LOWDOWN on Central Grid please

Well I think it's important to draw distinctions when you use the term "parcel."

A sim owner has god-powers over their sim, just like all Lindens have god powers over all of SL. That is by design, ofcourse. Parcel support, to my knowledge, is a bit hacky, and off the top of my head I don't know how supported it is to, say, subdivide a sim and give individual parcels away to others the way you would in SL. It could be that parcels retain the same god-like permissions accidentally (or otherwise), but I've never fiddled with that myself. My setups are with only me owning them.

It's important though that people realize that sim owners retain those permissions by design, the same way I have total control over the contents of my dedicated server for a website, regardless of who else uploads things into that.

As to Melanie's comment I can't speculate other than the fact that she's not currently a core developer, and Adam's comments are representative of one of the founders of OpenSim.

Your link though doesn't talk about parcel permissions, but object ones. The quote in question doesn't seem to reflect parcel permissions, from your link.

I should also point out that, as you've discovered, all things in OpenSim are changeable. If the developers have decided that's the route they want to go, there's nothing preventing others from coming in and making things more stringent themselves.

There will be some grids that use OpenSim software that want to emulate SL identically. Those grids will probably want their permissions modules set up a specific way.

Other grids that are closed to access, like behind a corporate firewall for example, and only used by specific people, might prefer that everyone be able to manipulate the content of everyone else.

The good thing about OpenSim is that it can be modified to reflect the needs of those implementing it, so it's not quite accurate to say that it's broken because it's not supporting things the way you want it to. It can always be modified, and hopefully those modifications can be made available in a similar fashion to those who want to run a similar setup.

Right.. very good points and I agree.

A "Parcel of land" in an "Out of the Box" implementation of opensim, "Cut" from an entire region of any size will give godlike powers to the owner of that parcel on any object they place on or over their land... including any attachments... regardless of the permission settings found in the configuration files, At least those were my findings in July.

I just wanted to be clear that there are differences and by reading your links to Adam's post I was a bit more confused as to why this issue wasn't mentioned.
I posted a request on one of those links to Adam asking his views on the issue.

My concerns still remain the same for those of us who have chosen to operate public grids on this platform and it would be a nice feature to be able to turn on or off in the initial configuration or setup of the software. I think people are being misled (not purposely)into thinking their content/creations will be protected simply by enabling the server side permissions in the .ini file and it is my opinion these misled individuals, once bitten by this issue will have a completely different view of the opensim project and the word will quicly spread.

It is my hope that users will at least be educated on this issue and at most have the issue completely resolved by a code revision to enable this to be turned on or off.

I simply don't want myself and others like me to be thrown under the bus when this issue blows up.... hence my reason for raising the concern in the first place.

I stand by my claims.. the content on my grid is not affected by this issue any longer except for a persistent copy problem, which was by my own "FIX" not me leeching from someone else. My currency implementation was also done completely by me with the assistance of some of the code from WireRedux and OpenSim. Without those "Stubs" my task would have been far more difficult.

As for charging people for the land and use of our grid... Everyone is free to sign up on our grid... a premium membership is nowhere to be found on the 3rd Rock Grid and "ALL" users can buy land and pay tier. We charge no fees to upload content such as textures, animations, etc. and we hope to keep it that way barring any abuse by our users.

I don't feel like I'm profiting unjustly from anyone else's work... I am clear about our shortcomings with everyone from the start and all of our user's know upfront that our grid is "BASED" on the OpenSim platform... we've never claimed the grid is based on our own software which we've designed. Check out our FAQ on our site.. I address this very issue for a user. (http://www.3rdrockgrid.com/main/)

I still had to take the time to learn how to set it up, I maintain it, I do nightly backups, I've added features to complement the existing OpenSim features and my users are consuming bandwidth while enjoying themselves. With that said I feel I have every right to charge a fee for the use of land on our grid for the time and other investments I've put into it. We use only premium 100mb connections and our servers are all dedicated solely to our grid and are not shared with other applications. They are all professional grade servers running windows server OS. They are not "Budget" servers running on "Spare" bandwidth.

I do agree however that my grid's return to the community has not been much in the way of code, it has however added publicity to the project, education to our users and other's not even yet associated with our grid, I've shared my binaries which I compiled from source with my "FIX" added, I've provided my fix free to anyone who wants it, I'm consistently campaigning my concerns on "Upholding" the projects image, I've helped other users setup their own standalone installs, I've shared my experiences with others all in the spirit of this project and I'm offering users of other grids including Second Life(TM) another alternative. I stand behind OpenSim and for it in every respect.

My goal with this post is to simply educate those who are unaware of the permissions issue, try to convince others that there is indeed "VALUE" being sold on the public grids beyond what is offered by the projects initial code and that the 3rd Rock Grid is a very viable alternative to other grids.

To those of you who requested and received my binaries.... I'm always glad to help out if you have trouble. Just ask.

In the long run, the user's will decide how much that value is worth to them and they will gravitate to the grid where they feel the most welcome and taken care of and where their content is protected. We intend to be one of these grids in every respect.

Good post Butch, thank you for explaining your viewpoint.

Thanks Joshua, u2!
I appreciate the opportunity to provide my thoughts/views on this issue and I apologize for "Hijacking" this thread.
I posted a request to Adam on one of the pages you suggested for reading earlier and some may like to see his reply... so here's the link yet again:
http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/07/copy-protection-nuances/

Thanks again.

Hey Butch, looks like you got a present.

http://cia.vc/stats/project/opensim/.message/3b026f

That's GREAT!!
Looks like they have reconsidered their position on this after all.

well, now I am looking into figuring out to make redux work with standalone lol. and butch this works still like a charm. Wish I wasnt on windows though. wish it was nix lol.

Cool stuff. I am liking this guy, Joshua. Much better then that other one. lol

Thanks Bigmoe... let me know if you need anything... always glad to help when I can.

What do you have to do to get the RealXtend viewer to connect to CentralGrid?

I've pasted every variation of -loginuri http://maingrid.centralgrid.com:8002 -loginpage http://www.centralgrid.com/client.html I can think of into the place to type in the login , and I've added that to the target field of the RealXtend shortcut. It always says DNS can't resolve the name.

LOL, What an arrogant statement. What you do show is you have more mouth than knowledge. Anyone "in the know" would never make such a blatant assumption about other people's knowledge. I suggest you take some of that arrogance and learn a bit.

After all, only a noob would say something like "Apache and MySQL powers the internet". LOL, what a joke.

Um... if you knew who he lived with in real life you wouldn't be saying that.