Open-Source Servers: When?

People keep asking me -- "If you know so much, why don't you buy your own sim?" And I'm going to, as soon as the servers are open-sourced.

Which begs the question -- when will the servers be open-sourced? And, along those same lines, is anyone or any group of people already getting ready to do anything with this?

I've Googled it and all I can find are the initial news reports, but nothing in detail and nothing since.

Any clues?

II

Is this like an office pool?

Actually what it is, specifically, is me asking if anyone knows when this is going to happen.

Since you obviously can't figure out why I'd ask that, I'll go over it for you:

See, some people might read things I don't, or know people I don't or, in general, have some kind of knowledge from some place which is valuable yet unavailable to me. Thus, I'm posing two questions:

When will this happen?

Is anyone getting anything together to prepare for it? For example, are any players forming a group, pooling funds, etc... Are there any projects I can buy into. That kind of thing.

Now, this is the part of the message where I tell you what a piece of crap you are for smarting off to me for the unforgivable crime of seeking knowledge, and then everyone who reads it decides I'm a bad person for saying so and forgets that you're a piece of crap.

Die.

II

The sim will eventually be open-sourced but I really doubt it will be anything like what people expect from it.

First of all, LL wouldn't be stupid enough to let any random rogue sim connect on up to the grid, they might as well throw the permission system out the window if they do that. The source doesn't even need changing for that, the ability to perform your own rollbacks means that every transfer object can be copied again and again and again.

Second of all, the ability to run your own sim, even disconnected from the grid. LL has a presence server, the search servers, the asset dabatase servers and whatever else not. They have made no mention of releasing any of the supporting backend infrastructure in addition to open sourcing the sim side.

If LL does allow third-party hosted sims to connect up, they'll likely only extend the contract to hosting companies who will pay a hefty fee to link up and who'll most likely be burried with liability contracts to keep them from being careless and trashing the whole economy and permission system.

Some bloggers are suggesting the Lindex will go away at that point. I don't know if that's true or not.

If they open-sourced the code and didn't let the servers connect to the grid, that'd still be decent.

It's probably the only way SL will survive, unless Linden starts selling something else. Linden is failing to capitalize, even though it runs a game with a massive microeconomy. It's not hard to figure out why. Users have two buy-in levels: $10 per month to receive permission to spend hundreds of dollars owning land (so, basically, your $10 gets you nothing tangible), or $1,700 and $300 per month to own a sim. Lots of *players* make money off of SL, selling items, and that's obviously why games like Kaneva are building malls that pay back to the devs rather than letting players run everything.

But SL is better than Kaneva, precisely because it is free and open to player development. Kaneva is just... boring. Granted, it's still testing, but there's just not enough variety, at least compared to the gold standard that SL has set.

As for the security issues, those can all be resolved. If millions of credit and debit card transactions can be secured online then so can anything else that travels the Internet.

I'm very confident The Grid will open up just like The Web, I just want to know when. If they're not going to do it, they should fire the panelist who said they will because there are probably a ton of people like me out there who are now withholding their cash while waiting for the cheaper sims.

II

Lighten up, Francis. Try to find a sense of humor.

The server source won't be released anytime soon. Features like losing inventory items and other problems will take months to fix I'm sure. Obviously what they've built thus far isn't scalable so do you think they'll add on to that by adding more load to the network?

I don't know if they will or not. I don't really know anything about networks. I manage Web content, not networks.

II

Take a look at http://opensecondlife.org/wiki/OpenSim. You might also be interested in the deepgrid project http://www.deepgrid.com/

This forum isn't for general discussion; there are many Resident Sites where this discussion is appropriate. I'll close this thread...