I'm coming back online a bit cautiously, following my Boom and Bust blowout, which had me disconnected from the Internet for a few months, because it had become an obsession.
The rupture served its purpose: my Internet activity is now more reasonable. For instance, instead of compulsively trying to keep up with Twitter and Plurk, I just log in and read a few pages from time and time. It feels weird knowing that I'm missing most of the content of the streams. But of course we all miss most of what happens on the Internet, because it is so huge.
One thing I missed while I was away from Second Life was the eruption of the conflict about the OpenSpace Sims (otherwise known as void sims). So what better way to resume my Second Life blogging, than to write a retrospective review of the OpenSpace fiasco.
The Void Sims get an Upgrade
It all began rather innocently, back on March 7th, 2008, when Jack Linden announced changes to the OpenSpace sims. The announced changes can be summed up as follows:
According to Tateru Nino's history of openspace, low-prim sims were originally used exclusively by Linden Lab, to pad empty areas on the mainland and to provide coastlines. The Lindens called them quad simulators, because four of these sims shared a single server, whereas a normal sim had its own dedicated server.
Prokofy Neva remembers that early in 2006 the Lindens allowed Adam Zaius to use the void sims to add open sea in and around his rentals continent of Azure Islands. Anshe Chung noticed that Adam had these, and demanded that the Lindens let her have them too.
In late 2006, under public pressure, Linden Lab packaged void simulators into a product, called OpenSpaces. They were sold as adjacent groups of four, for a setup fee of USD$1250 and a rental fee of USD$195/month. Tateru says that demand for this product was modest at that time. In late 2007, void simulator groups of four became decoupled. Instead of being clustered together on the same server, they might wind up all over the data center, which caused major problems with border transfers between the void simulators. Then in March 2008 Jack Linden announced the major changes to the OpenSpace product. Why?
A New Use for Old Servers?
Why did Linden Lab decide in March 2008 to encourage increased use of void simulators? Gwyneth Lewellyn suggests that Linden Lab might have wanted to maximize their profit from old, obsolete servers that were leased, together with the necessary bandwidth, under a long-term agreement (if there were no ongoing lease to keep paying for, they would have just thrown the obsolete servers away). Gwyneth is unsure of the dates, but she thinks Linden Lab first started using void sims just after upgrading to Class 3 servers, which meant they had a lot of old servers lying around. Some of the old servers were moved to the Beta Preview Grid or to the many internal grids, but some could be used for low-traffic sims.
The original void sim product required purchase of 4 void sims at a time, in order to use a full server, and was available only to owners of regular sims, to prevent anyone from purchasing them in place of a regular sim. LL in fact earned as much from 4 void sims, using old hardware, as from one regular sim on new hardware.
But as Gwyneth explains, the technology kept improving. From Class 3 servers, which could handle at the most two sims at a time, LL progressed to Class 4 and then Class 5, and will soon migrate to Class 6. At some stage LL started buying quad-core servers, which can handle four regular sims at the same time. This meant that they had more obsolete servers than ever, still under lease. The obvious business solution was to sell as many of those old servers as possible, while making sure they remained a low quality product. Gwyneth suggests that this is reason for the March 2008 announcement. And she mentions an additional feature which is only indirectly implied in the announcement: the new openspace policy allowed parcels to be sold and announced on the available parcel list.
The OpenSpace Product Takes Off
The new product aroused interest on the part of resident landowners (you still had to own an island already in order to purchase an openspace sim).
A typical response was that of Sarah Nerd. In a post on the Your2dPlace website, the day following Jack Linden's announcement, she wrote: "Personally I like this new option. It will allow me to expand my holdings quicker and be able to offer full free standing open space sims to renters that allow for a lot of freedom at a lower price." Landowners were clearly interested from the start in buying OpenSpace sims in order to rent them out. And many landowners began to buy OpenSpace sims.
On June 2008, Linden Lab announced that they were suspending the auctions of new mainland simulators. Tateru states that this dearth of new mainland sims made void simulators a preferred choice for landowners. However, the Linden announcement suggests that the mainland freeze was a result of the popularity of the openspace product, rather than a cause. The Lindens shut off the supply of mainland sims because the price per square meter fell too low, and they cite as a cause of the price fall: "the large number of OpenSpace regions sold through the new Land Store." Moreover, they mention that the price per square meter "rose a little as we reached March of this year before falling consistently since then." The logical conclusion is that mainland prices were falling because landowners were instead buying OpenSpace sims.
There is of course an additional possible cause for the drop in prices of mainland sims. The first half of 2008 saw the growth of several new grids using OpenSim, the open source derivative of the Second Life software. OpenSim grids such as OpenLife began selling sims for far less than the LL prices. Of course, as my own experience shows, the OpenSim alternatives offer far fewer functions than Second Life. But they do offer enough functions to be interesting as a cheaper, low-end alternative. Competition from the cheaper OpenSim grids may even have been one motive for the development of the new OpenSpace product – as Gwyneth also seems to suggest.
On July 8th Zee Linden posted the second Quarter results for Second Life which showed that total land mass grew over 44% in the second quarter of 2008. The post expressly stated: "Our growth was due to the popularity of our newly launched 'Openspace' land product along with a change in pricing to make the purchase of land more accessible to first time buyers."
OpenSpace becomes a Linden Nightmare
The use of Openspace sims soared far beyond LL expectations. Gwyneth reports that by fall 2008 there were an estimated 13,000 OpenSpace sims on the grid, out of 32,000 sims in all. On September 18th, RightAsRain Rimbaud noted that LL had reported more than 2700 new islands on the grid since the 1st of August, which would be more than a 10% increase in land mass on the grid in 6 weeks. RightAsRain asked whether this was a real statistic, or just the conversion of full sims to void sims, since there was no corresponding growth in the number of avatars. He also noted that the new sims appeared to be mostly academic islands (which pay lower rates than businesses – even in the case of void sims).
This growth was favored by a new tendency towards larger plots with less residents. The OpenSpace sims were restricted to lower prim counts, but people actually wanted sims that were less dense. Many landowners were buying OpenSpace sims in place of regular sims. As Gwyneth puts it: "the openspace sim, as a product, was undermining LL’s own income."
Also, certain unethical landowners began selling parcels on OpenSpace sims without saying that they were not regular sims, and complaints began to flood in. This was bad for the Linden image, and overloaded the support services.
More recently, Gwyneth has also suggested that the bandwidth cost of the OpenSpace sims was becoming a problem. While hardware use increases linearly with the number of sims, bandwidth use increases exponentially, since each new sim needs to be connected to its 4 neighbours (it is unnecessary to connect each sim directly to its 8 neighbours), with all the resources needed to keep the networking pipes flowing, such as memory buffers at all stages. A given number of OpenSpace sims consume the same bandwidth as the same number of regular sims, but they earn LL far less income.
Jack Linden Pulls the Plug
The Lindens decided to put an end to the Openspaces disaster as quickly as possible. The bad news came to residents on October 27th, 2008, in the form of a new announcement by Jack Linden. The announced changes in OpenSpace pricing and policy can be summarized as follows:
Jack justified these changes by explaining that most of the OpenSpaces were being used for much more than the expected "light" use. Rather than being employed as open areas with little content and traffic, most were being rented out to other residents, causing overloading and performance fluctuations.
But as Gwyneth put it: "Nobody truly believes that no one at Linden Lab wasn’t aware of what was going on." And the "ridiculous" price raise was a clear signal that LL was simply trying to drop the product.
Yet Another Revolution
Jack's announcement set off Yet Another Revolution in Second Life (to use one of Prokofy's favorite constructions, as when he called me Yet Another Leftist on the Internet).
Revolts of all sorts are common on the grid. Even in my short Second Life (my first rezzday recently came and went without my noticing it) I've seen at least two major protests, one after the other last spring. The first was a blog strike prompted by the Linden decision to initiate a new branding policy, which required all bloggers to add the trademark symbol after the words "Second Life." The second was a protest in response to a mandatory upgrade of the official SL viewer which suddenly deprived thousands of older computers of access to the grid.
But the OpenSpaces uprising was particularly virulent. On October 28th, the day after Jack's announcement, Wagner (Hamlet) Au covered an in-world protest outside the Linden Estate Services office, with angry avatars waving protest signs, and at least one case of self-immolation. The SL blogosphere broiled with indignation. Major landowner Lillie Yifu announced on her blog that she was leaving Second Life. A petition was started on the JIRA, the official SL issue tracker, and votes against the price rise began flooding in. Crap Mariner created an
Openspace Flickr stream to show the Openspace sims threaten by the price increase.
By the evening of October 28th, Tateru was comparing the protest to the Second Life Revolution of 2003, a tax revolt modeled on the tea party of 1776.
The reasons for the anger are well explained by Hotspur O'Toole, who argued that the price hike would do particular damage to "sims that rely heavily on open spaces for not just an aesthetic, but their day to day activities. Sims like the Second Life Sailing Confederation, or the Wild West sims, or Caledon, or Antiquity, all of which have significant open sims that are being used as an essential aesthetic for community activities."
In other words, the end result of the Linden maneuvering is that the void sims, which had long served a useful special purpose at a low cost, had suddenly become unreasonably expensive.
Prokofy's interpretation was that the Lindens were trying their usual method: "let's bomb them with a really harsh announcement, then see where the 'pain points' are, and solve accordingly." That brings to mind the way the Linden's introduced the new branding policy last spring – only they never gave an inch on that one.
Exodus to OpenLife?
As reported by Bettina Tizzy, within 24 hours of Jack Linden's price rise announcement, over 800 new users signed up on the OpenLife grid, more than 16 times the average number in a 24 hour period. On October 29th even Prokofy Neva, unrelenting foe of open source software, logged on to OpenLife, ironically calling it ClosedLife because of its lack of user-friendliness.
Bettina was obliged to report that OpenLife was not ready for most Second Life users. Prokofy, after a few more tries, dismissed it as NotWorkingLife and NotReadyForRentalsLife. I myself had first looked into OpenSim thinking it could serve as the basis of an alternative business model for virtual worlds. But I concluded that it seems more appropriate to use OpenSim to create entirely open source worlds, and to leave the virtual monetary systems to proprietary developers like Second Life – if only they could do it properly.
Damage Control
Gwyneth Llewelyn recognizes Jack Linden's efforts to respond in an appropriate manner. He launched the discussion on the forums (there were more than 3,000 replies) and he organized several in-world meetings. On October 29th he posted an update on the OpenSpaces announcement, thanking everyone for taking time to give feedback, assuring residents that Linden Lab was listening to them, and acknowledging that some OpenSpace sims were being used as they were intended.
The turmoil continued. On November 4th Jack Linden announced that the next day M Linden, the Linden Lab CEO, would post details about how LL would proceed regarding OpenSpaces. Comments were closed on this blog post, as they would be on M Linden's announcement. If you click on Find out why the explanation seems to be that: "some posts — like service status updates — are simply for informational purposes." Feedback on M's post was instead directed to the Forum.
On November 5th M Linden posted A Letter to Second Life Residents. After a few paragraphs of justifications and rationalizations, he presented the new policies, which can be summarized thus:
The same day, Tateru Nino offered the additional information that the modified OpenSpaces product would have its object limits slashed to 750 prims, as compared to 1875 prims in the old void sims, and occupancy limits slashed to 10.
Landowner Disappointment and Deflation of the Land Mass
The response to M Linden's announcement was summed up in the title of Gwyneth Llewelyn's post: Wrong Answer Mr. M Linden. As she notes: "the cost-per-prim in the new 'Homestead' sims will be about 500% more expensive than on regular sims." And two severely limited Homestead sims will cost as much as a full sim on the mainland without any unusual limitations. So nobody is going to want these Homestead sims.
Moreover, informed users know that the technology has advanced to the point where even the old servers can handle much higher levels of prims and traffic, so the arguments about overloading seem to be outright doublespeak. (Although as mentioned above there may be more credible bandwidth arguments.) The real reasons appear to be purely economic. But is it good economics? Gwyneth quickly calculated that if most of the 13,000 OpenSpace sims are dropped by their owners, which seems a likely outcome, at US$75/month this will mean a one million dollar per month drop in LL income!
A week after M Linden's Letter, Tateru Nino reported that the Second Life land mass had shrunk for the first time on record, with a net loss of 24.05 million square metres. However, this net loss amounted to only 2.8% of the total OpenSpaces product on the Second Life grid. Many OpenSpace owners apparently intended to hang on to them until the January 5th, 2009 price change, and dump them then.
Looking through the blogs, however, it appears that some OpenSpace owners are leaving Second Life for good.
On November 18th Tateru reported that the decline of Second Life land mass was accelerating, and had reached a net loss of 52.1 million square metres (or 795 simulators) by midnight of 16 November. This represented more than 6% of the total Openspaces simulators at the time of M Linden's letter.
Thus it seems likely there will be a sudden drastic drop in land mass around January 5th. To prevent this, Gwyneth Llewelyn has proposed an interesting solution: upgrade the mainland sims, keeping the price at US$195, and allow OpenSpace owners to transfer their sims to the mainland without setup fees. The proposed upgrade would include introducing on the new mainland sims the Estate Tools and avatar limits (100) currently available only on private islands. Many of the OpenSpace owners would probably gladly transfer their sims to the mainland, and pay the higher price, to obtain all of these advantages.
Back to Business as Usual
That brings us up to today. The clamor seems to have died down, other than a mention by the Second Life Herald that one group of residents is forming a virtual organization to raise funds for legal action against Linden Lab, to try to recover monetary damages suffered due to the OpenSpace sim price increases.
The sailing and dog-fighting blogs have gone back to business as usual, which seems to mean that they can live with 750 prim OpenSpaces – all they need is water or air, basically.
Second Life may have lost a few paying customers, but most of the rest will stay, because there is really no alternative.
But for anyone who is interested in democracy, on-line communities and user rights, this latest series of blunders by the game gods should serve as a reminder. If the system you adhere to fails to define your rights in an official text, then you have none. No amount of "listening to the forums" can replace an explicit recognition of your right to representation, participation and redress. Of course there is no legal obligation for the game gods to provide such rights, but nothing prevents them from doing so either. And if you had a real choice between a virtual world that provided them, and another that did not, which would you choose?
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Friday, 5 December 2008
OpenSpace Revisited
Friday, 31 October 2008
Boom and Bust
Over the past year and a half my Internet activity has followed the same general cycle as the stock market. Both rose progressively to greater and greater heights, finally reaching an unsustainable peak - and then rapidly dropped down to a fraction of their former levels.
The collapse of my personal investment of time in the Internet only took a few weeks, whereas the stock market has been plunging steadily since January 2008. The loss of stock value did accelerate in the month of October, but it now seems to have levelled off.
Despite minor differences, these two boom-and-bust cycles share a common principle: there comes a point at which accumulated value must be destroyed in order to allow new growth.
My Internet Boom
My cycle of intense internet activity began in early 2007, when I firmly decided to create my own website. By late Spring I had installed about 3 or 4 sites, only to discover that no one looked at any of them.
So I began studying Search Engine Optimization, in an unsuccessful attempt to draw visitors. In the Autumn of 2007 I realized that I could reach a far larger audience by editing articles on Wikipedia. But I soon got bogged down in Wikipedia edit wars.
Then in late November of 2007 I discovered Second Life, and Danton Sideways was born. In December I joined the Confederation of Democratic Simulators (CDS), which was my first true Internet community. I started the present blog, where I recorded my progressive discovery of the virtual world of Second Life. I began attending meetings of the Citizen's Social Democratic Faction, which is one of the CDS political parties, and I also sat in on the weekly meetings of the CDS Representative Assembly.
By early 2008 the Internet was taking up vast portions of my time. I started following several Second Life bloggers, including notably Prokofy Neva, who writes very long daily posts. Through Prokofy I discovered Twitter, which consumed additional large daily chunks of time. Through other Twitter users I discovered
Plurk, which is still more time-consuming than Twitter. Meanwhile I began to get involved in OpenSim, and even started my own OpenSim blog.
My Internet Bust
By the beginning of Summer 2008 my situation had become unmanageable. I was spending every free minute I had in front of the computer, and it was still not enough. In late July I took my family on vacation in Italy, where I stayed online thanks to my Asus 3e netbook. But once back home I realized that I was completely overextended, and needed to cut back.
So I started pulling out of my various Internet activities, gradually at first, and then with increasing speed. At the top of my cycle I had at one point stumbled on a video about screen addiction, starring a cartoon character who comes up for air in "real life." That is what it felt like. It was as if I came back among the living.
I posted my last article on this blog (before the present post) on August 11th. I made my last Plurk on August 24th. On September 8th I sent an email to my friends in CSDF, announcing that I was reducing my time in Second Life. I made my last tweet on Twitter on September 18th.
From there on, my activity on the Internet (other than a bit of normal googling and emailing) dropped to virtually zero.
The Great Stock Market Bust of 2008
As chance would have it, my personal Internet bust coincided closely with the great stock market crash of October 2008. The stock market drop of 2008 is in reality no greater than that of 2002-2003, as can be seen by a glance at a historical chart of the Dow Jones average. But October 2008 saw something much worse: a worldwide financial crisis, following the huge U.S. housing price crash. Alan Greenspan calls it a "once in a century credit tsunami."
After having studied this crash on the Internet for a few weeks, I'm convinced that it is the equivalent of that of 1929, and that we are entering a period of extended deflation which will be the equivalent of the Great Depression. I expressed this opinion, for example, in a comment on one of the blogs devoted to the Kondratieff Cycle.
New Growth
That we may be on the verge of a new Great Depression is just a hypothesis. What remains true is that periods of reduced activity serve a very important function: they permit new healthy growth to begin. Thus the economist Schumpeter talked of creative destruction, in the sense that accumulated value must be cleared away in order that new value may be produced.
In my own case, much of my Internet activity had carried me far from my original aims, and had become an end in itself. By severely cutting back, I gained space to reflect upon what I really want to do, which is (as always) to promote the development of convivial tools.
So I am coming back online, timidly and cautiously, to work on my personal projects. At the rate of maybe a few hours per week - instead of 24 hours per day.
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Tuesday, 12 August 2008
The Road to Illich
During the past two weeks I was on vacation in Italy with my wife and daughters. We spent a few days in Naples, and then went to the Amalfi Coast, where medieval towns with tourist-packed beaches sit nestled between cliffs soaring above the blue Mediterranean.
Before leaving France we took the risk of reserving an apartment by Internet. Arriving in Amalfi we discovered that our lodgings were several kilometers out of town and perched high above the sea, with no less than 700 steps to walk down to get to the beach – and to climb back up again. We learned to take the local bus to get around, and enjoyed the majestic view from our villa.
I brought along my Asus 3e computer, which belongs to the genus subnotebook and the species netbook. The cluster of apartments was equipped with wifi, but it took me a while to figure out how to get the Internet connection. So I had a few days of down-time in which to reflect on my main internet project, which involves making technology more accessible to everyone.
I've been long searching for a way to promote the ideas that Ivan Illich set out in his book Tools for Conviviality. I once began discussing lllich in an earlier post on this blog, titled Fools for Tools, but then I got sidetracked into Second Life obsessions such as CDS politics and OpenSim.
A Digression about Social Justice
I finally got back to Illich during the journey in Southern Italy. As I mentioned above, the first stage of our trip was a few days in Naples, a city which most tourists flee, stopping there only long enough to visit the archeological museum with its collection of ancient relics. But I had my own particular motives for wanting to spend a bit of time there. I'm fond of Baroque architecture, and Naples is full of run-down examples thereof. Also, my leftist sympathies for the downtrodden masses drew me to this bustling southern port, teaming with poor workers, street peddlers and immigrants. And then Naples was the home of one of my favorite authors, Giambattista Vico, an eighteenth-century philologist who revolutionized the study of history and initiated modern hermaneutics.
Through meticulous analysis of ancient texts, Vico showed that most Greek and Roman myths were thinly-disguised allegories of class struggle. For example, he wrote that the western dragon generally represents the laboured earth, the dragon’s scales being rocks in the fields, and the fiery breath an allusion to the agricultural practice of using fire to clear land. By extension, the dragon also represents the peasant class that labours the earth, and the Herculean hero or medieval knight that kills the dragon represents a leader of aristocratic land-owners who crushes a peasant revolt.
In the modern industrial welfare-state, popular myths take other forms, such as glamorous stories of stars, champions and popular idols, but the basic theme is the same. Our myths still generally celebrate the victory of the strong over the weak, and thereby justify the monopolization of wealth and power by an elite minority.
When I was younger I embraced the goal of an egalitarian society. I've since become convinced that strict social equality is a totalitarian ideal. I now prefer the liberal philosophy of John Rawls, who developed a more subtle Theory of Justice which takes into account the economic need to reward personal initiative. Rawls' theory says that we should accept inequality as long as the gains of the wealthy bring benefits for the least-advantaged members of society.
Musings about Convivial Tools
But let me get back to Illich. In Amalfi when I finally got hold of the wifi code and tried to connect to the Internet, my Asus kept giving me failure messages. I eventually figured out that it takes the Asus about ten minutes to establish the wifi connection, and I wasn't waiting long enough. Now each time I encounter some such technical failure, I think of Illich and his theory of convivial tools, because I believe we could design a new type of tools that would minimise the occurrence of user helplessness. A "convivial" tool empowers the user, by providing a friendly interface and a useful help function, but also by allowing the user to tinker with its inner workings, and thus fix – or at least clearly identify – what is broken. The wifi function of the Asus 3e failed on these counts, despite the fact that my Asus has a Linux operating system.
Way back in the early nineteen-seventies, Ivan Illich described a process whereby tools would be developed by a community of users. Such a participative process can nowadays be seen at work in open source software development. But few people realize that the first personal computers were also created through a process of community tool development. Illich's vision of a community of do-it-yourself tool developers was taken up by pc pioneer Lee Felsenstein, and provided the explicit model for the Homebrew Computer Club, whose members made the first functional personal computers, including the first Apple computer.
The thirty years that separate us from the invention of the personal computer have brought exponential growth in all aspects of computing: capacity of chips and storage, the web, search engines, high bandwidth, collaborative sites including wikis and social software, and open source software. The type of collaborative tool envisaged by Illich has become so widespread that Illich himself might now seem irrelevant.
But as the tools and systems become more complex, the need to render the tools more accessible to the average user becomes all the more pressing. (Note also the direct connection between the theory of social justice mentioned above, which aims to help the less advantaged members of society, and the convivial approach to technology, which seeks to help the average user, rather than experts and power users – who can take care of themselves.)
My personal concern is less with ensuring user participation in tool development, than with ensuring that the user has easy access to the inner workings of tools, and can tinker with and fix them. For software tools, such access is best provided by making programs open source. For other types of tools, access to the inner workings can be provided by designing the tools such that the user can easily disassemble and reassemble them. I'll wait for another occasion to explain why it is revolutionary to design tools that can be easily disassembled. For the moment, let me describe how I plan to use Second Life to promote convivial tools.
Danton’s Tools House
I'm currently setting up shop in a small street going North from the main plaza of the Colonia Nova sim. However, the shop, which I've called Danton's Tools House, is still rather empty. In the eight months since I discovered Second Life, I've been too busy with Second Life blogs, CDS, Twitter, Plurk and OpenSim to learn well the rudiments of building, let alone scripting, baking textures, or making animations. So far I’ve made a wall with a doorway in it, at the entrance to my shop, and an upper floor that serves as Danton's Workshop - which is the closest thing I've got to a sandbox. My goal is to fill this non-profit storefront with exhibits related to in-world tools, but so far I've little to show.
The Tools House Website
The shop is also supposed to present a sign with a link to the Danton's Tools House Website. I installed the Joomla website package on a hosted server, but I must learn to use Joomla before I can announce the link to the site. At present I'm trying to figure out how to put an image into the default Joomla page header. There is a new version of Joomla that makes this easier, but I want to learn how to use the older version, so that I will understand how the Joomla pages are constructed.
The initial idea for the Tools House Website was to present tools and other resources for residents of Second Life. This would include tutorials, lists of useful links, recommended places to visit, and so on. Such sites already exist, and would be linked to, but the Tools House site would aim to be a showcase for a specifically Illichian approach to providing open source access to Second Life tools and resources. The problem of course is how I will find the time to assemble all that information.
Tools and More Tools
I would ultimately want to go beyond tools for Second Life, and present information on the website about all sorts of other tools. I might assemble hints and useful links about using social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and so on. Then there is the idea of providing help and information about using the main open source software packages. You can download the software from sites such as Sourceforge, and find detailed information about the programs on Wikipedia, specialized sites or, in the last resort, on various forums. But Wikipedia strives for objectivity and exhaustiveness, which prevents subjective presentation of useful, targeted advice. And the specialized sites for specific software packages tend to be oriented to users who are already experts. So there is still a need for general resource sites aimed at the average software user.
Going still further abroad in the realm of tools, beyond software and the Internet, there is the vast domain of physical tools and machines. I've long dreamed of promoting a selection of easy-to-repair household appliances. These appliances would be designed to last as long as possible, with a guaranteed supply of spare parts easily ordered by Internet. They would also be designed for easy disassembly by the user, for easy repair by the user during the machine's useful life, and for recycling of the components at the end of the life cycle. Such appliances would probably cost more than the disposable type, but should appeal to a minority of do-it-yourself and environmentally conscious consumers, like myself.
Ideas can also be considered to be a form of tools. Another of my projects was to promote the design of "open-source idea systems," assemblies of concepts that could be adapted and maintained in the same manner as other convivial tools. The personal vision that lies behind this particular project is hard to explain, but it is another application of the general idea of conviviality.
Doing My Thing
As noted above, these various ambitious projects far surpass my individual capacities. An appropriate format for these projects might seem to be a collaborative website such as a wiki. But a wiki implies a group, and at present I am still alone. Moreover, wikis are susceptible to a variety of problems, such as weak editorial direction, spamming, trolling and self-serving promotion of products or websites. It thus seems preferable to find some other format, collaborative if possible, which would permit the development of a clear editorial line oriented towards Illichian conviviality.
What I am really looking for is some way to work with others. But as Billy Holiday sang: "God bless the child that's got his own." Balanced collaboration results when each participant has their own garden to cultivate. So I'll keep on doing my own thing, hoping that someday I can find a way to do it with a group.
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Monday, 7 July 2008
CDS Election Update
The next round of elections for the government of the Confederation of Democratic Sims (CDS) are almost upon us: the polls open on July 12th.
Between my adventures in OpenSim and my ongoing discussions with Prokofy Neva, I've left CDS somewhat in the background. Yet only a few posts back I announced that I was forming a new political party within CDS. Whatever happened to that?
Basically, it fizzled. I spent a few months scouting around in the various progressive communities on Second Life, trying to find recruits for a new party in CDS. I met a number of interesting residents, but they were all too busy developing their own projects. And I realized that I myself was branching out in too many directions at once. So I've decided to return into the fold of the Citizen's Social Democratic Faction (CSDF), which is the existing "moderate-left" party within CDS.
A brief look back
The Confederation of Democratic Sims was the first democratically-run region in Second Life. I've given a brief history of CDS in one of my blog posts, from its founding by Ulrika Zugzwang, to the latter's abrupt departure. In another post I went over that history in somewhat more detail, including a look at the involvement of Ashcroft Burnham, who left to create the Metaverse Republic group.
I myself found CDS in the first week after I joined Second Life. I immediately took up residence in Colonia Nova, which is one of the three (soon to be four) sims making up CDS. I was thus on hand for the Representative Assembly elections held in January of 2008, and for the first meeting of the new Representative Assembly held on February 3rd, which is described here.
The Representative Assembly of the first half of 2008 turned out to be catastrophic. CDS has had turbulent politics throughout its short history, but this semester has been one of the high-water marks. Following the departure of Michel Manen, who left to concentrate on yet another experiment in in-world democracy, called Al-Andalus, his party CARE was transformed into NuCare, under the leadership of sulphurous ThePrincess Parisi. The subsequent conflicts are told in my blog post Swept Away. In protest over the continual personal attacks which ThePrincess directed at Patroklus Murakami, the elected Leader of the Representative Assembly, the two CSDF representatives resigned from their posts. This provoked a mid-term by-election to replace them.
Recent Events in CDS
It was in this context that I decided to create a new leftist party within CDS. I announced my intentions in a post on the CDS blog, dated April 10, 2008. My reasons were multiple, but one main concern was that I had been expressing opinions on the forum without seeking the approval of the party I belonged to. The Citizen's Social Democratic Faction (CSDF) proudly announces itself as "moderate left," whereas I've always been something of a radical, and felt the need to have a free hand. I envisaged creating a broad coalition to try to pull together all those who feel in some way or another to the left of CSDF, but I recognize that this is like trying to square the circle, since minor leftist tendencies usually put most of their energy into fighting each other.
Meanwhile, the special mid-term elections to replace the two CSDF representatives were getting under way. CSDF decided to present candidates for the two seats that they themselves had given up. The CSDF candidates were Gwyneth Llewelyn and Justice Soothsaker, two long-time stalwarts of the Confederation of Democratic Sims. When the election results were announced on Sunday April 27th, the two new representatives were found to be Gwyneth Llewelyn of CSDF and Flyingroc Chung of the Democratic Pragmatist Union.
At the following meeting of the Representative Assembly, the role of Leader of the Representative Assembly (LRA) was again given to Jamie Palisades, who vigorously helped the still-warring factions to focus on issues instead of personal disputes. The NuCare faction, led by ThePrincess Parisi and MT Lundquist, continued to criticise CSDF, in particular for a supposed conflict of interest of their candidates, who had been members of the Scientific Council (a body with authority to judge electoral matters) before standing for election. These criticisms were supported by Beathan Vale, a Representative of the Simplicity Party, who sometimes allied with NuCare, and sometimes took his own track. Numerous new laws were proposed, such as one designed to forestall the aforesaid conflicts of interest, as well as others that implied constitutional changes.
In this general ferment, one law was passed which directly affected my project. It was decided that a faction must have a membership of at least 10% of the CDS population in order to present candidates in the elections. Since the population of eligible CDS landowners is something like 80 souls, this means that a party needs at least 8 members to present candidates. Someone has suggested to me in private that NuCare pushed this law through in order to prevent me from forming a new party, but that rumour would give my small efforts unreasonable importance. At any rate, this measure later backfired on NuCare, since their membership has dropped to a level that may make it difficult for THEM to be eligible to present candidates.
Another major focus of activity in CDS has been the preparation of a fourth sim. The CDS New Guild, under the tireless leadership of Moon Adamant, updated the CDS Master Plan and finalized the plans for a new sim, to be called Locus Amoenus, which means "Agreeable Place." (I still say it sounds like "Locust Amoebas"). Originally it was ThePrincess who pushed hard for a new sim with small low-rent plots, apparently so that she could easily recruit new members for NuCare, but this also fit in nicely with my plans, because it would make it easier for me to recruit members for my new party.
But I was failing to get anywhere. I managed to organise one real meeting, held in the Colonia Praetorium on a Sunday in late May, with a few potentially interested Second Life residents. But a week later the participation was already dwindling. A candidate in whom I had high hopes balked upon learning that one has to buy property in CDS in order to be able to vote, saying: "Property possesses you. I do only squatting. Peace to the hutz, fire to the palace."
Another candidate who WAS interested in buying one of my two properties (I was ready to sell my own workshop since nothing else was available), failed to show up on the appointed day. According to CDS law, a new member must buy land 30 days or more before the elections open, in order to be eligible to vote. Since the polls open on July 12th, the transaction had to happen before June 12th. That date came and went, without my having recruited a single new person. So I drew the inevitable conclusions, and humbly went back to being a member of CSDF.
But other parties are also having membership problems. Following an obscure dispute about a bath house or hot tub (depending on who tells the story), which may or may not have violated the Colonia Nova zoning regulations, NuCare ejected Cindy Ecksol, one of its own Representatives. Then as the elections approached, NuCare leader ThePrincess considered joining the Democratic Pragmatist Union, perhaps as a hedge against NuCare falling short of the number of members required for presenting candidates. In reaction, other NuCare members led by Bromo Ivory and Mizou Vavoom decided to eject the Princess from NuCare.
Behind her façade of pomp and fury, ThePrincess is actually a comic character. She reminds me of the Baron Charlus in Proust, who seems imposing and terrible, but who turns out to be a sort of running joke. Still, while you are all smiling at her antics, remember anyhow to get out the vote.
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Friday, 27 June 2008
Micro-Ode to Proko-Fly
The other day I posted a series of messages on Twitter, in reply to a message posted by OpenSpime enthusiast David Orban.
Twitter, for anyone who has managed to avoid hearing about it, is the first, and still the foremost, micro-blogging service. Each micro-message, called a Tweet, is limited to a maximum of 140 characters, and is supposed to reply to the question "What are you doing now?" But as the following example shows, a Tweet may in fact be any sort of message at all.
My series of Tweets ran as follows.
The Tweets:
dantonsideways To @davidorban: Homer describes a certain warrior as being like a fly in perseverance, endlessly coming back to harass the enemy
dantonsideways My tweet about the fly got me thinking of another persistent gadfly: Proko-fly Neva
dantonsideways Proko-fly : a fly in the big stone soup!
dantonsideways Proko-fly : a fly in the unctuous ointment of the social software interwebz!
dantonsideways Proko-fly a hairdryer? A veritable FLAMETHROWER in the vanity feed of the l33t FIC Digerati!
dantonsideways Hey, I'm almost as much fun as Mitch Wagner! w00T!#@!
Commentary:
It is fitting that this string of Tweets should begin with a reference to Homer, the ancient Greek poet who gave us the heroic epics the Iliad and the Odyssey . Because this short series of Tweets forms in fact a micro-ode to someone I've called Proko-fly, considered here as an almost mythical hero.
Those familiar with Second Life will recognize that I am refering to the infamous Prokofy Neva. If you need to be briefed on Prokofy, you might see my blog post about Second Life Loudmouths. Prokofy is best known for his criticism of what he called the Feted Inner Core (FIC) in Second Life, which is a supposed group of privileged programmers and content creators given unfair advantages by Linden Lab. Prokofy vigorously carries out an odd one-man crusade in defense of the average Jane or Joe, and against what he calls the Bolshevism of internet communitarians, open source and the California Ideology that reigns in Silicon Valley
So why is Danton posting a micro-homage to Proko-fly, when Danton is a fan of open source and internet communitarians? Worse, Danton is a self-confessed "libertarian socialist," whereas Prokofy consistently decries techno-libertarianism and all forms of socialism. Rather than try to explain this mystery, let me at least try to explain the Tweets.
The first Tweet replies to an offhand (and for our purposes irrelevant) message posted by David Orban, about shooing a fly out of his house. Which brought to my mind that simile used by Homer, and then led my wandering thoughts to the number one gadfly in my personal blogosphere: Prokofy Neva.
The story of the stone soup is found in many cultures. Travelers arrive in a village with an empty pot, which they fill with water and place over a fire. They drop a large stone into it, and explain to the villagers that they are making "stone soup," which tastes wonderful, but just needs a bit of garnish. The curious villagers each add something, and the travelers end up with a nourishing meal.
Prokofy applies the stone soup analogy to the business models of open source and social software. He says that the idea that one can make money by giving something away for free is an illusion: creative effort must be paid for. Trying to make money by giving things away free will inevitably result in a pot that contains only hot water and a stone.
The hairdryer incident occurred on Twitter on April 28, 2008. Prokofy was engaged in a vigorous Twitter exchange with several a-list bloggers, including the renowned Robert Scoble. Scoble has over 28,000 followers on Twitter and over 5,000 friends on Facebook. Prokofy in fact likes Scoble, considering him one of the more sensible internet evangelists, but was nonetheless striving energetically to set Scoble straight about internet culture. Suddenly Scoble tweeted the following:
Scobleizer Ian Betteridge just posted on FriendFeed: "arguing with Prokofy is like arguing with a hairdryer."
The original Tweet can be seen here. Around the same time, TechCrunch blogger Mike Arrington decided to shut Prokofy out of his twitter feed. As I remember, Scoble followed suit, though I'm now unable to find the links. (And somewhere Prokofy gave a detailed explanation of the different ways of shutting someone out of your twitter feed, which went over my head.)
Shortly after that, Prokofy had a similar falling-out with Steve Gillmore, as described here. All of these l33t (hacker slang for "elite") a-listers were successively shutting Prokofy out of their "vanity feed", which Prokofy defines as follows:
"His vanity feed (I learned this term just now through talking about this incident with many people) is his RSS of all the mentions of him on Twitter. Not just people he follows, not just keywords, but people who talk about him -- his name itself as a keyword, and people who type '@stevegillmor' to try to get him to hear, even if he isn't following them, in the knowledge that he might look himself up on Tweetscan, and find it interesting to see what someone wrote unsolicited."
To justify shutting Prokofy out, the a-listers generally accuse Prokofy of being a Troll. Prokofy replies that he considers "Troll" to be an outdated concept:
"'Troll' is a concept I do not recognize, do not care about, and don't follow. It is a hangover of MMORPG and The Well culture. It's got to go if we are to have a free and normal Internet. I fail to find anything remotely scientific or objective about this concept, that insider geeks use as a flag or marker to mean 'people we hate who aren't like us and won't get in our tribe'."
Trolls are also said to incite flame wars. Thus I hesitated to use the word "flamethrower" in my Micro-Ode, but it was unavoidable. Hot flame is implicit in the "hairdryer" analogy, so the heroic dimension requires letting it all hang out. Danton stands in awed admiration before the magnitude of Proko-fly's achievement. He has fused the entire a-list together in one massive block of self defense against the truths they hate to hear.
But what brings Mitch Wagner into the last Tweet? Mitch writes for Information Week and also hangs out in Second Life under the name of Ziggy Figaro. I enjoy following Mitch on Twitter because of his laid-back humour, seen for example here, here, here or here.
Also, this makes a complete cycle, going from mild-mannered David Orban, through Prok's heroic struggles with the digerati, and back again to mild-mannered Mitch Wagner. As in Auden's poem about Icarus, the ship that had "seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
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Sunday, 22 June 2008
Danton goes Open Source
About a year and half ago I embarked on a voyage of discovery through Cyberspace. I had been just another average internet user until one winter day early in 2007, when I said to myself: "I'm finally going to create that website I've been talking about."
The creation of my first website became a long saga. A friend had advised me to use a software package for dynamic websites, which turned out to be way over my head. I spent weeks struggling to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of HTML, PHP, MySQL, DNS and
web hosting, when I could have had a free hosted blog up and running in a matter of minutes. But I wanted a "real website."
I finally got a few websites running, which lead me to branch out further. I began exploring the blogosphere in greater depth. Then I created my own user page on Wikipedia, under the name of Redeyed Treefrog. And in late November of 2007 I joined Second Life. A few weeks later I created this Second Life blog, which rapidly acquired a larger audience than all of my other websites taken together.
Through my involvement in Second Life, and in particular through reading Prokofy Neva, I began to investigate social software. I would have hesitated to join most social sites using my real name, but I found it easy to sign up as Danton Sideways. Thus Danton is now present on Twitter, Plurk, Facebook, FriendFeed and several other such sites, where my "friends" are for the most part other Second Life avatars. I've become an Early Adopter. Now I'm taking what for me is the next logical step: I'm going Open Source. And I've created for the occasion a separate Open Source blog.
I've mentioned in a previous post on this blog my interest in the approaches to tools developed by counter-culture philosophers such as Ivan Illich and Stewart Brand. I've also stated that I consider free software guru Richard Stallman to be a saint, and Microsoft to be The Beast. So of course Prokofy Neva's continual diatribes against Open Source leave me unswayed. I am personally convinced that Open Source can stand up against the criticism that is directed against it on economic, legal or moral grounds. But I would prefer to leave the polemics to others. Instead of spending my time and energy arguing about Open Source, I'd rather just put Open Source to use.
I recently took a tour of several new grids that use OpenSim, which is the Open Source version of Second Life. OpenSim was created through reverse engineering of the Second Life software. At the risk of skirting the type of polemics I want to avoid, I might observe that reverse engineering is one of the grey areas of Open Source practice. In some cases it clearly involves infringement of Intellectual Property rights, but in other cases Open Source is more a matter of legitimate establishment of universal compatibility through open standards. Thus the IBM PC became the main international standard for PC computer hardware, because so many companies could easily make IBM clones. A rather different case is OpenOffice, the open source office suite released by Sun Microsystems, which provides a legitimate alternative to the detestable monopoly of Microsoft (the latter still uses every trick in the book to subvert the establishment of universal standards in this domain). And the benign, or at the least neutral, attitude of Second Life towards OpenSim has been explained as a form of enlightened self-interest: if the Second Life software becomes the basis of a new widely-used standard, this could reinforce the position of Second Life with respect to its competitors.
After taking my tour of the OpenSim grids, I wanted to learn more about the OpenSim software. I had to learn to use IRC, so that I could follow the discussions on the #opensim channel on freenode. I downloaded the IRC software program XCHAT, and on June 3d I connected to the #opensim channel as user "Danton." I got chatting with someone called "nebadon," and gave him the link to my blog post about the OpenSim grids.
That evening I learned from the #opensim channel that there was a meeting inworld on the OSGrid to discuss OpenSim. I logged into the Wright Plaza sim and found about 30 avatars standing around, talking about technical problems. Most of them appeared in the default Ruth avatar, but some had elaborate avatars, and a few were dancing wildly. Nebadon suggested I give everyone the link to my post, which several had already read and found well-written. After a few minutes the public chat went strangely silent, but the dancing avatars were still prancing madly about. I went back to the IRC chat, where I was informed that the sim had crashed. In Second Life I have had my viewer crash, but have never experienced the crash of a whole sim, so I failed to understand that the avatar dance scripts keep on going in one's viewer, long after the sim itself has crashed.
I started trying to fool around with the OpenSim software itself. I downloaded a binary version, and got it running in standalone mode on my home computer. Around that time I discovered that Ugo Trade has written a series of fascinating posts about OpenSim on her blog, including one that gives a list of OpenSim blogs, and another that introduced me to TribalNet.
As I tumbled further down the rabbit hole into the subterranean depths of OpenSim, I began to conceive of writing a series of blog posts describing what I found. But the present blog is devoted to the adventures of Danton Sideways in Second Life. I therefore reactivated an unused blog for Danton Sideways that I had created several months ago, as described here. I gave that blog a new name referring to "Open Source", and have already posted on it an article describing how I got OpenSim running in standalone mode on my PC.
News about Danton Sideways in Second Life will continue to appear here on the present blog. Henceforth, news about Danton Sideways in OpenSim will be given on Danton's Open Source Blog. How many separate lives can one little avatar have?
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Monday, 2 June 2008
Alternate Second Life Viewers
After finishing my last post, about the open source grids operating under OpenSim software, I started studying alternate Second Life viewers. (The viewer, also called the "client," is the part of the Second Life software that you download onto your hard disk, and that enables your computer to communicate with the distant Second Life servers.)
Most, but not all, of the alternative viewers are open source, and some are still in early stages of development. All of them work with the Second Life grid, and many also work with the open source grids. This capacity of the same viewer to communicate indifferently with the Second Life grid or with the Open Sim grids is particularly interesting, since it prefigures the "3D web." Imagine a viewer that allows you to teleport from one virtual world to the next, almost easily as we now click from one webpage to another. Such a "3D web" may be just around the corner.
The official Second Life viewer
Before looking at the alternative viewers, it may be worth saying a word or two about the official viewer. The viewer must be downloaded and installed on your hard drive before you can connect to the Second Life servers, so the newbie experience generally starts at the official viewer download page . This download page also gives a definition of the various categories of Test Viewers (Release Candidate Viewers, First Look Viewers and Beta Viewers).
The current viewer is Version Number 1.19.1.4, which is what I have on my computer. The entire list of versions is given here. It can be seen that Linden Lab is currently up to Release Candidate 1.20.8.
I will definitely avoid using the latest Release Candidate myself, because my computer is a few years old, and is already stressed out by version 1.19.1.4. I would have willingly stayed with an older version but, one day a few months ago when I tried to log on to Second Life, the system forced me to switch to the new viewer. The new viewer produced weird and undesired visual effects, in the form of shifting triangles of colored light streaming from my avatar. Using Google I found a post on the JIRA which linked this problem to my graphics card, which is an ATI Radeon X300/X550. I followed the advice someone posted on the JIRA, and installed an older version of the driver for my graphics card, since the most recent driver is incompatible with the current viewer. Using the older graphics driver solved the problem of the colored-triangles. However, to adjust to my downgraded graphics driver, Second Life automatically set my draw distance to 64 meters, so my avatar is now myopic. A great many residents seem to be having similar problems, which shows how critical viewer issues can be.
As I told in my previous post, the official Second Life viewer has gone open source. You can even try to compile it yourself, if you want to. First you download the source code, and then you follow the elaborate instructions, which start here and, for windows users, continue here. I tried to follow these instructions, as told in a post on my other blog, but I got overwhelmed by all of the other programs that I had to install to make this work, and gave up about half-way through.
Alternative open source viewers
The official Second Life wiki has a long page on alternate viewers. This list includes several open source modifications of the official viewer (such the Able, Dale Glass and Nicholaz editions), one closed source modification (Onrez), one extensively rewritten open source viewer (RealXtend), and a number of miscellaneous other viewers. A curiosity is the Marine Edition, codename "RestrainedLife," which is a viewer designed to enhance the BDSM experience, in conjunction with simple scripts to make attached objects undetachable, prevent chat and otherwise restrain one's consenting BDSM partner.
The main open source modifications of the official viewer were described by Caleb Booker in a post from September 2007. The Able Edition, made by Able Whitman, works just like the main viewer but adds visual muting, thereby blocking out ad farms and other visual annoyances. The Dale Glass Edition (see also the Dale Glass blog) adds a number experimental features for dealing with griefers. These include a proximity detector which shows the names of other avatars in the area, as well as the avatar age and whether there is any payment information on file, and a detector indicating the source of particles and sounds.
The Nicholaz viewer was built by Nicholaz Beresford with a focus on stability, usability and performance. I've heard residents say that the Nicholaz viewer helps reduce frequent crashing and similar problems with the official viewer. The Nicholaz release called EyeCandy is to be used together with version 1.19.1.4 of the official viewer. Since I am using that official viewer, I installed EyeCandy, which involves simply copying the executable (".exe") file and three small XLM files into the same program directory where your Second Life viewer is already installed. Then instead of launching the Second Life viewer you simply launch the Nicholaz executable file (I put a shortcut to this on my desktop). It is easy to launch either the official viewer, or the Nicholaz viewer, as you wish. I found the Nicholaz viewer to be pretty much the same as the official viewer, the most noticeable difference being a button that says "release keys," to use when a script has taken control of your keys.
The Kirstens viewers are compiled for high end intel based machines for best performance or to fix specific problems, and have proved very stable. The instructions say to copy the executable file into your Second Life directory, as for the Nicholaz viewer. I did not try the Kirstens viewer, but it of special interest because the OpenLife website proposes a download of a modified Kirstens viewer (see below)
The realXtend viewer
The realXtend viewer is part of an open source virtual world platform that was discretely developed during several months by two companies, Admino and Ludocraft, before they suddenly revealed it to a group of OpenSim developers that they invited to Finland in January 2008. Sakai Openlife, of the OpenLife grid, who was among the guests, describes this event as follows:
"Friday morning we all met. Firstly wow, it was great to meet most of the others from the OpenSimulator project, I don't think it had been done before, and whilst things may have started quiet it didn't take long for us all to Gel together and get talking! And then we met the guys under the banner 'RealXtend', this was interesting why had I flown more than 14,000km across the planet? Who were they and what had they been doing? Questions were flying in everyone's minds and we started to get some information. 2 Companies Admino & Ludocraft had been working furiously in the background over the past 4 months, 'extending' the function of the OpenSimulator Project, they had done this with the afforded generosity of Juha Hulkko.
So what did they want global domination? No. Were they Anti-Linden? No (actually Chris Collins from Linden Labs was there too). Did they want to take over the OpenSimulator Project? No.
They wanted to move forward, extend as the name suggests features & methods for greater user function and versatility of the code & it's application."
After the participants in the Finnish meeting returned home, floods of information about realXtend starting showing up on various blogs. The realXtend platform is made up of two parts, which are:
* realXtend viewer, an open source browser for virtual worlds,
* realXtend server, an open source server based on OpenSim.
The realXtend viewer, based on the Ogre 3D engine, allows the use of meshes in place of primitives. As explained by Ugo Trade, a prim is a solid, while a mesh is a series of triangles in 3D which can make any arbitrary surface. Prims are more compact and lower cost to render, but most 3D programs build meshes by default, in order to support proper 3D models. And since one mesh can replace many prims, the difference in computing cost between meshes and prims is smaller than one would think.
On the server side, reports Adam Frisby of OpenSim, realXtend adds features such as Python scripting support, and a new server called the ‘Avatar Server,’ which allows transporting your avatar's appearance from one OpenSim simulator to a completely different one, without any shared grid infrastructure.
I downloaded version 0.21 of the realXtend viewer from the realXtend download page, and installed it with no problem. To my surprise it worked fine for connecting to Second Life, but not for OpenLife. When I type the OpenLife URI (http://logingrid.net:8002) into the "Connect to" box, realXtend first takes a very long time to get past "Initializing World", then hangs permanently on "Connecting to Region." However, the OpenLife website offers a download of a special RealXtend Openlife Edition Viewer v0.2. That might work better for OpenLife than the standard version of realXtend, but I would have to uninstall the version I currently have, so I've left it at that. The OpenLife website also offers a download of a special OpenLife version of the Kirstens viewer (see above), but I have not yet tried that either.
The Onrez Viewer
The Onrez Viewer is a closed-source viewer originally created by the Electric Sheep Company to be used with the CSI New York Virtual Experience. The viewer's name also recalls the Onrez website which provides online shopping for Second Life items.
When the Onrez viewer was introduced in October 2007, Hamlet Au noted that its main innovation was to allow in-world web browsing (supporting html, but not plugins such as Flash). I installed the Onrez viewer easily, and when I connected to Second Life I found a special window open in the middle of the Second Life view, displaying a website called The Loop . At first there was no browser line in this window, so I was stuck on that page, but I closed the special window and then opened it up again by clicking on the button saying "The Loop," at top right of the screen, , and the browser line appeared.
What I disliked about the Onrez viewer was that the menu layout is rather different from that of the official viewer, and is thus hard to find one's way around in. Also, every time I log out the viewer crashes and my system gives me an error message.
Lite viewers
In July 2007 a UK teen student called Katharine Berry announced on her blog that she was developing an ajax-based client for Second Life, which she called Ajaxlife. The story was picked up by Hamlet Au, who got the tip from Gwyneth Llewelyn.
This client only permits a limited set of functions, such as local chat, instant messages and a basic map, and thus removes the need for a powerful graphics card. But as noted by Hamlet, Ajaxlife also allows you to connect to Second Life without even downloading and installing the viewer. The user instead logs on to the Ajaxlife website, which in turn logs the user into Second Life. This allows users to get past corporate or academic firewalls, which may block access to heavily interactive websites. Hamlet reported that Katharine was thinking of making a version that can run on the user's own machine, but in that case the firewall problem remains.
As Katharine explained to Hamlet Au, Ajaxlife uses JavaScript to handle the User Interface. The connection to Second Life is handled by a C# program running on Katharine's server, which uses libsecondlife to deal with SL connections. AjaxLife handles maps with an entirely separate system: once a day a libsecondlife bot of Katherine's logs into Second Life, downloads all the map images, and saves a copy to her server, so that they can be called up as needed.
Katharine at first announced that Ajaxlife would be open source, but there are no currently available downloads of the source code. In March 2008 she released a version that added the ability to delete inventory items, which Hamlet Au called the Ajaxlife Killer Application. A few weeks ago, on May 18th, Katharine announced on the Ajaxlife blog implementation of version 0.3.3.
I tried AjaxLife for the first time a few weeks ago, as way to connect to Second Life using my newly-purchased Asus eee, which is a tiny, low-cost netbook, with a low-performance graphics card. Logging on to Ajaxlife, I was able to use IM, to open inventory directories, and to edit saved notecards, but the group functions only allowed me to IM the entire group, without giving me the list of members. I was also able to log on with no problem through my firewall at work. But the last few times I tried to log in, I got error messages.
In October 2008, a few months after Katharine's initial announcement, a Japanese company called 3Di introduced the MovableLife website, which likewise promised access to Second Life "using only a web browser." I logged in to MovableLife and tried to IM a friend, but while the friend could read everything I wrote (as I learned later), all I could see was their first reply repeating endlessly. My reaction, besides finding the site useless, was to think "OMG I've just entered my Second Life password onto this site." The MovableLife page says somewhere in small print: "We do not store your Second Life account information on our servers, it is transferred directly to the Second Life servers." I sure hope that is true.
Web-based access through a third party site remains an interesting solution for those who want to connect to Second Life through firewalls. But in order to overcome the worry about password theft, the easiest solution would be for Linden Lab to provide such an interface themselves.
Similar in many ways to Ajaxlife is the Sleek viewer, which was released in July 2007, just after Katharine Berry's initial announcement. According to a comment by Oz Spade, Sleek had actually been around since 2006, and was developed using libsecondlife not by a company, but by one person.
The Sleek viewer is a light-weight viewer that allows access to Second Life for a reduced set of functions such as sending IMs. Reasons for using it include having a low-power graphics card or wanting to multi-task on older machines, as mentioned by this user, who compares it to an old-fashioned multi-user dungeon.
The Sleek download is a zip file, from which you extract 12 files into one directory. To launch the viewer you just click on the executable file. After logging in to Second Life, I was able to see which of my friends were online, send IMs and see resident profiles. I was even able to use search to find residents by name. However, the inventory function did nothing more than show me inventory directories: when I tried to open them they appeared empty. And when I tried to use Sleek at work, the firewall blocked it.
On April 1st 2008 the Sleek blog announced that Sleek had been bought by Microsoft, but the date would make one somewhat skeptical of that announcement.
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Monday, 26 May 2008
Touring the Open Source Grids
After about 6 months in Second Life I mustered the courage to try one of the alternative open source grids. Having seen the term OpenSim on various Second Life blogs, I Googled that, and found the OpenSim website. At the top of the page was a link to the Grid List, which names a surprising number of public grids, listed in order of their initial appearance. The oldest was DeepGrid, which began operations in June 2007, followed by Open Source Grid (OSGrid) which began in July 2007, and OpenLife which began in October 2007.
I decided to start with OpenLife. I connected to the OpenLife website, and after a bit of searching found the OpenLife Wiki and a page that tells how to get started.
The wiki says that you can use either the RealXtend Viewer or the SecondLife Viewer, but the RealXtend Viewer failed to start for me. So I followed the instructions on how to create a shortcut to OpenLife for the SecondLife Viewer. I opened an account with the avatar name Danton Sideways, and launched the viewer.
I found myself on a rather barren island, in the default female avatar called "Ruth." I tried to edit my appearance, but nothing happened. I looked into my inventory, and found it to be completely empty. I then flew over a few adjoining sims, which were vast stretches of terraformed land with nothing on them. I also tried to use Search to find people, but the Search function gave no results whatsoever. My initial reaction was: "Is this a joke?"
I came away from that initial OpenSim experience thinking that all I could do was fly over an empty terraformed wasteland in the Ruth avatar, looking for other avatars who were not there. On the next try, however, things got better. But before I go on with my story, let us take a glance backwards, to survey the origins of the open source alternatives to Second Life.
How Second Life went Open Source
Back in 2005 Gwyneth Llewelyn presented in her blog post on Expanding Second Life an early vision of how Second Life could be spread across a system of decentralized servers. Gwyneth suggested that Linden Lab could set up a system whereby anyone could run their own sim with their own asset server (which implied making the software open source), but would need to pay Linden Lab for an encrypted certificate in order to connect to the main grid. Gwyneth envisaged a system with many sim operators, each having their own users, as follows:
"When 'your' user logs in at your own sim, the UUID which is generated is encrypted with a key which has been provided by LL. If you don’t use that key, well, you may register with an 'isolated sim' and have your fun there. But you won’t be able to access any content on the main grid, nor be able to export your content there."
Gwyneth thus proposed a way for Linden Labs to go open source but still remain profitable by using encrypted keys. Linden Labs was slow to respond to this challenge. Meanwhile, a low-profile group of non-Linden programmers had already begun reverse engineering the Second Life protocol.
On May 12, 2006 John Hurliman registered, on the Gna! free software development platform, a new open source project called libsecondlife. The registration post defined libsecondlife as "an open source library to allow software to access the Second Life world." Hurliman announced that "we have a complete protocol description", and explained:
"Our goal is to create a multi-threaded, object-oriented library to write a Second Life client of any complexity. We currently do not have any source code, as it's still in the design and planning phase."
Libsecondlife has been described as "a BSD open source library for creating custom clients that could connect to Second Life". A technical description of the libsecondlife project is given on the Second Life Wikia. Development of libsecondlife is still ongoing, as can be seen on the libsecondlife wiki, where most of the articles are signed by Baba Yamamoto.
Libsecondlife however soon generated a major scandal with its derivative CopyBot programme. CopyBot was originally created as a debugging tool by the libsecondlife development team, who had in mind using it to be able to backup one's own created content on one's own hard drive, or to be able to export one's own intellectual property to other environments. But since it was open source, CopyBot was quickly modified by unscrupulous hackers who recompiled it as a tool to replicate objects and avatar appearances without permission. Angry Second Life residents met with Linden Lab on November 13, 2006 to discuss the Copybot problem, and then organized a series of virtual protests, as described by Reuters and Hamlet Au. The outcry led Linden Lab on 14 November 2007 to declare that the use of CopyBot was a TOS violation.
Less than two months after the CopyBot scandal, on 8 January 2007, Phoenix Linden announced on the official Second Life Blog that the source code would be released for the Second Life viewer. It thus seems that libsecondlife and CopyBot were the catalysts for prompting Linden Lab to go open source themselves, in order to maintain control over a development which appeared inevitable.
However, in January 2007 Linden Lab only released the source code for the Second Life viewer, also called the "client," which is the software that the user installs on their own computer in order to access Second Life. There remained the software that runs Second Life itself on the Linden Lab servers, storing and retrieving all of the data about the sims and the users' assets, and implementing the virtual world in real time.
Various attempts had already been made to create an open source virtual world server, but had floundered in face of the massive task of writing both the server and the client at the same time. It was now no longer necessary to write the client, since Linden Lab had released the source code for the official Second Life viewer, and the libsecondlife library was available for creating other custom clients that could connect to Second Life. So in that same month of January 2007, Darren Guard (also known as MV) founded the OpenSim project, to concentrate on developing on open source virtual world server that the Second Life client could connect to. As explained in the Wikipedia OpenSim article, OpenSim uses libsecondlife to handle communication between the client and the server.
Then in April 2007 Linden Lab announced that they planned to release the Second Life server source code (or at least parts of it). But while Linden Lab was still just thinking of releasing parts of the server source code, the first public open source grids, based on OpenSim, started operating. DeepGrid began in June 2007, followed by OSGrid in July. One of the participants gives this description of the first day of DeepGrid:
"There was a sim, its name was "Mortville" and a half-dozen crazed programmers were jumping around on a little island, flying into the ground, all chat was showing up twice, IM crashed the sim, all objects were phantom, no trees, no nothing, but it was wondrous. Within a couple of weeks there were a dozen sims on Deepgrid."
Linden Lab struggled to keep up. On 13 September 2007, as explained in a page on the Second Life Grid website, Linden Lab kicked off a public planning process for "designing protocols for virtual world software interoperability," which led to the formation of the Architecture Working Group (AWG). One of the stated goals of the AWG is to "enable third parties to run servers that connect to the Second Life Grid platform." In other words, since the development of open source grids is inevitable, Linden Lab wants to enable third parties to connect their own sims to Second Life, for a fee. Which is pretty much what Gwyneth Llewelyn was talking about back in 2005.
The latest development in this direction is an announced plan for IBM to hold Second Life grid servers on their private corporate network, behind the firewall, but with enough network access to communicate with the central services on the Second Life grid. This project is further described on the blog of Zha Ewry (David Levine) of IBM. Zha Ewry is also the head of the Linden-sponsored Architecture Working Group, and IBM runs its own private sims using OpenSim software. One of these is the Shengri La sim, built by Shenlei Winkler of the Fashion Research Institute, as can be seen here.
My Further Adventures on the Open Source Grids
As I've told above, my initial experience in OpenLife was a total disappointment. I did nothing but fly over barren terraformed sims in the Ruth avatar, with no inventory and no search function. So I decided to try CentralGrid to see if that was any better.
On the CentralGrid website I found a link to the CentralGrid forum, with a page that tells how to log on. Following these instructions, I created a shortcut to the Second Life viewer, in exactly the same way as for OpenLife. Once logged in, I found myself in an identical Ruth avatar with an identically empty inventory. The only difference was that the entry sim was somewhat more built up, with a few blocks of empty streets and wide-spaced, sterile buildings all in the same modern style. And my feet didn't sink a few inches into the earth, as they tended to do in OpenLife. But the search function was equally unusable. What I understood later is that all of these open source grids are just picking up the latest version of the OpenSim software, and tweaking it, so they can only offer the functions which have already been developed for OpenSim.
In both OpenLife and CentralGrid, the main activity seems to be selling entire sims. Some of the open source grids allow users to connect their own servers, but these two seem to require you to rent the servers from them. There is no official way to rent just a plot of land (though one could always rent a plot by making a private deal with a sim owner). Few of the grids have any plans to create an in-world currency, though CentralGrid is reportedly working on it. People buy these sims knowing that the software is still under development, and that there is no in-world economy, thus no possible return-on-investment, so of course the prices are lower than for sims on Second Life.
Some days later I decided to try again. I went back to the OpenLife website and logged onto the chatroom. One nifty feature of OpenLife is this chatroom, which can be joined easily by anyone, without having to know how to use IRC channels. There is nearly always someone on line to whom you can ask questions. I found online Sakai OpenLife himself, the founder of OpenLife, and asked why I was unable to edit my appearance. He replied that it was explained on the wiki. So I went back to the wiki and found that there was indeed a page about editing appearance. You must go into your inventory, click on Body Parts, right click to get "create new," and then wear the new object to edit it. I thus created and edited four body parts (body, skin, hair, eyes) and three pieces of clothing (shirt, trousers and shoes). I tried to get the same look as for Danton Sideways in Second Life, but the result was rather far from the mark. And I was unable to grow a beard, because while my chin puffed out into a beard shape, I had no appropriate texture colour to add, so I reverted to a clean-shaven look.
Remaining in-world on the dreary welcome island, I changed windows to go to the chat room, and asked where I might find a more lively sim. Someone suggested I try Electron, which is the sim of Gobi Greenwood (correction: Electron is actually owned by Gumby Roffo). Electron is rather nicely built up, including a stage and screen that streams a video clip. On my next visit I went to Quartz, another of Gobi's sims, where he is setting up a freebie store. It is a several story building which for the moment is totally empty. I also went to the Renegade sim, where I met Josh Noonan inside a fancy temple build. He proposed to rent me a plot via an external payment using paypall. I said I was interested, but I have to go back to discuss this further.
I then returned to CentralGrid. I set the destination sim to CentralGrid Home, but had a problem logging in. The error message said something about waiting for a handshake, and the forum instructions for dealing with this were rather complicated. So I just tried a different destination (Central Grid Sandbox), and that worked. I edited my avatar exactly as on OpenLife – the underlying OpenSim software is identical – but the result was again disappointing. You would have trouble recognizing that it is supposed to the same Danton Sideways as is in Second Life.
I tried teleporting in CentralGrid, and arrived in the Moonbeam sim, where I was surprised to actually see another avatar on line, hanging in the air. Then I crashed. When I logged back in I was Ruth again, and had to open my inventory and put on all of my edited body parts and clothing items one by one. When I was dressed I looked for the avatar I had seen, and found Happi Homewood, working on his multi-story shopping center in the Moonbeam sim. He explained that he was getting ready for when CentralGrid would implement an in-world currency. I sent him a friend request, so that I could find him easily in-world, and he accepted it. That was my last act so far in CentralGrid.
And last but not least, I made one in-world visit to the Open Source Grid. I found the OS Grid website, and a link on the site to the OS Grid forum, which is obviously used by a fairly large and active community. Creating as usual a new shortcut for the Second Life viewer, I logged in as Danton Sideways, and landed in Wright Plaza. I took a moment to quickly run through the habitual OpenSim avatar editing process, putting on my standard 4 body parts and 3 pieces of clothing, and then explored the sim
I was pleased to find a fairly intricate, colorful build, with lots of vegetation, typical of what one finds in Second Life. And there were several avatars roaming around in just that one sim. I went up to a certain Paulie Femto, and chatted a while. He said I could use the sandbox if I wanted to on his Cameo Beach sim, which is actually run from his home computer, connected to OS Grid. He said he tried to keep it operating 24/7. He also told me about the freenode IRC channel for OS Grid. That definitely got my interest. After all these years of hearing about them, I've never actually had the occasion to use an IRC channel. This may be my big chance!
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