Slashdot Log In
Second Life To Open Source Server Code
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 19, 2007 12:43 PM
from the over-there-is-sixth-life-nobody-goes-there dept.
from the over-there-is-sixth-life-nobody-goes-there dept.
mrspin writes "Having already taken the timid steps of open-sourcing the code for its client software, Linden Lab has confirmed that they'll be going the whole way, and will soon be opening up the server code for Second Life. This furthers Second Life's ambitions to be a fully distributed 3D network — built on interoperability and not owned by one company — a bit like the Internet itself. ZDNet's The Social Web asks: 'who will be the first to offer Second Life hosting or use the server code for their own internal purposes? IBM would be an obvious candidate, perhaps offering corporate Second Life services. And for the rest of us? GoogleLife, free virtual land — ad supported of course. It's certainly a possibility.'"
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
So what's there angle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I think you mean, "So what's their angle?"
So as not to be a complete git and only respond on the basis of a grammatical error, I am also wondering what they get out of this. As virtual as it is, they were selling real estate based on its perceived scarcity. With anyone setting up a server, and likely FAR improving upon the aesthetics over the SL landscape, who would continue to play in SL? As the saying goes, "there's no 'there' there."
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What is free software's angle?
Does anyone remember Wolfenstein Enemy Territory? This is a fully functioning game that ID software released for free - completely! I'm not going to search, but since I know that ID often (always?) releases the source for their games and engines after a certain period of time why not then other software companies?
ID is still in business because they continue to innovate and make new games. By offering the sources for free and even entire games, ID has created
Re: (Score:2)
Haven't played second life though, so I dont know how applicable it will be to my ideas.
Thanks SL!
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is real-world income to be made, but it is most certainly taxable. If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
Re:Angles of angels (Score:5, Interesting)
What if you never do sell them for real-world dollars? What if, for example, you simply take your Lindon Dollars to the (hypothetical) iTMS SL store and exchange them directly into music downloads? Of course the IRS theoretically taxes direct exchange based on the "market value" of the goods (which is 100% arbitrary), but can you imagine the overhead of trying to track all those online transfers?
If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way. Even if the tax on the final exchange remains it's still a major improvement.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
Actually, if you're earning significant numbers of Linden Dollars your earnings may already be taxable even without converting them to hard currency. This will almost certainly be the case for anybody operating as a real estate mogul in SL - each transaction will be a tax event. It will depend on a lot of factors, but if you're setting out to make money out of SL
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Angles of angels (Score:4, Interesting)
Second, it's a big sandbox, and it gives you a fairly pervasive ability to create stuff. Although there are definite (and often times very annoying) limits to the modeling system and scripting system, you can still use them to make just about anything that you can imagine. If you enjoy that sort of free creativity, then SL offers it in a reasonably straight-forward package. If you spend a little bit of time being social, then you can easily find people to help you create, or just to share your creations with.
A third thing that I enjoy about SL is its potential for just ridiculousness. Parts of the SL world are a lot like those stupid, random, and often very amusing photoshopped pictures that people email to each other, except it happens in real time. I wouldn't say that spending time there makes me any smarter or a better person, but it's at least as amusing as watching most of the crap on TV these days.
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
It's interesting - I can see your point. But if you replace "SL" with "Website" in your above statements, you can easily see how the attitude might change in a few years.
After all, at first I imagine many companies failed to see the relevance of a corporate website. They may never have imagined hiring someone specifically for managing it: let alone an entire staff for some.
The future hasn't happened yet. This
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Various people have been getting excited about the idea of "virtual reality" over and over again at least through the past couple decades, and while the reality has consistently fallen short of the hype, there's certainly a potential that's very compelling.
Second Life makes some of those potentials even more
Re: (Score:3)
You obviously have dealt with a better class of simple minded idiots than I have.
Re: (Score:3)
If a simple minded idiot saw their first website in 1990, they must have been a simple-minded-particle-physicist-idiot working at CERN, since the web was first publicly accessible in mid 91.
That said, I (who may or may not be a simple minded idiot) first saw a website in 93. At that point, support for images was little more than a rumor, and Gopher dwarfed http in deployed base. Yet it was immediately clear to me that the web would be
Real Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
Instead of waiting for them to do the same with the server, sidestep them altogether with libsecondlife.org's OpenSim or pick a new platform altogether from the growing list of real open source projects: Open Croquet, Ogoglio.com (my project), or Verse.
Oh and while you're doing that (Score:5, Interesting)
The "necessity" of getting a return on your per-square-meter fees causes SL to be overtaken by casinos and brothels. Make the fee dependent on something of actual economic value.
Just thinking aloud, don't have time to do it myself
Parent
Re:Real Open Source (Score:4, Interesting)
Bandwidth requirements are certainly notably higher (due to the fact that there's not one authoritative server per region, but several), but on the other hand, it's everyone's bandwidth being used; no one company has to pay for it.
It's actually more complicated to this, since the loads for a given region will vary greatly. You'd likely need realtime tesselation and merging of regions to keep the loads reasonable for a given client -- either that, or very small regions, with each server running a large number of them (when the load gets too high, a server starts offloading some of its regions). Still, the basic premise seems feasible.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenSim is a great project, I work with those guys frequently, but contrary to popular belief it is not a child project of libsecondlife. It is an independent project that happens to u
Say hello to Sin City (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Layne
Re:Say hello to Sin City (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Say hello to Sin City (Score:5, Funny)
(ducks)
Parent
Harsh Realm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Harsh Realm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
N/T (Score:5, Funny)
> look
You are in a room of user-created content. Exits are north, south, and dennis.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> go north
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
> duck
Re:N/T (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
They are going to have to make it stable first (Score:5, Interesting)
And to this mix we will add a heterogeneous server base, geographically dispersed, with network connections of unknown reliability?
Get ready for a Second Life experience akin to IRC in the 90s.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
That's more accurate than you realize. Because of trust issues, most third-party servers won't be allowed to connect to the Linden Lab network. Instead, expect to see competing networks of servers.
It's all about the content (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's all about the content (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to agree with this. I checked out Second Life awhile ago. I still have it installed, but I haven't gone back because the whole thing felt extremely slow and clumsy to me. Give me a Second Life with FPS-style speed/responsiveness, and I'll be interested...
Parent
The Street (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm suddenly getting interested in trying out Second Life, not having been interested at all before.
This is just Cool(TM).
Croquet? (Score:5, Informative)
I would ask those actually excited by this announcement to please inspect Croquet [opencroquet.org], a collaborative, three-dimensional framework for cooperative computing that is built atop Squeak [squeakland.org], the modern implementation of Smalltalk by Alan Kay and others.
Croquet is Open and Free now. It's in its early stages, but so is second life.
I don't know if Croquet is an excellent choice for building a metaverse, but I'm pretty sure it's a better choice than Second Life.
Re:Croquet? (Score:5, Interesting)
This cannot scale to more than a handful of users. Croquet's design is fundamentally incapable of being "massively multiplayer". I would say that that makes it not "a better choice than Second Life" in quite a few cases.
(Never mind the fact that Second Life is a huge, proven, production system with hundreds of thousands of users whereas Croquet is an academic experiment.)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1) The amount of bandwidth and computational resources needed to support one user are roughly proportional to the number of other users in that user's vicinity (e.g. the number of other users which are visible and thus need to be updated in the user's client).
2) The average number of users in the vicinity of any one other user is roughly constant.
Point (2) can be achieved by growing the world as the number of users increases, which should only require O(n) resources (on the server) to do.
With t
good step (Score:4, Interesting)
Linden labs not in it to make money (Score:5, Insightful)
I've had the sneaking suspicion that Linden Labs may not be a for-profit company in that their goal is to get rich and IPO.
My conspiracy theory is that the people who are funding Linden Labs, primarily Bezos and other Internet rich boys with cash set up Linden Labs to PRIMARILY develop and get the tech of a 3d world into wide use. Then their companies (Amazon for instance which is ALREADY working heavily in SL) utilize it in their buisness.
My inconclusive evidence?
1. They just don't seem interested in IPOing, when asked it's not really a priority. If you are going to IPO you do it when the hype is big.
2. They are open sourcing the client and server. If you were going to make money you'd charge a small but significant fee. Open sourcing the whole thing makes no sense. No, I don't think they are going the sendmail or mysql model by providing "consulting services". They don't seem interested in that either.
3. In their own Ego driven way somebody like Bezos could change the world. Ego inflation feels great!
So there..poopoo on it all you want. Not everything in the world is primarily motivated by money and profit.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Second Life Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
There are currently 36,511 users currently logged into SecondLife right now. Somewhat hard to call that 'no one'.
That's quite a lot, but it still pales in comparison to many online games.
Soccer sim Hattrick http://www.hattrick.org/ [hattrick.org] usally has more than that (not right now, it has 13.000 because it's 2 am in Europe but on weekends and Wednesdays, it reaches 50.000 users simultaneously connected).
I don't play it, but according to this site, World of Warcraft reaches 200.000 simultaneous users!!! and for all I know it could reach millions... http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december05/kirriemuir/12k irriemuir.html [dlib.org]
Other g
Here's how I want this to work (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I have a positive aspect right here. (Score:5, Interesting)
Having access to the SL source code would enable him to set up his own server at the university; that way we'd have much less (network-induced) lag. Also, we wouldn't have to worry about being interrupted by walking penises.
Parent