SL is NOT a Collaborative environment.

One creator -> whoever linked the last prim. This is moronic. I recently worked a project with a friend making a retro radio. It was his idea and since at the time he couldn't script or photoshop I offered to pick up the slack. Besides it was a cool idea. So he made the shell, and I made all the textures ( some of them rather complex illustrator work for speaker grill and dial ) and scripted the radio, with a color change menu, dial that moves when you tune it, droppable play lists, the works.

Now when he sells it in his store, he is listed as the sole creator.

Now, I dont' really care - he's a friend who needed help and I was happy to help him. But it did get me to thinking..

SL is definately not a equal opportunity employer. People like me who can script, animate, photoshop _and_ build have little motivation to work with other people on projects, since unless they are creating the last linked object, they will not be mentioned in the credits.. And people who only script get seriously screwed when it comes to recognition. I actually saw this quote (paraphrased, I'm not in SL at the moment) at the site of a popular designer:

"Scripting: Don't, there is always a dweeb somewhere that'll do it."

I would like to see multiple attribution in the creator label that combines all creators of prims/textures/scripts/animations for that object, that would go a long way towards addressing this and related (stealing content and reselling as your own) issues.

In the meantime I give most of my scripts away for free or not at all and am not collaborating on anything unless it is just for fun.

I pine for Unix-style owner / group / world - read / write / execute rights. /sigh

Yes, this has saddened me too.



But - some things you can 'sort of' do about it.

1. Advertise mentioning all names

2. Put credits in everyone's 'picks' and reference them

3. List names in item name, or description (description can be edited by user though)

4. Have a 'click for note card' option that lists everyone

5. Make a few different flavours of the object, everyone getting a name on each

6. Have a 'sales' avatar so "It" gets the credit, keeping everyone equal

7. Have a vendor automatically split profits, if $L is more important than fame

... stuff like that. Not ideal though, I agree.



And yes, someone can kind of 'ruin your business' by giving away a freebie just like your script or item for the fun of it, but... there is a flip side to that.

It ensures that Second Life won't ever be entirely 'pay to play', and that's a good thing.

Perhaps bringing in more customers over the long run, if you try hard and keep making quality stuff.

Most people think of money as the motivator in SL but I would suggest for most of us it is recognition.

I think SL would be a richer experience if collaboration was rewarding in that aspect. The permissions system is mostly about the monitary and I think this slants SL in the wrong direction.

That's what we used to have but... LL, in their eternal quest to dumb down everything for the masses, revamped the permissions system by removing functionality until they thought it was "easy" enough.

and those permisions + a tree heirarchy + full attribution of all participants

would solve 90% of the issues around theft, collaboration, etc. There could even be a dumbed down mode on top of it, it could even be a dumb mode like we have today.

Surely this was considered years ago. It's an obviously necessary collaborative feature to have contributor names automatically added to the creator list when they add a prim, texture or script to an object.

Although, come to think of it, that would require normalizing a creator-object table and LL employees don't do that for anything, ever.

Originally we had no permissions system at all. How quickly they forget

I know the quote you're talking about, but I hope you read the rest of the card and noticed the whole thing was completely tongue-in-cheek.

The rest of your post I pretty much agree with though. Collaborative projects don't have any options for splitting income made via sales to more than one creator. As far as recognition, you could list the other creators in the description line, but that's about it - and allowing someone modify rights to work on a project simultaneously involves a lot of trust, because its all or nothing.

That's true, but that was before your time and mine.
In Alpha, you could literally edit EVERYTHING... including other people's avatars! Steller Sunshine (first player evar) once told me that in that *cough*vast*cough* empty world of 6-9 sims, all she could do for fun was throw Mac Beach off a cliff

I thought the permissions system didn't come into being until after 1.0 some time, like around 1.2 or so. Of course I smoked a lot of pot in college so I could be remembering wrong.

Actually it must be collaborative because Philip Rosedale says it is.

Yes I did read the whole thing and found it very funny.

However, statements are funny basically for 2 reasons.

1) It is completely true but people usually don't say it out loud.
2) It is so completely untrue as to be silly.

I assumed from my experience that the funny statement was funny due to reason #1.

haha, like your sig Khamon