Second Life To Open Source Server Code

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.'"

So what's there angle?

The real buzz over second life is the ability to create wealth playing the game. Seems to me that they will always be the 'Federal Reserve' for their creation, and their intention is to make money by creating it. If anything kills second life, it will be a widely distributed unlimited money hack.

Re:Angles of angels

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.

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.

Re:Angles of angels

SL offers a few things that I find occasionally interesting. First off, it's a fancy chat service. I can talk with a bunch of people, and the 3D world it takes place in allows for a lot of creative ways for you to express yourself beyond just text.

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.

Real Open Source

The Second Life open client code is already out of sync with the production code because Linden Lab just threw it over the wall and then went on happily producing private versions of their software.

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

Could someone build at least one world in which you purchase "land" based on the power/CPU requirements of the land, rather than its (virtual) area.

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

Re:Real Open Source

I'm interested in the prospects of a distributed MMOG. The world is split up into regions. Instead of an authoritative server doing the processing tasks and stating what is and what isn't, specific clients are granted authority about the regions. Multiple clients, that is. Everyone listens to all of the authoritative clients running a region, and decides what's true based on a simple majority vote. The key is that clients don't get to pick what regions they're authoritative for; it would be distributed by something like a Kademlia network. The only way to take majority control of a region would be a massive DOS, kicking off a large percentage of the network.

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.

Say hello to Sin City

Once its all open, guess who will be in the line to download the code and get programming? Yep, the pr0n industry!

Re:Say hello to Sin City

How will they call their version? Second Wife?

Re:Say hello to Sin City

No, that's the version hosted in Utah...

(ducks)

Harsh Realm

GoogleLife, free virtual land -- ad supported of course.

How about applying GoogleMaps to a Second Life server, a few alterations to allow weaponry, NPCs from census data, and create your own Harsh Realm [imdb.com]?

Re:Harsh Realm

GoogleLife, free virtual land -- ad supported of course.

How about applying GoogleMaps to a Second Life server, a few alterations to allow weaponry, NPCs from census data, and create your own Harsh Realm [imdb.com]?

...then have the server wirelessly transmit your avatar commands to a DARPA contest vehicle fitted with a webcam and a wide range of heavy artillery, and hey presto! You've got the most realistic version of Grand Theft Auto anyone has ever seen...

N/T

Second life is the new IRC? I can see it happening. I propose an interface to allow people to be present in second life from an IRC client.

> look
You are in a room of user-created content. Exits are north, south, and dennis.

Re:N/T

Let me get this straight, you're being attacked by a flock of flying penises, and your first instinct is to bend over?

They are going to have to make it stable first

Distributed between two data centers, that they control, Linden Labs can't manage better than about 95%-98% uptime. Inventory items and sometimes even portions of entire sims regularly go into the bit bucket when the data centers have connectivity issues.

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.

It's all about the content

The truth is that so many people are trying to shove content down your throat in Second Life (mostly advertising, no less) that the servers just don't have the bandwidth capacity. I think that's why they're making this move - to distribute the bandwidth load among many, many users. I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps. And now we can all dream about 'how I'd run my private digital world', can't we?

Re:It's all about the content

I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps.

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...

The Street

Does anyone else think that this could be the beginning of "The Metaverse" as envisioned by Stephenson? (see Snow Crash [wikipedia.org])

Croquet?

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?

Err... I'm afraid not. Take a look at Croquet's design [opencroquet.org]. It's an old fashion P2P protocol in which each user forwards only their inputs (e.g. keypresses) over the network to other users. Every user must run the full simulation locally, making total network traffic and resource usage O(n^2) with the number of users.

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.)

good step

This sounds like another key step to making the web how some had originally envisioned it. Back in the day when VRML was born there was the idea of creating virtual worlds where we walk to a clothing store like we would in 'first life', of course the technology wasn't quite there yet... Now with Second Life we're a hair closer but as long as proprietaryness is in the way that's just one more silly road block. Personally I want a Google Earth version of second life so I can travel the world and see a decent recreation of it made with actual photos and 3d satellite imagery, I also want to recreate my college campus and attend class virtually...

only thing left

the onlt thing left is my fiber optic jack in my cranium and my Vr helmet.

Linden labs not in it to make money

Those of you who can't understand ANY motivation if it does not involve making money will have a hard time even considering this possibility.

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.

Visual MUD

This is a great idea. Hopefully someday something like this will lead to a free (or at least low-cost), user-generated, small-scale MUD for use by us small-time friends-only PnP-type role-players. It wouldn't need to be much more than a sort of visual IRC that can be run on a private server so that "spectators" don't drop by.

(Have a sort of RPGMaker-like toolkit for making custom effects and stuff would be nice, but I'm not holding out _that_ much hope.)

It makes total sense

Just check out Ultima Online.

Ea hadnt been cramping on anyone who is running devised versions of their server in different emulator communities, and as a result there are zillions of free ultima online servers around and zillions of people playing in those. Despite the fact that there are also a goodly number of servers that are letting people play uo with them for a monthly fee.

But, almost all of them who keep on playing ultima online cease playing on free servers and goes signs up with osi, uo's official server at some later point.

this is due to the fact that, inevitably mishaps this or that way happens in those non-official uo servers, your account gets deleted, your items get lost, features never get completed to reflect entirety of osi's service and such. so, sooner or later players who really get hooked up with up get fed up, and go sign up for an osi account.

this is the only thing that has been keeping ultima online running for that long a time from 1994-5 to now, despite the fact that it was so outdated even 1-2 years after it came out.

second life is following in its footsteps. they are going to open source everything, let everyone run a sl server, and when people who are playing in those servers come face to face with bugs, issues, mismanagement problems etc (note that running an 3 d online world server is much more demanding than running an uo server), they will do what ? go for the real thing instead, and go sign up with SL in its original source.

simple as hell. fantastic marketing tactic.

What do you to call it? Third Life?

How many lives does one person need? Most folks don't even have a first life.

haven't tried 2nd life yet

but some of the screenshots I've seen looking interesting.. I'm wondering though, can I go into the "2nd life" virtual world and buy some guns and proceed to shoot other players? or how about making a porn ? (use screencasting software to record the event.)

Ender's Games

Second life reminds me of the computer game all the students had to play at Battle School. The data and traits collected from that world must give out huge marketing and personality habits.

Second Life Hype

The main problem with Second Life is that everyone talks about it but nobody plays it. It makes for great news stories only because of the title. Even for people who don't play computer games, the name "Second Life" resonates with them. They see people who play games as playing in a second life anyway. When they read stories about Second Life, they imagine that all of their nerd friends are playing it and that it will be the wave of the future. You can see this with all of the advertisers and Presidential candidates thinking they are riding the wave of the future but are really missing the point.

Here's how I want this to work

I want it to work like this: I buy a small house in Second Life, and anyone who comes through my "door" ends up on my server, and the inside of my house is hosted exclusively on that server, and I can control who comes in and out. And it can be HUGE on the inside, a la the Tardis.

isn't this a mistake for them?

If people actually start using other servers, won't they lost their income stream? If someone sets up free second life server for particular interest groups, what's the point of using the official one?

What benefit does linden labs get from open sourcing their server?

Re:Pessemists start your engines

Why not think of the "positive" aspects of this instead of taking a big steaming dump on it?

You're new here, aren't you?

I have a positive aspect right here.

One of my professors is toying with the idea of working with SL for some lectures. The lectures are still in thr real world, but the assignments revolve around building stuff in SL. For example, one assignment might revolve around designing an automated "assembly line" that reacts to certain events Probably the biggest gripe he has with SL so far is that not everything is possible - he's currently trying to get a Petri network simulator going.

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.