SL-killer, Part Deux

A while back I had a thread about whether Blue Mars would be the SL-killer - the thing that comes along to make residents jump ship. Well, a recent post on the Blog discussion thread brought up another thought. Lourdes Laysan made the point that if there is a truly functioning monetary system then people would flock to Opensim.

I guess for me that's ONE of the requirements, but there is another significant one, that has to be in place before someone who makes content would consider making it and selling it in that Grid...

While LL are pretty lax at enforcing IP issues, they DO follow up on DMCA requests - we have seen people who have ripped off our content getting content removed and bans issued.

Well, when a resident of openSim visits a sim that is hosted on someone personal home computer, doesn't all the information about that person's inventory go with it? Especially if something is rezzed, or worn. What would stop the person who owns the computer grabbing that data, changing the perms on the items to full perms, and then selling the items themselves?

Does the OPenSim stuff have its own inventory servers somewhere central?

Sorry if these are really dumb questions, but I owuld like to know.

As a corollary question - what's it going to take to have an SL-clone be viable enough for people upset with LL to jump ship?

I have yet to hear a solid and compelling story about IP protection for OpenSIM. It's kind of a moot point anyways, at this stage. OpenSim is really not much more than a proof of concept so far, and certainly not capable nor stable enough to act as a high-concurrency grid. It will likely be a few years until OpenSim can even aspire to be an "SL-killer".

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely *love* OpenSim, and I use it every day for a variety of things. In fact I'm logged in right now doing some offline building. But if you want to be realistic, it's just not 'there' yet, and won't be for some time to come.

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It's not a dumb question at all, but it's one that's very easily answered on the OpenSim site: http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Main_Page

The short answer is no. For the more complete answer, perhaps someone else will chime in, or as I said all the answers you seek can be found at the site linked above.

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OK thanks for the link - good reading, there!

So it definitely isn't even close to having what I would regard as the necessary "bits" for a business to jump ship, but it's probably good for the creators that want to just build stuff and not worry about money or IP. Fair enough.

Ahhh, and dumb old me - OpenSim is the platform - you have to dig down and find the grids, like OSGrid - there are a whole bunch of those and each have their own login.

So maybe a better question for me to ask is: What's it going to take for an OpenSim-based grid to provide an effective platform for disgruntled SL-business-owners?

To me it's a functioning micro-economy and effective IP-protection - what am I missing?

OpenSim is currently *excellent* for content creators who want a low-lag offline building environment, and as an added bonus you can archive builds, etc. It still requires a bit of technical know-how, but the wiki will get most people through any hurdles.
Those are core, and without those nothing else matters for business. In my opinion, OpenSim is not really terribly concerned about functioning as a business platform as you and I would use it, or at least not as a top priority.

To function as a viable platform for content creators, I think they also have quite a ways to go on scripting. Static creations are nice (and let me say that Hosoi Ichiba products are amazing!), but interactivity is extremely important in a virtual world, and while OpenSim has some very exciting stuff happening in that area, it's still in the very early stages.

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IF an OpenSim based grid such OpenLife starts to get any kind of significant concurrency figures, they are going to run into scalability problems just as SL have. The central databases are going to be just of one of those areas.
It will be up to the people rolling out the new grid (not the OpenSim developers) to solve these implementation problems and it will not be easy nor inexpensive to do. My prediction is that these kinds of grids will limp along gaining new people and people storing new assets until everything starts to slow down and failures start becoming commonplace. Once this happens it will be a huge effort with many problems along the way to solving it.
Why do I think this? Mainly because I have read nothing that suggests any of the grids out there are putting any kind of resources into ways of storing this data as well as or better than LL.

Bear in mind too that OpenSIM does not yet have a complete physics engine implemented yet. Think that won't matter much? Lots of SL things use physics, ranging from ferris wheels, to pool tables to guns and of course flying/landing which is pretty sad looking atm.

Despite what I have put I think OpenSIM is a great project and they have done wonders to come this far in the short time they have.
The software definitely has great potential and some innovative uses made possible.
However it has to be said that people looking for a place like SL but not SL in order to jump provider and "go with a better managed company" will find it not to be such a stellar experience, at least not for the foreseeable future, perhaps never.

If your ideal SL replacement is a few thousand avatars concurrency max and no decent physics to speak of then it will be perfect. If anyone thinks that all the disgruntled people will fill up a grid to the tune of ten's of thousands of avs simultaneously like SL has and create a lively economy where people can sell their products like they do today, they are dreaming - this might never be achievable with OpenSIM without huge changes in the way assets are stored.
Even if OpenSIM does manage to be scalable, it does not guarantee that every company building their own grid can make it scale properly or cost effectively.

Just my thoughts...

Hmmmm...

OK....a bit off topic.....but since I've never ventured to use OpenSim.....I have a question. In terms of content creation......I'm guessing folks use it to try out textures and so forth before paying to upload the final product to SL? If this is the case.....I need to learn a bit more so I'm not wasting L's with all the textures I end up trashing.

Definitely. You can test textures for free This includes clothing, of course, and it can be an absolutely huge money and time saver for people who do a lot of iterations and testing. While you *can* use the Beta grid, the experience is often frustrating at best. OpenSim is *much* better in that regard.

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/me saw a TV ad for Free Realms the other day...

Worse. OpenSim is very very far behind on concurrency.
I would agree with that, as well as the fact that I don't think the OpenSim developers themselves are well-versed in the high-concurrency/high-availability necessary to match SecondLife.

OpenSim physics are currently extremely poor, but there's a lot of potential there. And at least there's an upgrade path inherent in OpenSim, unlike SecondLife

I think it will get there eventually, but not soon.

It's still got a ways to go in order to function as a viable social platform as well, but I imagine it will get there faster than it will become a viable business platform.

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That is precisely one of its strengths. You get to build, lag and interruption free, and you can use as many textures as you wish, at no cost (and animations and sounds).

When you are 100% satisfied with your creation you can then upload just the textures you have used.

I am not 100% sure if Second Inventory works in the reverse direction, ie from an opensim standalone to SL, but if it does then opensim provides a very powerful sandbox indeed, and saves you money.

Rock

I belong to OpenLife and Open Sim as well as SL. Both of them trail some way behind SL although they look and work the same way. One thing about OL is that you can create prims up to 100 metres in any dimension instead of 10 metres as in SL. That's quite fun.

Also, as far as I can tell, land is sold by the entire sim, so the environement looks a bit less cluttered than SL - or rather the clutter is bigger and more spaced out!

Open Sim is quite good for nostalgic sim border crashes and things like that! But it's an intersting and worthwhile place.

Call me a cynic, but can OpenLife actually become a viable competitor to SL as long as it remains open to all ages and strictly PG-only? I have yet to see any startup based on the opengrid software that looks likely to have a chance to compete. Perhaps the SL-killer will be something that totally throws out the entire LL model and develops brand new software and policies from the top down and from the bottom up.

i don't think something so close would be the killer..i would think something that ran well and had sl features and more..it total honesty i don't see anything else really killing sl but LL itself..at least the SL we all know right now..

new people coming to it don't know what they are missing with things thathave gone away and ones to come in the future won't know what they have missed with content moved to it's own mainland..

i think the only thing that could kill sl would be something that beat it's new users to the punch by getting them first before they tried sl..and it would have to be better..

0.6.5 is the latest stable OpenSim version. I recently set it up for a more permanent installation.

I imported a bunch of scripts for a house control system. With a little bit of tweaking it all works fine with the scripting Xengine. Not so a couple of months ago. I was actually amazed. Most ll functions really work, not all and no vehicles but you can use llSetForce apparently..
So I can now test scripts in OS and it don't crash (as easy) and if it does, I have full control to restart the region. and continue. Attachments stay on, crossings are better etc...

Of course it has a long way to go but will have some different features than here at SL and will always be behind until someone throws money at development. The RexModules are most exciting. All the other OS grids are dependent on OS updating code for them, including OL which hovers just behind OS now, with scripting especially.

The money module in OpenSim is there now but it's a hook that needs attaching to the hosts own creative coding to make it work. So currency is totally dependent on the grid-hosts doing it properly.

SecondLife will always be forefront, at least in the forseeable future. Even if a biz has presence on other grids, the head office will be in SL with Hypregrid links to others.

That's my opinion from a little experience. Now I slide back under my rock.