Supreme flock of lan = Cheating land scalpers

Why would everyone running landbots & copybots be a bad thing?

Because it would even the playing field. I'm thinking whoever decides to market a land bot for all will not only make a killing, but will probably end up being praised instead of hated like the one who sold the "go to every sim and steal your stuff" bot.

They won't make a killing - because contributions to LibSL and the open source client have to be open source and licensed under the GPL, so nobody will be able to sell them. I know LL had good reasons for making this rule, but the problem is it's created the perverse incentive to do what Ekanthius has done - write tools that give you (or your company) an advantage, but then just keep them to yourself, to avoid the GPL's strong requirements that activate as soon as the tools are "distributed".

Contributions to libsl do not have to be open sourced. LibSL is BSD licensed and as such anyone can freely use it, modify it, sell the result for a profit and choose not to release the code.

http://www.libsecondlife.org/wiki/libsecondlife:Licence



http://www.bsdnewsletter.com/bsd/license.html


It makes me very sad that people keep making claims about BSD and GPL without verifying what they say is actually true.

I've been playing a little in the land market with my extra tier over the past month, and I've backed way down in the past week. In my limited experience, I've noticed that at least 80-90% of people who buy from me put the lots back up for resale right away. It's like a big chain land flip that can't sustain itself forever.

And now that I know how few premium members there really are in SL, it sure seems to me like there are more investors out there than people buying for private use.

I don't think it's price fixing on the part of the big land barons. I think there are a lot of little sellers trying to make a profit.

Of course if prices fall enough that I can get my own sim for under $1,500 I might be back in!

For the record, I still hate this thread title. I think the Lindens will eventually get to the point where they leave all these nasty threads open instead of policing them, and then use it as an excuse to close the forums completely.

If people weren't prepared to pay it, they wouldn't!

I spoke to a friend who is trained as an accountant, and they agreed with what I believed: removing the low priced options from a market doesn't drive up the average market price, because it doesn't increase the price people will be willing to pay for the product. All it does is to mean that some more people, who weren't prepared to pay the average market price, have to do without the product.

If Elanthius is able to run the risk of having a bot auto-buy what might be a junk plot and then resell it at a higher price, and if he can do this without the risk of exceeding his tier - then what was to stop the original land seller selling at the higher price in the first place?

I agree, too many people have been drawn into SL as a way to make money, and I feel sorry for them: they're missing out most of what SL has to offer.

And, yes, one of the things pumping up land prices is people selling to other speculators and trying to shave a little profit off every trade.

I think your accountant friend is confusing the mean with the mode.

And both the mean and the mode are important: the people on the tail end of the demand curve are not the only ones hurt when they're cut off... the business of marketing to those people brings a tremendous amount of money in. That's why your Sunday paper is bloated with coupons, why dollar stores are a hot product. Elanthius and other people running bots are basically pulling all that money out of the market.

"I wonder what the vintners buy, one half so precious as the stuff they sell". The basis of the free market - what makes it free is that for each person in the transaction what they get is worth more to them than what they give up. Elanthius is not greatly hurt by having some percentage of his land not moving, so long as he makes a profit on the overall turnover. But someone who is operating on a smaller budget who needs to sell the land *then* has to take a lower price because the money is more valuable to him than the possibiliy of future profits.

Ok but I believe Star Wars is on right now.

Reminds me of the guy who traded one large red paperclip for (some other stuff for) a house.
http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/ at the top, the series of pictures.