CyberTech News

Jani. Tomorrow some members of Hispagrid have a presentation of OpenSim/realXtend/ModRex in a virtual Campus (UNISPA) in SecondLife. If you don’t mind I would like to refer to your post in the presentation, as summarized very important and interesting points.

Yes, go ahead and use this! Thanks.

The fact that microsoft consider would support OpenSimulator worries me, due to their “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” tactics. The fact that OpenSimulator’s developers have stupidly licensed it under BSD allows anyone to steal the code, make improvements, and keep it all to themselves. OpenLife (more accurately ClosedLife) has done this, among other unethical activities.

I think Opensim is developed so fast because it is licensed in BSD and companies like that.
A movement that is advancing this fast is really hard to ignore and to successfully make a proprietary fork out of it. Openlife is still taking patches from Opensim.
Tribal Media, one of the core companies of Opensim, has their own closed fork. That is the nature of the BSD license.

i live there (and also there) and it is really fun
to run your own sims was it really reverse engineered ?

Virtual worlds don’t constitute a 3D Web, or a 3D Internet, IMO. It seems the comparison illustrates a failure to understand what the Web (or indeed the Internet) is and does.

Reaching back a couple of years into the musty vaults: http://www.secondlifeinsider.com/2007/07/14/second-life-is-the-future-of-the-3d-web/

This isn’t good news. The 3D web needs to be a mixture of opensource and proprietary code so that there is *choice*. There isn’t when you impose opensource. Unlike Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, which have demonstratively ended up, after initial promise, destroying culture, newspapers, businesses, etc. with Web 3.0, commerce and value may be able to be preserved and not sucked out to accrue only to a few oligarchs like Google — but only if we repudiate this opensource extremism at its birth.

It confirms what I’ve said about opensource projects, that big IT simply exploits the free labour of idealists for their own benefit.

It also sounds to me like this is a corporate-hype press release. Opensim isn’t that robust whatsoever. We all know that, having used it.

I’m glad to hear an inside booster of opensim at least admit that it is reverse-engineered SL, however, as every time this subject comes up we have to hear lectures about how it isn’t really reverse engineered.

There’s also a real sleight of hand here when you talk about “big IT” demonstrating business cases, which you can do anywhere, and then implying that *business* will actually result from this platform. It hasn’t yet.

No viable business wants to tie themselves only to opensource, as it is not only antithetical to private property and fanning copyleftism, it is setting up everyone to endlessly have to pay consulting fees to the geeks who will unlock its wonkiness and get it to work.

Second Life and other “closed” worlds that are spoken of so perjoratively in fact are much more open for consumer and business use because they are run by companies with management and quality control and commitment to customer service, all factors missing from opensource projects filled with random volunteers who often harbour antagonism to capitalism.

I’ll remember to check back at the end of 2009 when there will still not be any sort of mass adaption of this sillyness, and see if “big IT” moved on, having scraped you for all your knowledge, to make their own proprietary worlds behind firewalls.

Prokofy, I think that the fact that Opensim is BSD and that the big companies are interested in it, will lead into situation where the 3D Web is a mixture of proprietary and open source, in a healthy way.
If this was just an initiative from big companies, then I would be really skeptical about its success. Or if it was just a bunch of fanatic copyleft volunteers (don’t get me wrong, I like copyleft), then I’d be skeptical as well.

BSD License or not -> It’s copyable ^^
Free for you free for all.

Don’t talk so much – build and help.

If a big company is comming with his own copy – fine i stay here.

The RealXtend guys are really doing a great job, keep it up!

It is great to see how far OpenSim has come. Hypergrid is currently blowing my mind. We have, right here and right now, a 3d web2.0 possibility..Great work all the devs, testers, users and companies that support this project. (i always thought BSD would free up some code to be used commercially alongside non-GPL compliant code..In many ways BSD gives more freedoms than GPL, there will be ‘value added’ opensim providers later I guess (havok 4 licences anyone ))..good luck OpenSim

Microsoft and open source? You must be joking! : )

MS used monopoly of it’s operating system to use entire planet as it’s QA department (did we all forgot terrible mess with windows?). We all did Q&A jobs on Windows for our own money, and now we’re about to co-write the software from which main benefits will be sucked-backed by companies?

That’s eventually MATRIX materialized!

Take a look at current situation:

Web 2.0 is completely upside-down from what it should be:

1. Instead of technical unity – there’s engineering wars, and complete technological mess and dissonance of display standards. Too many disconnected and hard-to-be-connected things now in the web-creation POT… complete mess…due to engineering disagreements, bullish Big Company strategies and standard wars – while on the other had
2. Design became completely unison! Instead to seek originality and identity – all designers are placing same “candy buttons all over billions of w-sites…

How can you jump from totally dumb-down web 2.0 into 3D?

It’s Literally – near complete death of creativity on the web… Really really sad situation.

When you say “open” and then mention names of Intel and Microsoft – there’s something wrong.

Question – in that everywhere-present Microsoft Explorer – can you actually make easy backup of your e-mails? Can you?

Prok, you make some very valid points… especially regarding the way Microsoft works and how businesses take advantage of Open Source projects.

The downside is, that once they use Opensource, because of the licensing it becomes very difficult to keep modifications to that source private.

I’ve had personal dealings with OpenLife Grid and found that company to be (imo allegedly etc etc) fraudulent, lies to its customers on a regular basis, extremely unprofessional, and very abusive to customer interests (surprisingly possibly moreso than Linden Lab, if that is even possible). In the short time it’s been in business, OLG has developed a very bad reputation… incredibly so for a startup company.

All these things said though… there are a couple of points that bear considering:

1. At this point, there’s not much that’s going to stop the Virtual Web. It’s been a while in coming, like the world wide web is off to a shaky start, but is the first snowball of a looming avalanche.

2. Byebye Second Life. Linden Lab price gouged and ripped its customers to the point people are just waiting for a viable alternative.

Once the Opensim project gets its steam up, develops a reasonably stable platform and all the functions work– there will be no reason for anyone sane to pay Linden Lab’s excessive prices– or put up with the historically consistent abusive and apathetic policies of that company.

45,000 prim sims costing $20 to $95 a month compared to 15,000 prim sims at $295 a month?

LOL, not even a contest. The Virtual Web? Bring it on. Woohoo!

the interesting point on the reverse engeeniring is allways:

where did linden get their code for MXP support, (opensim-style) hypergri or the treepopulator – if the opensim crew did reverse engineer it ?

Lindens did put their viewer open source, and while some librarys in former times have been done by r.e. using a proxy to get knowledge about the protocol – it would not make sense at all today.

and even if – Linden cooperate with opensim for a long while. That would not be an issue from the legal side. I guess IBM is even in the situation to afford at least one lawyer and did check this before they did build a product based on opensim.

don´t forget, that the “big companys” have the money and they do partly found 3D development.

a mixed situation like with BSD licensing has been arround the world before software was something important. university and companys-cooperation on similar terms was well established before the young IT industry even was born.

i can´t blame bill gats for what he did. success does not suck, does it ?

and they offer pretty much on open basis or for free. opensim would not be at that point without .Net CRL and free visual studio express.

one example: i you think, MS does not cooperate – go and buy the book “windows 2000 inside” and have a look at the compatibility chapters to BIND, Kerberos, SAMBA etc..

as said above, this is often more a war about personal opinions (wich are fine) often not enough knowledge (about applied economics, or the companys spoted at , wich is not fine). even Linden Labs did a great job, and i wish they can find their place in the new 3D web (web 3.0) market. why not ?

right now, we need people that (like said above) don´t argue to much about 3d-politics – but bring in content into the opensim/rex/.. metaverses and find more (less exotic to the mass) usecases in RL.

we still need many opinions and good writers – but maybe more a classic journalism, where you do research, speak to people and have a look yourself. take time and make sure you got the right information, instead of cross copying web content, linking from here to there.

and if there is something wirten what may be a personal view on things , great. make clear from wich perspective you see the things and state its a personal opion.

finaly, rember a common pitfall: this is a international community. and culture and behavior is very different. as i am german, i usualy am to straigth with telling my opnions. other may be very smart and have strong knowledge – but theier culture tells them to wait, till asked. so , listen carefully in between the lines.

enjoy your third, fourth or whatever virtual life – spread the word and accept money if big companys want to invest.

cheers,
Ralf

Ralf: “i can´t blame bill gats for what he did. success does not suck, does it ?”

No, it doesn’t. But success by illegal means does. Microsoft WAS found to be in breach of Federal anti-monopoly laws. If Bill had to break Federal law to achieve “success”… can it really be called success? How would he have done if he’d had to compete fairly and legally?

While some people my applaud Gates for using the system to gain a major fortune, to me he’s still nothing more than someone who was willing to break the law to achieve his goals– a criminal who (due to conceivable reasons) got off pretty much scott free.

I also think that a bloated, slow, bug-ridden, user-unfriendly, security-issue operating system kinda sux. I have to applaud the fact that Microsoft makes regular updates available to patch such things. That is excellent. But Windows as a whole? I know what it COULD have been… and what it isn’t… and that’s one major shame.

Can’t help but smile when I see people reaching into the horizon, talking about what will be, or what is coming… VR environments, that run over http, secure and non-secure, communicate with the very internet browser that are rendered on, do not use a bespoke scripting language, or need special api’s to ’speak’ to the outside world… require a huge growing data center to run on, confine the avatar to its own world, fight over inventories, etc etc.. have been around for some 10+ years. In many ways, they blow the ilks of SL/Opensim out of the water, in others, they are greatly user friendly, multi platform compatible, can be searched over standard search engines. Have voice, chat, user interactiveity not yet even seen in SL/Opensim, comes with a physics engine capable of jointing/linking multiple prims in a kenetic way, flexi prims, even ‘magnatism’ attributes. Can stream cross platform media natively (and no parcel media limitations either), runs alongside standard payment methods such as paypal, CC etc.

Hi Jani,

Just a small correction to your reply about TribalMedia having a closed fork.

We don’t actually have a closed fork, what we have is our own distribution which is the opensim core (exactly the same as the SVN versions) with our own proprietary modules added. So its not actually a fork as any changes we do to the core are commited back to SVN. This is exactly what the original idea for opensim was about. For people to take the core and build the solution to meet their needs on top of it.

Anyway I just wanted to clear that up.

Thanks.

Prokofy – I agree that we need a mix of open and closed source. I also think we need disparate groups creating servers and clients which inter-operate. We need .net, Java, c++, python, etc. platforms to interoperate. The way to do this is with a protocol and a content description standard; HTTP, HTML, and MIME did this for the web. This is why Tommi and I created MXP.