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Second Life To Open Source Server Code
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Apr 19, 2007 01:43 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.'"
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So what's there angle? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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)
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Harsh Realm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Harsh Realm (Score:5, Funny)
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N/T (Score:5, Funny)
> look
You are in a room of user-created content. Exits are north, south, and dennis.
Re:N/T (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
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)
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
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.
Second Life Hype (Score:4, Insightful)
Here's how I want this to work (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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