[Opensim-dev] Thoughts....

Tue Mar 4 18:17:24 UTC 2008

In no way am I saying ..."you should give your hard work to society...  uh... because we want it."

What I'm saying is opensim has a limited scope. To be honest, its very unlikely that out of the box opensim will be the foundation of any metaverse, its not meant to be in the way you are think of it. Its meant to be a expandable base platform. 
For instance in opensim we aren't dealing with currency and most of us see that as outside the scope of the project. And that third party modules will be written for such things. 

I'm not sure what you mean by having the assets on the client. At the moment we aren't doing any changes to the client. But our goal is to be a flexible as possible. I'm totally against any one solution to things. I want us to be flexible as possible. If someone setting up a opensim application, wants the asset to be on the client then I want to be able to make it as easy to allow that, but its unlikely it will be a out of the box thing in opensim for at least some time. The same if someone wants all assets to be on a central server, I want them to be able to do that. Or if someone wants somewhere in between.

And exactly the same in regard to DRM/IP solutions. Not all applications of opensim are going to public social things like SL, so some things won't want any type of IP protection, because it might be a private installation and who has access to that is tightly controled. We can't possible do every single thing required by all applications. That is why we take a view of creating a base server/platform that others expand to meet their requirements. Having said that, if someone came to us who was interested in implemeting a module IP protection system as part of opensim, then I don't think we would turn them away. It would just need to be completely modular so it wasn't a requirement of using opensim, if the person running that Grid didn't want it to be. We are not here to say one way or the other of anything is the right way. We want to have a platform that each side of any viewpoint can use to implement things there way. 

Opensim itself will not be a complete solution for a metaverse. Think of it like a web server. You have the server (which also could include a number of third party modules) and then you have different code for the web pages. Opensim will hopefully be that base server/platform, then their will be modules on top, then the code for that region (if you wanted something special for that region. 

So my viewport is, if a content creator only wants to have their creations on a "secure" (we all know it will never be 100% secure, but whatever level they are happy with) installation then I think they should be allowed to do it.

If other people only want to be involved with a installation with free sharing of items, then I support them being able to do (with the content creators on that system having agreed to that).

I believe in IP rights, if you create something then you should be able to decide what is done with it. But in practice DRM will never win, but thats not me saying that the people who want to try are wrong to try. 

I do think for content creation as a business model, that people should maybe think of doing services. Where say people subscribe to a service then get access to that users creations. Okay maybe other people will end up copying them, but if its a service rather than just individual items the people are buying. I think its much more resilient. And again I would like people to be able to use opensim to do this if they wanted.

OpenSim is not about forcing any one solution on anyone. Even if we wanted to implement all these things, we just don't have the man power to do it. There is only so much we can do. So we want to provide what we can do and let others take it and run with it and add their bits. Hopefully in the end something interesting will emerge.

The Burnman <theburnman at gmail.com> wrote: On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 5:09 AM, Michael Wright <michaelwri22 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
 Maybe in the future, opensim might include some DRM system as a option people can use, or extend. But that is a long way  off, we need to get the base done first. 
I think this stage is exactly where you should be considering the most basic concept of IP Rights protection.  I am not talking about installing a BMG style DRM utility which actively attempts to thwart the attempts of thieves.  After my discussion with Charles the other day, a compromise of offering the option to allow assets to be downloaded to the client for local storage or not seemed rather reasonable.  This would allow both sides of the argument greater control over their grids.  But moving to far in one direction will only make it that much more difficult to explore other avenues down the road.  Implement local asset storage without any other consideration now, and the rest of the development will end up being based on that concept.  The wheel would have to be reinvented.

I'm sure someone will mis-understand this and take it as me saying that opensim doesn't care about IP protection, but that is not what I'm saying. I'm saying its outside the scope of opensim. Opensim is not a grid, its not any single installed instance of opensim. Opensim is purely a software platform. That overs take and make it do what they want it to do. 

I disagree wholeheartedly.  I believe that considerations for IP Rights are essential if OpenSim is attempting to set a standard for the metaverse.  While all of the hard work that has gone into OpenSim is truly impressive and deserves much praise, at the end of the day, the content which will end up going into the grids will be the focus of most of the users.

The cold hard truth is that the end-user looks at the web pages, not the web browser or the server the page is hosted on.

I can see that some who have expressed their opinions here will not change their minds, and I certainly don't believe my own position will change much either, so this may be a futile discussion.  It will be interesting to see what else comes up down the road which offers more to the content creator than "you should give your hard work to society...  uh... because we want it".

Please forgive my frustration, but I think the open-source mentality goes too far sometimes.
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