Make SL Open Source!

Do you host your own website, if you have one?

No...you have it hosted by a hosting company.

The biggest benefit of open source is not in hosting it at home, although having a room or a sandbox of your own on your keychain drive is certainly very cool. It's the opportunity for customization, competition and most importantly, the creation of a distributed (and sometimes redundant) network.

So, when the big earthquake pushes SF into the ocean, the 3D grid will be world wide and it won't matter. (unless you're there, lol)

Also, we can see after the "ageplay"* and gambling bans that there is a race to the finish line, between those who want free expression for user created content and those who would lock it down completely. It's easy to ban things most reasonable people find wrong, dangerous or potentially fraudulent, but the problem is that regulators and busybodies don't necessarily have an easygoing view of what is permissible. Distributed networks make the 3D web more like the 2D one in terms of responsibility and enforcement.

Working out who gets to be an asset server, and how to price items for sale when everything is potentially full perms, are as much matters of markets as they are of technology. Initially LL might run the only asset server, then others could come into existence as standards are worked out.

*Footnote, I am referring here to sexual ageplay, not to youngish avatars in PG roleplaying.

Most people host there website on there own server....

Not quite. I'm a bit of a tech geek. I run multiple websites and I host them all externally.

Too much work, like others have mentioned, keeping a computer up and running 24/7 and hosting these days is super cheap. On top of which - a vast majority of people with websites don't know enough about computers to make their own websites (they hire someone to do it) let alone host them.

If LL does opensource the servers it's going to HAVE to be thru colo or companies that have the means to support such a system. If people actually do try to run their own sim on their home cable - well you think SL is laggy now...

I see what you mean....
But I reckon the main grid will be less laggy as people will be moving out there private sim islands and running them on there own servers and would rather spend £100 (202 USD) on a server, than spend the ridiculous prices of 'US $1675 + US $295 per month (waived first month)'.

Your private sims... will be private and hardly laggy! (depending on how good your server is).

Remember the stir caused by Copybot? And that was caused by opening of some client-side code. Luckily Copybot was limited in what it could actually copy...

Just imagine the damage if the server-side asset controls were exposed...

Number one SL is open source.. has been for several months, secondly, you can run your own servers, I have friends who are in the process of setting up their servers as we speak and are going to have four islands running on them.

the second life viewer is open source yes.... the thing your firiends are setting there islands on is called 'open sim', something which is NOT connected to SL, which means you have to start from the begining with nothing... new avatar... eveything. (you will not be able to teleport to the islands from the main SL grid).

i vote for it its a gr8 idea sl i hope u do it

vote YES please!!!!! i want my own land badly
PLEASE!!!

Well if the viewer is open source they may as well do the rest... i will vote too. OpenSim already exists but it's 3rd party so it isn't perfect. i can't even get it to run lol.. still it shows that there is a public need for it.

yes very true... seems to crash when i try to run it lol, thanks to all who have voted YES!!!!

If you vote YES may i remind you to please join my group:

Make SL Open Source!

the backend system ie: the user server,grid server,asset server will be under control of linden labs.

now the sim server it what will run outside of linden labs server farm
this is where you would host your own inland,
the typical home user can not do this and a static ip is required
test results are fair on a t1 connection and 4 users in the sim

in my testlab i have 8 sims on a 4cpu xeon
user,grid,assets on 4cpu xeon 10 av's per sim the sim server takes a good beating

a p4 2ghz 1cpu and a 1gb ram i got 9 av's with fair performance.

just a few notes for the folks to digest

Interesting, and illustrates some pertinent points to me.

Surprised to hear you got all that working, I'm having a hell of a time getting all of the pieces running to create a persistent experience. I can run the sandbox, but that's pretty useless as far as being able to do anything remotely interesting Any notes would be very much appreciated, hint hint.

There's been some tremendous action going on in the SVN though, and it appears that a lot of work is currently underway. Very exciting stuff. I don't know how it will all work out in the long run with public-hosted servers, but in the short term having one that I can test scripts and builds and sculpties and such on without upload costs is pretty cool

I just finished SpiderMonkey integration with the libsl client code and found that to be very interesting and powerful, so now (naturally) I'm wondering if there's any reason to attempt the same thing on the OpenSIM side

.

Course you have my vote...but

look at the "remove voice" poll: 73% is - for many different reasons - against the voice. Do you think the Lindens will remove voice? Obviously they won't. They simply dont care. SL is *their* world and *their* way of getting money. Amen

For secondlife to come open source we need to gain the support of all the majority of the residents, so please tell everyone on your friends list to vote and reply in the forum.

No, it needs LL to get their open sim source business model sorted out and for enough devs to have time to make it happen.

I just found this while 'googleing' for open sim second life:
It tells you that Linden Labs announced at a conferance that they are planning to make it open source server side, until it happens i dont know if its true or not.

http://www.informationweek.com/blog/main/archives/2007/04/linden_lab_to_o.html#community

I was Informed By A Friend Of A Linden That SL will Become Open Source Server-Side In January!!!! Please Keep Voting Soo It Becomes One Of the Top Things On The Lindens Agenda... Lets Make It Open Source Tomorrow NOT In January!!!!! lol

Not sure if this has been posted but we found this recently:

http://www.deepgrid.com/

Here is the Open Source effort on the servers:

http://secondlifegrid.net/programs/open_source

Yup.

Plus, be aware that LL would not have to open source the code to enable others to bring up their own servers, just license usage of a suitable executable. Even that is a difficult issue, cf: from yesterday:

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/19/126250

There are intellectual property issues (if you rez something on a 3rd party server, there is no guarantee that the hosting entity observes permissions at all) that probably require some sort of certifications ala verisign, lalala. Huge amount of work going on about this. I truly do not think that any groundswell of clamor on the part of residents is going to accelerate it .. LL is dancing as fast as they can.

LL wants this, but if they just license servers willy-nillly or (even worse) toss the server code over the fence, they will create a nightmare for themselves and residents. There are many other threads in the forums discussing this, and LL's own recent blog posting about the new architecture directions is also relevant. Before agitating TOO loudly, maybe doing some more in-depth reading and reading some office hours transcripts would be good

This would also make SL more vulnerable to hacking.

This would also make SL more vulnerable to hacking.

So did making the client code available, and that didn't stop them. The server code has already been available for some time, but emulated not the authentic.

I can see Linden Lab not releasing the source for a long time, as they basically have a monopoly on hosting resources right now. Once they go open source, some company will come up with cheaper hosting costs than what LL is offering and some real competition begins. (Good for us end users!).

Next point, when SL goes open source the entire economy as we know it will be changed. The L$ will likely cease to exist, and people will just use real money (as they should) to exchange goods (like in real life). This is another reason for LL to hold off as long as they can on releasing the source, as they make a significant amount of cash from the L$ itself. This isn't necessarily a bad thing though, because then prims will be like any other digital asset (jpeg, php script etc). You can sell them for real money, or give them away as you please. When you think about it, doesn't it make a heck of a lot more sense doing it this way than to operate under a 'virtual economy'. The only real benefiters from a virtual economy is the owner (LL).

All in all though open source will pave the way for some standards to be created and we'll see what 3D virtual worlds can really offer us since they'll be truly unleashed. We won't be hampered by Linden Lab's policy, and we'll have the freedom to do as we please!