theft?

As it stands right now, if LL did NOT keep a tight reign on the asset servers, login servers, and the other infrastructure elements that control avatar identity and Inventory asset permissions, the content creators in SL would be royally screwed. Because we would have no recourse to rampant IP theft. The mechanisms simply are not in existance to prevent it, or to prosecute it.

I think Linden Lab is doing the right thing, in protecting the IP rights of their residents. At some point, certainly, there will be "other worlds" run on completely independant servers, and the freedom to travel from one to another with all your "stuff". I'd love to be able to do that, safely. But there have to be safeguards. Or else the first person who "steps out the airlock" will decompress the whole ship, killing everyrthing they left behind.

The whole point to AWG is to enable multiple entities to run their own grids, and let you pass from one grid to another without having to log in. It doesn't mean Linden Labs will be letting someone else run the asset servers or any other part of THEIR grid from them.

Linden Labs saying that they're not going to have other people run asset servers for the main grid should be about as uncontroversial as Google saying they don't plan on renting server space from Microsoft... or vice versa.

I don't think that's what the message was saying:



This seems to say that they _will_ be allowing external region servers to connect to SL's inventory server (and therefore potentially copy data).

What they WON'T be allowing is for you to run your _own_ inventory server which is accessed by clients in parallel with the actual SL one - which would arguably be more (not less) secure.

I agree with Yumi in the sense that we can't stop anyone from making their own grids.

The metaverse, ultimately, will be just fine.

It's just the people who need to have *our* traffic, content and branding for free that will be in trouble.

God forbid they actually have to, you know... work to build their own fortune. Terrible!

So much easier to have one's own 30% downtime, no-IP-protection, vice-city server masquerading as an authentic Linden Research Server on the main grid.

I'm *all* for the connexions-only model, which I think is brilliant. Perhaps we leave some content behind in this world or that, but I don't exactly have to bring my house with me everywhere I go.

Actually, this is what IBM is doing right now. They have their own asset server, on a grid which is connected to the SL grid. SL assets are managed by SL's server, and IBM assets are managed by theirs. However, theirs is a special case ... when they set this "trusted" IBM grid up several months ago, permission management code was not yet in place (or even designed) to permit creators to have any control over assets of avatars who go between the grids. [I haven't been going to meetings lately, but I think they are still wrestling with it). Some new code, and some legal agreements as well, were put in place to ensure that this was not an issue for this one interconnection. IP leakage appears not to have been an issue so far.

LL still continues to want to open the grid up so that teleporting between lots of grids (the 'metaverse')would be possible. However, the IP issues are huge.

I don't understand the whole "death of the metaverse" panic. To me, LL's statement that they will continue to administer SL's central servers seems intuitively obvious, but does not impact the creation of other grids and their interconnection with SL. That interconnection is just a very very difficult problem, involving a lot of policy AND implementation. So, I'm not amazed that it's going a little slowly.

[Oh, and fwiw, the AWG does not guide LL development at all. They are a group of volunteers and partners who collaborate on prototyping new architecture components, and helping LL wring out some specific issues/code.]
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It's not the death of the metaverse.

It's the death of the entitlement-verse.

The Metaverse is dead. Long live the Metaverse!

This is a logical and completely expected move on the part of LL. They don't want to be the ICANN of a future metaverse. They want to be the Microsoft. They are not thinking of SL as a Compuserve-style "walled garden" internet, but rather a Windows-style operating system for a metaverse. To achieve that, they have to maintain control of the technical standards, the asset server, and the L$.

/me steals Marianne's gif

I don't get how they make money if I can go to Joe's server and spend
all my money there because I enjoy it better, then SL's. I wouldn't want to spend
my money anywhere else.
When people half or all move somewhere else, stop paying premiums, mainland and island tier, sale or abandon our land and stop purchasing lindens
how does LL or SL keep the power on their servers and pay their employees?
I don't know if I had way to make money with group of clients who were in FD world
I would want to keep them in FD world as happy and willing to give me every
dollar they could afford to give me and not go off outside of FD world where they may
find some other world a whole lot better and not want to return.
How is SL going to make money when all the residents are spending money in Joe's Server, FD World, or some other persons world?
Is SL going to go to Joe and everyone else who has a world and say "Hey you got all our Residents, we want them to give us money too, give them back or pay us a cut for using the
open source viewer or if you pay us we will let you have access to every resident's inventory that joins you and come back and spend money with us to do whatever you wish but you
got to figure out way to get around the IP rights or DCMA policy?"
IMVU seems to have gotten around other people's IP rights, you have to agree
to not sue them as part of their TOS.

I've always thought that LL underestimates how important having SL a closed system is to its economy and its culture. If it ever becomes the ubiquitous decentralized 3d internet LL envisions I have a hard time imagining SL's economy surviving. My gut feeling is that tearing down the walls of the garden is rather a bad idea. Of course I could be completely wrong.

On an interesting related note, I just got this google news alert:

You can already keep the flying penises out on a private island.

Yep, so I wonder if it's just a marketing pitch, or perhaps uses a different pricing model.

3D teleconferencing? Will they ban the silly "Woooooooo" gesture?

On an interesting related note, I just got this google news alert:

Quote:
"Linden Lab has a new pitch for Second Life: it wants to be a 3D teleconferencing platform for enterprise customers. Today the company announced a new product called "Immersive Workspaces," an area in Second Life set aside for corporate meetings. Of course, you could already do that years ago, but this new product is "a completely exclusive and secure experience, with no connectivity to the Second Life mainland." In other words, business users can be confident no one will crash their event with a barrage of flying penises."

* * * * *

That's provided I never get invited to a corporate meeting. I was famous for leaving these out surreptitiously with the rest of the handouts at every mega-meeting possible:

http://www.bullshitbingo.net/cards/bullshit/

Dude, you're totally leveraging your synergies!