Open Spaces Announcement & Talk with M and Jack Linden

the people that use the OS as intended are saved the ones that were using as not intended should pay more

That sounds like a good idea (though I believe if you buy a new sim you get free island moves in the bargain... and that may work for conversions too).

Jack?

If I could afford to pay 75US per month for useless water I could afford to convert to an a homestead.....this still does not help me... I have one resident who is rarely there, uses approx 1875 prims and rarely has over 4 people there at a time. So it would under the new definition be considered homestead. I dont make anything on it but what the resident pays does cover the 75US tiers... The resident will not pay 125. So as I said no help for those in this category

I still want at least a partial refund to turn in my OSS...I figure they can still make money off of that when they resell it to someone for 250.

The 10 avatar 750 prim limit is reasonable under the original, stated intent for an openspace, but It really should have been that to begin with, if that original, stated intent was in fact meant to be followed.

I don't see anything in the KB article that says ANYTHING is forbidden.

If you are using your Openspace as a rental or other unapproved use, such as habitation, you are really using what we call a Homestead.

So you're going to do exactly the same, only stretched over a few months. Unacceptable.

$75 USD is *MORE* than enough money for you to run, power, and support an openspace sim. With a VERY healthy profit margin.

If these regions are using too many resources, impose thread monitoring and bandwidth caps, but allow for rare occasions of high strain, since sometimes it's required (terraforming, etc)

As a technical person, and a developer who's worked on the second life source code and protocol, I *KNOW* how trivial it would be for you to cap the region cpu and bandwidth use as required. So, you're not fooling anyone.

Instead of "bend over, we're gonna ---- you for no justifiable reason" it's "Bend over, we're gonna ---- you slowly for no justifiable reason"

Here's how you've failed the community:

- You claim that the openspace sims were intended to be only water or land, or extremely light use. Yet you used them yourself for full projects.

- You haven't looked into the technical solutions to this issue, did you even think to ask on the mailing list to see if anyone knew a way to restrict usage? no.

- You are ALREADY charging an exorbiant price for your products. You're earning 800% more than other hosting providers with the same hardware.

- You have taken disciplinary action against your customers for protesting against the changes

- You have failed to discuss this with the 4,000 people who signed a JIRA requesting you to reconsider

- Even now, after you've seen the MASSIVE community rebellion, you STILL throw this price change in our face, which quite frankly, you have FAILED to justify with any reasonable figures.

Opensim is looking very attractive.

Please let me make sure I understand all of this:

1) Linden doubles the prims on Open Spaces and sell thousands.

2) Linden allows Open Spaces to be placed anywhere on the Grid independent of Full
Sims. Says they can only be used for forests and oceans (Wink, Wink)

3) Thousands of Second Life Residents purchase and migrate to Open Spaces and set up
homes. (Hook - Line - And Sinker)

4) Someone at Linden Labs says, "oops" and Linden announces that they really didn't
think that people would, you know, actually use all those shiny new prims.

5) Someone else at Linden Labs says, " Hey, I got an idea - lets blame it on the residents
and jack the prices up by 67%.

6) Second Life citizens riot at being duped.

7) Someone at Linden Labs says, "oops".

Someone else at Linden Labs says, " Hey, I got an idea - lets pull the old switcheroo
confusing everyone with new terms and multiple types of Open Spaces and still
blame it on the citizens; and, best of all, keep the price increase but extend the
implementation a few months.

9) Someone at Linden Labs shouts, "Brilliant - the old Razzle Dazzle Em! "

10) Some citizens mollified.

11) Some citizens confused.

12 Some citizens still peeved.

13) All citizens abused.

I think that about covers it.

If the true definition for Openspaces Lite is going to be 750 prims and limited to 10 avatars,

and if having a light amount of residents to help pay for tier means prices rising to 125 USD then I am preparing for the death of SL sailing in a private sim enviroment.

The United Sailing Sims is 130 sims of which about 90% are openspaces. Do the math, thats 8775 USD each month divided among 8 SL hobbiests. If we cannot use Openspaces in the way we have, or if we cannot be accomodated in a fashion that allows us to raise money to pay for that 8775 USD each month, then the United Sailing Sims is dead.

I had recommended to Jack and Robin Linden an Openspace lite poduct that would allow 1550 prims for 50 USD. THAT would have been a reachable goal for us to have appealed to the SL Sailing community. But of course we are not presented with anything like that.

If a sim like Santa Catalina heavily used for sailing has to drop to 750 prims it it will loose its renter/owner. If it is limited to 10 avatars we cannot hold regattas that pass thru its waters. If it is throttled down in such a manner that any burst in sim activitily when a fleet of 12 to 12 boats enter it, it chokes. THESE CONDITIONS are not supportable. We will have to abandon LL as a viable platform

I really dont expect LL to go back to the drawing board on this again. Thus I am EXTREMELY sad. Alhough I have not polled the other seven USS owners yet, I think i can safely predict that the USS-SL is going to die because of LLs decision.

What happened to Mitch Kapor's goal of funding a future virtual world where real people could build a viable virtual PLACE. I believed in you Mitch. I believed in LL's original mission. I feel betrayed.

You can't live there,

so you're going to have a hard time putting a house on it and saying you don't live there.

I fully agree with you Mark, 750 prims are not enough for sailing areas, you cannot do any landscaping with it as you need spare prims for the boats, 10 avis do not work either for regattes, guess linden is not interested to have sailing areas like you and me have...

I see we're at nine+ pages of responses already, so let me try to answer some of the questions asked so far.

First of all, the limits are in the knowledgebase article which is linked from the blog post itself. We still have some work to do around script limits, more on that soon.

@Meade: To begin with Homesteads will be running 4 per CPU, but as we now work on ways to improve performance one of the options we'll be looking at is to change that ratio to 3 per CPU. That gives more memory headroom and is obviously less load on the CPU. It may not be the route we take, but it's one possibility.

@Sedary @Kris and others: I think it's clear that prim limits needed to be revisited in light of our change to two products rather than one. A product that is truly going to remain for light use such as water or forest doesn't require as many prims as the Homestead product. We need to clearly define these two as different products for different purposes hence that lower prim limit for Openspaces.

Jazz: Your questions on conversion are covered in the knowledgebase article. So yes, we will convert up from Openspaces to full regions for free, at least until January 09. If you have less than 4 Openspaces, then you can pay USD$250 for each missing one to convert up. So if you only had one Openspace, you would have to pay USD$750 (3 x USD$250) to convert.

@Yumi: We understand your concern about removing renters from Openspaces, but in order for us to be able to offer that product it does mean that owners will have to abide by the intended use. So unfortunately that does mean that we'll have to ask people to scale down if they wish to be classed as Openspaces rather than Homesteads.


More responses as I read further..