That requires some thinking before saying if it's a good idea or not. My current first thought is: what would the impact of such a slimming down of LL be? They earn over US$5 million/month just from hosting sims; where would all that come from?

Premium service? That would be a possibility: to be able to use LL's central servers, you'd pay, say, US$60/month per avatar. There are around 80,000 Premium accounts right now (who pay a tenth of that) — would they be willing to pay that much to have their inventory centrally stored? If yes, well, I'd say that would be a possible solution.

Then the next question would arise: how would the migration work? Where would the 30,000 grid regions be hosted from now on? How would LL handle it? An auction system where grid operators would bid to get a region to host? I can imagine that this would be very, very tricky to handle.

Note that, unlike what you claim, the visual contiguity of Second Life is far more important than it seems, as I have explained on an earlier post

That requires some thinking before saying if it's a good idea or not. My current first thought is: what would the impact of such a slimming down of LL be? They earn over US$5 million/month just from hosting sims; where would all that come from?

Premium service? That would be a possibility: to be able to use LL's central servers, you'd pay, say, US$60/month per avatar. There are around 80,000 Premium accounts right now (who pay a tenth of that) — would they be willing to pay that much to have their inventory centrally stored? If yes, well, I'd say that would be a possible solution.

Then the next question would arise: how would the migration work? Where would the 30,000 grid regions be hosted from now on? How would LL handle it? An auction system where grid operators would bid to get a region to host? I can imagine that this would be very, very tricky to handle.

Note that, unlike what you claim, the visual contiguity of Second Life is far more important than it seems, as I have explained on an earlier post

Providing two major service (currency/billing services and inventory server services) would address their strengths while allowing them to avoid where they keep falling down (grid server performance, customer service, etc.). The fact that LL is refusing to see is this: nobody in SL cares that they can walk/fly from one mainland sim to the next; new locations are found by Search and from bookmarks from friends, and traveled to by teleport. -There is no need for unrelated sims to be adjoining-, therefore no need for them to be on the same grid.

It would also get LL out of the “content approvals” business, which is one which no sane company wants to touch.

I have been investigating OpenSimulator for about a month… I have a grid of my own, running on hosted servers, and since I am an IT guy in RL naturally I have been digging into the code and am starting to contribute back to the project.

For me, OpenSim is a very exciting project. What it does is astounding, considering the small team of people and the timeframe used to get where we are now. I dont think Linden Labs is quaking in its boots just yet though; as you have pointed out, they have a production system running on the largest public grid in the world. I suspect that they will start reaping the benefits they secretly and not so secretly expected when they put the client into open source. What I mean is they have a good team of unpaid developers in the wild, cranking out new functionality at no expense to themselves. They can afford to sit back and see what works and what doesnt in OpenSim, and cherry-pick the best features for future incorporation as they see fit.

Yes, the Linden codebase is creaky and difficult to update. That is the penalty for being the first explorer to land on the beach… on the other hand, they have a lot of experience on that beach, and have a strong position and control that the OpenSim community will never have.

I think you gloss over the IP rights issue far too much. I am for sure not going to hypergrid to some Bulgarian server, provide hooks to my content, and hope that the grids I go to are ‘honest’. With HyperGrid, if you can see them, they can see you.

The LL money system is another advantage which is seriously underestimated by almost everyone I talk to. SL has done a great job of locking down their money system. I am very skeptical of the trustworthiness of open source solutions when it comes to my wallet. This is not to say there arent smart people working on the issue; rather that LL is running a closed matrix, and they control all of it.

In any case, a year is a long time in the OpenSim development lifecycle. it will be interesting to revisit the topic, come January 2010.

I appreciate the level of expertise and knowledge you bring to this HIGHLY interesting topic. I will be keeping any eye on your blog and OpenSim as I am keenly interested to see how things shape up.

Thanks for all the great work,
Avarie

I want to compliment you on sorting out so many of the issues so well. Your writing makes me think about our obsession a bit with IM and where we are going with OpenSim development and deployment on grids such as OSGrid.

Personally, my goal is to help us get to version 1.0 of OpenSim by the end of the year. Currently we are at about version 0.6 and are consequently about 60% to having the features an average user of the maingrid might expect.

OSGrid has been running for a year and a half and is the oldest continuously running OpenSim grid. We support both the development with a close relationship with the developers and have been building a community. Both the OGP and HyperGrids first appeared on OSGrid, so we will continue to be in the forefront of OpenSim development and deployment and help all the newer and younger grids work out deployments in UGAIM and sims.

Again, thanks for the article. Its a really good one.

Charles Krinke
OpenSim Core Developer
Director of OSGrid

Under the current OpenSim architecture inherited from the Linden Labs Second Life viewer, it is difficult to visit other grids and worlds. One could argue that the Hypergrid is actually a work around for this – the connections between worlds are achieved at the server level rather than the client level. The disadvantage (or conversely, advantage), is that you can only visit other grids that your home grid has explicitly chosen to connect with. Though maybe one can then travel from that grid to a completely different grid – I’m not sure if the code currently allows this).

A more long term alternative may be to visit other grids just by typing a different url into your viewer, in exactly the same way that a web browser currently works. Then the architecture of independent virtual worlds becomes much more like that of the existing web, with all the advantages (and disadvantages!) that this may bring. It would allow you to go and visit any virtual world you please and make it much easier to bring in new blood.

For anybody interested there are a few more details at http://justincc.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/could-there-be-a-future-without-big-grids/ (which was written pre-hypergrid).

Why? Well, because LL seriously needs a makeover. You say LL or SL to a corporate client you get scoffed at. Not a good thing. And its not that they don’t fully appreciate the concept. They love it. What they don’t love is LL’s apparent inability to get out of its own way – See past their program-centric ego, and listen to at least some of their client base for how they can heal their mostly self-inflicted wounds.

Or maybe they ARE listening.

Ask yourself some of these questions. Why is LL not wringing their hands over the competition that OPenSim is or will eventually present to their business model? Why are they seemingly encouraging companies like my own to push past their own boarders and set up grids? Why isn’t LL working on Interpolarity – teleporting back and forth between SL and OpenSim? Most of the crowd that was working on that have been laid off.

Now, take a gander at the LL economic statistics on the SL website. The “Islands OWNED/ADDED” section is disabled. Why? Because it has been showing a negative total in the latter for about two months. That alone should make LL worried, but they are not.

I think LL has been struggling to find their way. What, between the meteoric rise of 2005-7, with all its ouchies, the media humiliation of the rain of penises, and then all this economic mess and media brow beating they are constantly taking, they are lost in some ways. They truly need to reinvent themselves – find the silver lining to having over 500 CPU’s sitting ideal in their co-locations, due to a mass exodus over the price hike.

How does a company like this take advantage of a mass exodus? I’ve always contended that LL was pretty clueless as to how confrontational the 67% OpenSim price hike would be to their user base. Its pretty clear Jake Linden certainly had no idea the doo doo he was stepping into when he blurted out his speech.

So maybe they are finally thinking outside the box and going to use those freed up resources to go in a new direction – possibly to become the ultimate hosting service for fortune 500 and military gov contracts. LL has recently hired Washington/White House insider, Scott Secher, as their Manager of Government Accounts, as well as cuddling up to some heavy hitter military veterans. And we’ve all read about how they are doing a major server side improvement on he blog by that FRANK guy. Some think he’s Jack Linden, the infamous giver of bad news about the OpenSpace sims. Word is that he’s heading up the initiative to run some serious dark fiber, (dedicated fiber optics) to all their co-locations around the world to give them the best internet bandwidth and highest level of security possible. Why? Something tells me their not doing this just of us, the grid users.

If my guesses are right, a year from now you will see a vastly changed horizon for the 3D Web, Linden Labs and OpenSim. IMHO its all good – Not a bad thing at all, IF everyone works hard to accept and prepare for the change.

How could things pan out? Well, LL would probably end up taking on the big bad dog-eat-dog Fortune 500 boys. Go for it, I say. I’ve worked with the big boys and I have to tell ya. Its much nicer working with smaller and more agile business, so you won’t hear me being angry at LL anymore over all this.

And who knows. Maybe LL will even throw us a bone and offer an affordable product those to those who want to host their own OpenSim grids. Some people will probably laugh at that idea, considering LL’s loNG LONG LONG history of memory leaks,lost inventory items and just genera bugginess. Kinda hard to charge for a service you haven’t perfected, but I’m betting the dark fiber will help.

Truth is, this probably has to happen for things to progress as they should. Maybe we should consider putting our own positive spin on all this and work towards moving our communities to populate and financially fund the progression of the 3D World Wide Web through virtual land rentals, the retailing of virtual goods and doing designs for the small to medium sized companies using OpenSim. Otherwise, we might just not reach our full potential. Lord knows I can’t sit around and wait for LL to grow a brain and go the way I want them to, so I’m just stepping out and turning the situation upside down and trying to find that sunny side.

You’re just plainly stating pure and simple economics, the effort of attracting another 5% of the market with uncertain risk is too high for a regular designer to take that risk (since the use of CopyBot on the main grid is by far less than 5% of your risk).

I couldn’t agree more with you. And since by 2010, the probability of OpenSim residents surpassing Second Life residents in size is effectively zero you’re quite safe in developing just for the main grid, at least until, oh, 2015 or so

Still, I’m pretty sure that some content providers will follow Tessa’s endeavour to create a federation of grids that actually protect more user-generated content than LL currently does, and will not hesitate to launch their content there — for just one reason: there is high risk, yes, but also a higher margin for profit, as designers in SL are reluctant to move over to OpenSim, and for a while (let’s say 5 years) you can offer your products and services without fear of competition and for the price you wish — pretty much like low-quality products made a huge profit in 2004/5, since there were few choices available. When Namssor Daguerre invented the concept of avatar skins in 2005, he sold them for L$6000 each — and he sold thousands (today, you get them in packs of reasonably high quality for a few hundreds of L$) The first person who devised a way to make animation overriders sold the script for L$400 without any animations inside. These claims sound absurd today, just because we’re used to competition to lower the prices for the consumer. OpenSim is still virgin, unexplored territory; but, of course, it requires first for people to trust it. Nobody made any money on the Closed Beta SL in 2002, when permissions were introduced and the L$ was a novelty — and nothing really worked well yet.