Discuss Idea: Open Source Building Project

For a while now i've been thinking of possible ways to bring the idea of open source to building. My first idea was to use textures to give some first glance dimentions of the prim, but not only is that time consuming but also ugly.

So I glanced over the Open Source community for a while to see what makes it work. I have come to the following conclusion. It's not so much about hsaring the source in my opinion its more about the idea that anyone can come along and fix it improve or even break it.

SecondLife already includes the possibility to see the prim stats, what I want to do is the following...

I want to open my land to an Open Source building project, on this land anyone can build and anyone can edit objects. Just like a sandbox except nothing is deleted unless it goes against the build specs. The build specs is a a notecard on the land explaining what is wanted on this land. For example:

A working office space in the theme of a futuristic robot factory.

- Must be open and free for cameras.

- Textures must match and be shared in a prim left on the side.

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So before i go ahaead with this i'd like to get together with interested parties, find a few other people willing to open source their builds for additions. How could I improve this system?

sounds interesting. let me know where it will be

I think that is fab Karma! (And good karma too, hehe.)

Are you familiar with what Seifert Surface did at the recent Burning Life?

I think there's some molecules waitin' to be buzzed there!

Well a torley reply is enough to motivate.

My next steps will be to hold some discussions get a few interested parties together and work out the foundations of the system a way to directory all locations where builds are open sourced.

I'll use my land as an experiment soon and have it all ready and set up shortly for anypne to build on or add too.

If anyone interested in helping me first hand and spending some time on this gimmie a shout in SL. I think this is the perfect time for something like this especially with the open source thinking of LL with uBrowser and the new Alpha Linux client.

The big problem with the burning life prim wiki was people not following the rules - the default permissions set up when you rez a prim is that nobody can do anything to it, and in order for someone else to edit stuff you build you need to change a bunch of permissions. Unfortunately lots of people didn't bother.

Here are the instructions I gave:

Every single prim you add or edit must be set to allow anyone to move and copy, and set for sale for $0 (original), next owner can modify, copy, resell/give away. “Buy” stuff you want to edit.

It might make sense to have a group dedicated to "open source building", and then perhaps the group tools would be better suited to allowing others to edit (deed to group?). I haven't looked into it, though I did hear of some issues with objects deeded to a group somehow ending up not editable by anyone.

One idea would be to use the "grant modify rights" using the friends list for all members of the open prims building group. You'd probably want to get an alt for that group so that people can't muck with your regular builds and you don't pollute your friends list with unknown people.

It would be difficult to manage since everyone in the group would need to have everyone else as friend, and even so, granting modify rights doesn't allow others to see/edit the scripts in your prims.

SL is a collaborative building environment ... yeah, right

Seifert Surface, thank you very much for you input I am glad that someone has at least considerd a similar idea like this before. Also your feedback from your own attempts has alerted me to problems I would not have forseen without experimentation.

Candide LeMay, although valuable ideas that could be used to get around the modify problems we will face. I do feel it makes things a littel to complicated for people to get involved.

I invisage or a Open Source Building hub that will link all Open Source Building sites. we have to give land owners reason to want to open source there builds maybe they dont have the ideas the expertise so they pout up a briefe and let anybody come build on the land.

Im going to start experimentations with my land shortly and hopefully start a group, Seifert Surface I would really appreciate your help in trying to set this up. I'll send you a message ingame later.

Thanks all.

can you not code the permissions needed fror the prim into a script ? then you could just drop that onto the prims, and it'd save alot of time per builder.

Sadly no, so far you can only query the permissions of a prim with script, but not set them.