31st Aug 2010
OpenSim: Mass Migration Puzzle Pieces
It is the community that will win the Metaverse…
Overview
I see an inevitable migration on the horizon of residents from SecondLife to Opensim
based grids. There are two main forces at work: the decline of Linden Labs, and the
ascendency of the OpenSim.
- Linden Labs has been making a series of moves that are alienating the users. They are neither leaders in policy, nor technology. Not even meshes will save them.
- OpenSim is the clear technical leader, is rapidly making strides to stability, and the variety of grids springing up will assure that every community will have a strong home. OpenSim is much like X11 in the sense that it provides “mechanism, not policy”. Grid Operators take on the role of policy.
The Decline Of Linden Labs
Just since the time of SLCC (August 13-15, 2010), I can point to no less than four Linden Lab missteps which have upset various parts of the community:
1) Display Names – with over 1000 comments on blog, the Lindens appear to be intent on going live with a very ill-conceived plan to allow anyone to choose almost anything as a display name. What’s the problem with that? They are not providing a means for users to protect their names from abuse. While it may be true that a click or two will always reveal a true user name, it is still not clear what (Display Name? User Name? Both?) will be written to chat and IM logs. It is also not clear what the IM logfile names will be. This is a huge worry for anyone who is concerned about identity and reputation.
The Lindens take the view that people can file Abuse Reports. I note that this approach
attempts to address a symptom, but is no cure. With all the layoffs that the Lindens have been through, and the recent reduction in support hours, do they have the staff to handle the increase in ARs that will be generated by Display Name abuse? It would cost them less
to provide a control to prevent others from using your name as their display name. It would also go over with the community a lot better.
2) Teen Grid Closing - I can understand the economics of closing the Teen Grid. It costs a lot to run, and has a mere sliver of the main grid population. What has a lot of people up in arms is the misguided idea of migrating 16 and 17 year olds to the main grid. They would be better served by migrating to a grid that has been proven to be more focused on education (Reaction Grid comes to mind).
3) Customer Service Cutback – The short of it: same tiers, less service. Combine this with a slew of new problems (numerous ARs occuring from Display Name abuse, and legal/customer service issues arising from the presence of teens on what used to be a strictly adult grid). The hours are also incredibly USA centric. This will be one more factor that drives European and Asian users towards grids based in their regions.
4) Snowstorm, Do We Care?
Wizard of Oz: [in a booming voice] Step forward, Tin Man!
Tin Woodsman: [terrified, steps forward] Ohhhh!
Wizard of Oz: [still in a booming voice] You DARE to come to me for a heart, do you? You clinking, clanking, clattering collection of kaligenous junk!
Although SnowStorm is a great concept, in that there will be one viewer source code stream internally and externally, I sense that much of the developer community will focus their efforts elsewhere. The Wizard of Oz Linden (who, as far as I can tell [1], has only
been in SL for 4 months) has declared:
“Don’t waste everyones time suggesting that we throw away Viewer 2, or that we revert the UI to Viewer 1. It is absolutely not going to happen, and any suggestion to that effect will be ignored.”
Yes, Scott really said that: http://www.mail-archive.com/opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com/msg02459.html
Since the overwhelming majority of the community uses third party viewers, and does not like the 2.x UI, sensible developers are going to focus their efforts on giving the community what it wants. The Linden Lab attempt at outsourcing some of their viewer development for free, while at the same time insisting on the 2.x UI, will not get much traction. There is some limited cachet in being able to say that you contributed to the mainstream SL viewer, but if its usage is eclipsed by the offerings of several third parties, is it the best use of your valuable developer time?
The Ascendency Of OpenSim
I’ve touched on just some of the factors that are upsetting the SL community. It’s time to shift to the positive. We should be very glad that we are seeing the rise of a viable alternative!
As I have written before, and as others (such as Gwyn and Maria) have noted, OpenSim is showing itself to be a serious metaverse platform:
Technical – HyperGrid, MegaRegions, choice of voice (Whisper, FreeSwitch), more flexibility, compatible with existing SL viewers, archiving of regions and inventories. Willingness to evolve past LSL. Region scripting as well.
Policy – widespread, dependent on Grid Operators, if you dont like it, run your own grid! Opensim grids win because none of them has to address the issue of trying to come up with policies that would satisfy everyone in a large walled garden. We can easily move between web sites with varying policies and narrow niches. The same thing will be true in the Metaverse.
Cost – a fraction of what LL charges – Is there a market for high end grids with hand holding support, as well as a slew of specialty bargain basement offerings? Yes!
Currency – yes! OMC and Cyber Coin Bank These work across grids. Maria writes in depth about this.
Scaling – with one fell swoop, HyperGrid does much to address the issue of scaling. How? If people can easily get from one grid to another, then there is little reason to try to shoehorn them all into one place. As we see with some web sites, there will be some huge grids, possibly with millions of users. But balanced with that, there will a large number of grids that address niche communities, with 10’s of thousands of users. If they choose to be isolated, they can turn off hypergrid access. Within 5 years, the combined scale of OpenSim based grids will dwarf the walled garden of SecondLife. It is like the old AOL service trying to compete with the entire web.
Third Party Viewer Community - Not only will the viewers based on 1.x and 2.x source streams become the preferred entrance to OpenSim based grids (easy grid management in them), there will be a movement towards more types of front ends. HTML5 is one possibility (resurrect AjaxLife?). Unity3D holds a lot of promise.
What Could LL Do To Stave Off The Inevitable?
At this point in time, the biggest technical innovation LL has on their agenda would be meshes.
On the development side, they would have to show that they are open to some emulation of the 1.x interface, in order to gain traction. They are competing for something valuable, developer attention, and are making a lot of wrong moves.
On the policy side, they need to show that they will provide adequate controls for display names, so that people can be proactive about protecting their identity.
On the support side, they would need to make a case as to why people should pay the same amount of tier, but accept a reduced level of service.
On the interopability side, LL finds itself in the position of being a large walled garden, a la the AOL service of the 90’s and 00’s. LL should ask itself it wants to follow the examples of AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy.
The Tipping Point
Having said all this, it is quite clear that the majority of Metaverse usage hours are still being spent in SecondLife. I dont see any single event from the sides of OpenSim, or SecondLife, that will radically tip the scales. I see something more organic going on: friends will drag friends to OpenSim grids. Any one of several LL policy decisions will be a straw that breaks a residents back. OpenSim will make some technical advance, etc. There will be as many reasons to switch as there are metaverse residents. The Tipping Point occurs when a sizeable number of people realize that their personal puzzle pieces have fallen into place for them to make the switch.
[1] I did write to Scott, wondering how long he has been in SL. No Reply.
Interesting post. there are even more advantages to moving to the open sims (or InWorldz). one of those is that in open sim you can build your own megas. LL is intransigent on that issue. you get 45,000 prims on your own sim. you can link more prims into an object (like thousands!) all of these interlinked open sims can be connected together with HyperGrid, whereas the Lindens no longer support intergrid teleporting technologies. this means that you can teleport between grids throughout the Metaverse NOW, taking your avatar and attachments along with you. how does that all sound to you?
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wizard Gynoid, Daniel Smith. Daniel Smith said: [blog] I see a clear trend… http://bit.ly/dls-os-migrate — OpenSim: Mass Migration Puzzle Pieces #sl #OpenSim [...]
Daniel –
Thanks for the links — and the cogent analysis.
I, personally, do see avenues in which Second Life can get ahead of the metaverse, instead of being left behind in it. Will the Lindens be proactive, or continue running a defensive game? Given the recent track record, probably the latter.
Or, they could:
* Release a web-based viewer compatible with the hypergrid (hypergrid landmarks, etc…) and become the Netscape of the 3D web
* Drop the garden walls and become the main portal to the metaverse (become a Yahoo, instead of a Compuserve). They could protect existing content by creating a new grid-only permission and by default restricting all Second Life content from moving off-grid without specific permission for it by the content creators.
* Turn the Linden dollar into a multi-grid currency, and become the PayPal of the 3D web. There’s a lot of people out there who would trust a L$ payment over one from an unknown startup. (Window of opportunity is closing fast here — OMC and G$ are starting to get known.)
* Expand their marketplace to cover any OpenSim grid, and make money from OpenSim commerce instead of railing against it.
Linden Lab is currently uniquely placed to become the entry point to the 3D web, a Yahoo, Amazon and PayPal all rolled together. Or it can sit on the sidelines and watch the world go past.
– Maria
My deciding factor? All of my friends are in SL
courageously well surmised and i believe you are right on!
i am a poster child for this – i had 19 sims, i blogged daily about how awesome SL was – my other virtual half did conference presentations on SL and i have 8000 flickr pics up of sl
that was then
now we are in OpenSim with 16 sims
[...] a great book and the phrase is now part of everyday conversation. a blog called Cafe Bucky has an article about this and outlines the tipping point for virtual worlds btw, i am going to claim myself as a poster child [...]
I agree with the other folks, interesting post, Daniel :). The point about alternative grids being able to have different policies and concentrate on different communities is one that I particularly agree with. As a single organization, Linden Lab simply can’t do this.
However, I really don’t ever want to see Linden Lab fade away. They’re providing a very large part of the investment in viewer development that nobody else appears to be in a position to replicate, except maybe Realxtend through Naali.
Perhaps in an ideal world they would move on to a Netscape model (and perhaps make billions in the process :-) but basing on this on OpenSim would be extremely risky. After all, OpenSim is both alpha code and truly distributed virtual environment architectures, such as Hypergrid, will probably take a long time to become established.
I’m also not sure what the business model would be for that, though that never stopped Netscape :-). Conditions might be too different noawadays compared to the 90s. And both LL and other clients (such as Naali) are already open-sourced – the money would have to be made elsewhere, somehow.
Hi, remember that there is only one lab, not a bunch of labs. The company name is Linden Lab. There isn’t a Linden Labs. Thank you.
@ Lorelei – I know it is “Lab”. I even worked there in 2006. It’s like saying X Windows instead of the X Windowing System. I’ll do my best to refer to it in the singular. Cheers, Daniel
As a small time venture capitalist I keep track of the bid/ask situation on “restricted” stocks such as Linden Lab. I have been astounded to see that there have been NO bids at any price since March 2010.
Even for such “thinly traded” stocks that is almost unheard of!
I am tempted to bid $100 for a controlling share, but I might win the bid and THEN what would I do? LOL
Aloha Daniel:) Insightful … and perhaps your tagline should read: It is the community that will CREATE the Metaverse…