it’s hard to create an organization like this and the only one i have a little familiarity with is Blender 3D

i don’t think it is insulting to offer to pay to have something done in OS – doesn’t the money coming in from the few big companies drive direction to a point? i think it would be insulting to say that anything will be done for money, the goals need to fit the core groups vision

a project like this has to run on that small vision, or else it would just sit and spin. if i feel that my voice needs to be heard, then i better put my code where my mouth is and prove it. it is all too easy to sit back and say “do this” or “we need that”. i have no problem with those that do the work having the most say in what is going on. thinking otherwise is naive and if that is how the world works, then someone please come shovel my driveway in winter – i won’t pay you but i would be appreciative =)

all in all, a nice insight to what is going on and until i create something better, i am happy with how things are progressing

thank you to the core developers for having enough passion to do this, most people think that playing Farmville is work!

The most important thing is to understand where we stand, and to be painfully clear and bluntly honest about it. Instead of trying to please as many people as possible. It’s better to have less users who are a good fit to the project, than more users who aren’t — that’s only going to create mutual frustration.

I have, in the past, been a funding advisor between local bodies and community services organisations and foundations(some of these were 3 employees, some 1000 employees).

In the 7 years in the position I noted a sea change. And that is the attitude of the general public receiving services. And that is:

Regardless of size of organisation(even the 3 person services provider), the public demands Bank level services, data handling and response times.

At the far end of this scale is the classic hospital situation “More administrators than doctors. We must trim the administrators”. Which of course just pushes auditing and tasks onto the medical professionals, limiting their patient facing time.

Yet the number of administrators was in response to the publics demand for communication, transparency, and reporting.

Small organisations or foundations are especially vulnerable to these trends.

I have dipped my toe in the Opensim waters and keep abreast of developments. I know all about Openlife and InWorldz trying to emulate SL on the back of Opensim code. None of them remotely stand a chance of stealing the SL crown or even coming close. Lets face it, they are just as walled up as SL with their patents. But, all said and done, SL has set standards of expectation in the market. Opensim is reversed engineered and has a look and feel that is the same as SL but the developers do appear to be aiming to take Opensim far beyond the SL model. I own and run three RPG sims in SL and trade in goods so I am presently comfortable with the SL look and feel and, of course, the traffic it still manages to attract but I am not blinded by it and far from happy with that awful “Big Brother is watching me” feeling I get these days from Linden Labs.

My hat goes of to Opensim core developers and Diva for their hard work and while I agree, no one Opensim grid stands any chance of rivaling SL, I do believe. however, within a couple of years a Hypergrid of many grids will rival SL. Indeed, I think it is already happening but it is still too fragmented and lacking any central association to set any standards or address the issue of customer support which Troy above was getting at. I don’t know how such an association will come about if ever but I do agree with Troy that the typical Joe Ordinary will be lost in a lose confederacy of grids if there is no auntie to ask for help. Today, Joe Ordinary can go to the SL web site and create and dress his avatar and jump on board and do what he wants in a diverse metaverse of connected regions and I guess what Diva is saying is that the individual grids will offer these services themselves and, no doubt, compete with each other to attract users. Yes, this is already happening and developing so I think Troy is answered in part since, by the time Opensim matures, the infrastructure and services a grid should offer will already be in place across many grids.

I can imagine Joe Ordinary arriving at some Hypergrid enabled grid and find he can get his avatar fixed up and ready to go because that grid provides the service. Joe looks around this new world and soon discovers it is but one of many grids, not just regions as would be the case in SL. Very soon, Joe realizes he can do more than teleport to another region. He finds he can hyper jump to another grid in fact and, to his delight, he will look exactly the same when he arrives and what’s more have access to his inventory. He can buy new stuff and it all goes with him when he returns home. If Joe Ordinary needs help I believe he will find it where ever he goes and in some grids the owners will have implemented dedicated widgets of their own to improve the user experience. Nothing like this is possible in a closed grid like SL, InWorldz, Openlife or any of the other wannabe Second Life clones simply because they continue to wall themselves into a dead end street. The beauty of Opensim and the core developer’s vision is that they want it to be free for anyone to use and the task for us, the users and content providers, is to embrace it and do all the things that brings the Hypergrid to life. The traffic will soon follow.

I don’t know but I do believe Linden Labs is in a state of panic. They made Opensim possible when they released the viewer code and now I think they might like to push the gene back into the bottle. Perhaps Linden Labs will find their way again and become what they essentually are, a sever hosting company that is actually well placed to meet the needs of the emerging grids. But I do see troubled waters ahead for them if they don’t wake up to the reality that a lot of us that still spend our money in SL are looking at Opensim and could soon be voting with our virtual feet.

Obviously, we aren’t a bunch of cowboys and girls. We are fairly technical, though, there’s no question about it. And the project values time and talent above money, for the reasons explained, which can be a bit unsettling. The $1.6M+/year direct, no-money-exchanged, voluntary time contributions resulting from all sorts of motivations that this project is made of is an amazing and highly intriguing reality. If you ever tried to start a company and raise money for it, you will come to be in awe of this model. It’s not the only model to raise money, but it’s definitely a really intriguing [and effective] one. It establishes a common base, free of charge, upon which lots of commercial and non-commercial organizations can exist, without each of them having to raise that kind of money by themselves. Hopefully, some of those organizations will cater to users like Joe.

It takes more than chefs to make a restaurant.

In any case, my personal view on this is that the Second Life model/story is a niche application of online 3D immersion that has no wings anymore — well, maybe small wings on certain niches. Second Life itself is dying, I don’t believe the numbers they put out — they laid off 1/3 of their staff, for Christ’s sake; that’s speaks louder than any “economy indicators” or whatever they call those PR memos. We can (and must) ride on SL for another couple of years, but we must be ready to jump off pretty soon, and join the rest of the Web, if we want OpenSim to be relevant.

I am extremely positive about the future of OpenSimulator — probably even more than before. If you want to know the reason why, read this: http://www.metaverseink.com/blog/?p=33

My sense is that OpenSim should be able to be the center of vibrant ecosystem and contributors (code and otherwise) should be in good position to make decent money from work there. I guess the current status is to understand that user growth isn’t happening fast right now. What really are the issues there? We see a lot of activitiy, but getting mainstream use isn’t happening at a rapid clip. Is it just a timing thing or are there more complex issues blocking broader market adoption?

People complain about Linden Labs, but still there is a lot of money flowing in there each month? Why aren’t more people diverting that cash to opensim related projects? Clearly the offerng of software vs a hosted service are different. Why are Intel and IBM not supporting OpenSim with more new commits or even cash in some form? Is part of the block the fact that dev commmuity is so independent?

We are looking forward to the 7.x releases as we hope a more federated architecutre will allow more focus on performance and release use case specific functions out so they can be monetized more directly. Either OpenSim needs more resource or it will need to focus on fewer features better. Probably agreeing on what to focus upon is the hardest trade-off of all.

The “open metaverse” hopefully will be related to OpenSimulator, but it is something that transcends this project by a long shot! It’s completely unrealistic to expect that the 9 (yes, nine, as of now) active core developers of OpenSimulator are going to: (a) design that metaverse; (b) implement the general-purpose server; (c) do costumer support; (d) write the documentation; (e) do community management; (f) write standards proposals; (g) do their other jobs and interests. (Really, I don’t know what some people are smoking, but I’d like to have some of that…

WRT running into bugs. OpenSimulator is a server, and one that’s a lot more complicated than a web server like Apache. Clearly, not even the Apache server is for public consumption, it requires a fair amount of technical mastery. Not to mention the web applications themselves. “All users” don’t run web servers. “All users” should not run OpenSim servers — simple as that.

This doesn’t mean that “all users” are out of the possible metaverse. Just like on the Web, it means that users are exactly that — users of services set up by software engineers on top of Web servers. Same here. So Joe should probably be using a hosting company instead of trying to run OpenSim himself. By paying, Joe can at least try to pressure that company to pass the message along wrt the bug. Hopefully someone in that company can talk the technical language that developers respond to.

If I see a fallen road sign on my (real world) street corner, I can call the city maintenance people and let them know. There’s a system in place to fix bugs.

With Second Life, there’s a public site where people can post bug reports and where anyone (including Lindens) can comment on them. Sometimes bugs don’t get fixed because a fix would break existing systems, but at least the Lindens are considerate enough to come on and explain that. People can also vote on bugs to help set priorities. One of the reasons SL residents are so vocal about their complaints is that they believe Linden Lab will listen – because they often do.

I have a lot of hope for OpenSim and the Hypergrid, but if it’s really going to become the foundation of the “open” Metaverse, then it needs to have a feedback control system that works for all users, not just a select group of people with special skills.