Make SL Open Source!

I don't think we need worry about open sourcing effecting linden dollers too much. The only ones that would be effected are those who only invest in sims. It's used for basically everything. Being a virtual world, the currency is a driving force for people to create or do things, such as creating clothing, hair, buildings, statues, vehicles, and weapons. It's needed for you to obtain them as well.

If we are to assume the open sourcing would lower the cost of a sim, i believe this will make owning one a lot more enjoyable. It will release most of the stress of affording the next recurring fee, as you won't need to rent out half of it to be able to afford it. I'm sure that would make quite a few sim owners rest easy.

I don't even think it would affect the cost of the sims that much - what costs is the machines, the manpower required to maintain them and the electricity and internet bandwidth required to keep them powered up and online. Open Sourcing the server code wouldn't really affect any of those things.

Why do we need to use Linden dollars to buy/sell prims though? It all boils down to real life purchases of goods and services, except we're paying LL to use their fake money when we could use real money instead. This entire concept of a 'virtual economy' is actually ridiculous when you think about it. SL is a wonderful platform for development and offers some amazing value add to businesses, but I don't see why it should be treated any differently than websites / web hosting is.

People could still make money with a distributed grid, they'd just now have the ability to choose a cheaper host for their land, and to use real currency instead of linden dollars. This effectively reduces LL to a simulator hosting company. (Aside from whatever continuing development they do with the platform after OSSing it).

Can't really answer that myself. I guess it's for the same reason other virtual world have a play-money currency (entropia Universe, imvu, Sims, there, exc). I guess it's hard to break out of that habit. I think it all started with old online games like EQ and UO which have in-world currency people marked a real world value to so they could sell. Then everyone started copying the idea. Your right real money can be just as good since it eventually converts to or from it.

For us end users it totally makes wicked sense to get rid of the virtual economy.

- No L$ conversion fee's
- Objects bought and sold as real life assets (which they are) instead of 'virtual' assets. An object is just a digital asset after all, like a program or a multimedia file.
- Competitive simulator prices, instead of just Linden Lab monopolizing it
- Land will be easier to estimate value on, since you'll have more measurable metrics. IE: The sim performance, the other organizations / entities sharing the sim with you, the theme of the sim etc.

So all those people who have Second Life businesses could still continue their businesses without the SL economy. They'll just sell their prims like they would anything else in real life. Also, I'm hoping a distributed grid would provide a way to download your prims onto your local computers. This would save the whole rollback nightmares currently plaguing SL, and allow more flexibility when switching sim hosts as you would just have to upload your prims to the new server.

Also, it's common knowledge that Linden Labs is creating money out of nothing to support the ~270L to 1USD peg, which doesn't sit well with me, as somebody putting real money into this platform. I'd rather bypass the whole conversion process and run my business apples to apples.

Not quite. If you run your own island you and all your visitors would be ruthed and gray, because your inventories wouldn't exist. You couldn't search the main grid nor could you teleport anywhere. Of course the only friends online would be those connected to your sim. Your island would be like a website stored locally on your harddrive. That's a pretty lame SL experience. To connect to the main grid and use your own avatar you would have to use a Linden server. And for this gateway service they could charge significant amounts of money.

So we need a 'google' for the potential metaverse super grid.

If we have a distributed but still connected grid, you should still be able to teleport and search just like you do in SL now, except between multiple virtual worlds. Also, your inventory should travel with your avatar between simulators of the same type. IE: SL to SL.

Simple example:

We have three open sim servers, one second life server, and a Torque server. They're all searchable on 'google' as they're all simulators with plots of land and stores etc. With avatars likely to become a global standard, you could cross into or 'teleport' between different virtual worlds.

Inventory would obviously not be transferable for the most part, since we're comparing three different platforms. It's similar to having three web scripts, one in php, one in asp and the other in lasso. You need three different servers to run those as well, but they're still all accessible and viewable publicly all the same. Now if you were teleporting between two SL servers, then you could probably bring your inventory with you since the incoming server would be able to understand it.

I suspect whatever open standard is most popular will eventually blow out the competition and make the inventory problem a non-issue though going forward. If 80% of the metaverse user base was using SL then you wouldn't need to worry much about inventory.

I'd feel much better paying a company of my choice a gateway access fee, than paying a single company like Linden Lab solely.

And how would you deal with rogue sims?

Tp to the wrong sim and it could store full-permissions copies of everything in your inventory before wiping yours clean as an additional "joke".

The only reason SL is what it is now is because content creators can (for the most part) rely on LL to enforce the permissions system, in an open grid a permissions system is meaningless because no sim is bound by it.

"Pirates" would make sure all content would be available somewhere for free, the same way you can currently use bittorrent to download pretty much any copyrighted work.

Inventory doesn't need to be stored on the simulator you're currently accessing. It could work as follows:
1) Local Inventory on your PC
2) Remote stored inventory (so you can access it from any PC)

The client would just need to point towards a remote storage location for inventory if you decided to do it that way. The only thing that would actually travel to another simulator is what you have attached to you, or rez on that server.

Permissions should still be fine on an open grid. If you don't want people rezzing objects, then just configure it in the land settings.

Your object theft and pirate concerns are valid, but this is something that will never go away and we just need to learn to deal with. How many fraudulent websites are out there now that try to scam your credit card from you? With an open grid it's the same thing. If a simulator is saying "Come here for tonnes of free objects and 65k square metres of land for $20USD!" then you can probably be assured that it is a scam, and stay away. Same as on the web today, it's usually pretty easy to pick out the scammer websites. Yes people will put objects up for download on places like bittorrent, but that's just something else you need to learn to live with, as we already do for everything else in the world.

Another analogy, would you rather use the web the way it is now as an open network, or some closed off version of the web where one corporation tightly controls the whole thing to ensure safety and 'compliance'? I think the answer is very clear. LL has provided us with a very awesome platform, but to really see it's true potential they need to release to the public domain and scrap this whole 'virtual economy' business model they're trying to use.

I think LL has a idea how to do this without allowing a exploit. We may only be hosting the sim and connect it to their assets. Sounds like it would work and the sim fee might be cheeper if your hosting the sim part. I hope it would anyway.

-FrostFox

That's better than the current situation, as our hosting would certainly be more flexible. They really need to rethink their inventory strategy though as well. To truly be open source we should not need to depend on LL for anything period.