Owning region without paying FEE

Hello ! Is it possible to own a region and not pay the fee to Linden? I mean, can I have my region hosted on my server at home? Is the payment 1675 US$ + the fee 295 US$ /island the ONLY possibility ???

Not possible, no. In the end, Linden Lab owns all the servers, weather they are mainland sims or private islands.

Eventually, Linden Lab will allow private servers that you can host yourself. But this is not yet possible (and won't be for a good while).

Okay...but ss the payment 1675 US$ + the fee 295 US$ /island the ONLY possibility ?

Or you can buy a mainland sim at auction (over $3000 but only $195 per month in fees).

Okay..thanks for the answers!!!

Keep in mind, there are some things you can do w/ a Private Island you cannot do with mainland sims. Another possibility is to find someone who bought a PI at the old price who is looking to sell, which should get you into the old teir (iirc). Or you could lease an entire PI from someone else since many PIs are used for re-leasing (though usually parceled up). Is there a reason you need an entire region? You can also buy or lease smaller plots either on mainland sims or on PIs if all you want is to set up a business or house.

Short of designing and programing your own virtual sim and all the things to go in it from scratch on your own computer, the only way of getting a free sim would be to ask the Lindens if they could give you one and waive all charges! LOL

Lots of people will lease you a private island. They retain ultimate control, but you pay them directly. Usually you can get a deal where you don't pay the large setup cost (or a reduced one) in exchange for larger monthly payments.

But caveat emptor in private transactions, Lindens tend to stay out of it should anything go wrong.

There are two further options not mentioned so far:

1. If you want to use the island sim for educational or non-profit organisation work, then lower prices apply.

2. If you don't need to use a lot of prims then you can buy void regions (Openspaces) which come in groups of 4 regions, for the same price and tier as one regular region. Each void region will supprt only 1875prims.

Rock

A voids needs to be anchored to a main PI. You cannot just get void regions.

You know, if an ambitious group of open-source developers got together to work on an "SL-like" server and client software, which anybody could install on their home computers and webserver machines, you could theoretically create a really FREE system... crossing sims would become crossing to another server on the internet. Just like WWW is now.

Granted, since there would no more centralized servers, people could create and do anything they wanted as their assets would be stored locally on their own machine. Servers would have to be setup to determine what assets they allow players to come in with. There would be a lot of abuse of systems... just like WWW.

SL and LL isn't needed for this to happen, just a group of well-intentioned programmers with some time to spare and a desire for a free virtual world for all.

not likely to happen if all you do is wait that some hippie coder do all the dirty work for you , that for sure.

And well, i can't imagine how many "mudpit" sims would appear , hosted on sucky home computers XD.

SL isn't as resource/bandwidth friendly as apache or CS source ^_^

I love it when someone doubts someone's ingenuity

I think one problem with the idea is that the major reason many of us come to SL is for the "virtual world" experience. If you had your own PI on your own server and nobody else ever came there -- because nobody knew you had it, how much fun would that be? Now, if someone coded these home servers to connect to the grid, that would be an entirely different matter, and I'd be all for that

I think they already have worlds like this. I remember seeing something not too long ago, but I can't find it again. There is something special with SL that is missing in worlds like TSO and There. I don't know what it is, but it is there.

I find some of SL's shortcomings to be the things I enjoy most. My character lagging so bad one day that he went from male to female... Now that's just something I'll never forget!