[Opensim-dev] More on asset portability

[Ryan McDougall]

On Wed, 2008-05-21 at 07:31 -0700, Charles Krinke wrote:
> I have to key on the words "disconnect the asset and inventory servers
> from a particular grid".
> 
> Are you proposing that there be a planetary asset and inventory server
> at 3di for the entire Metaverse?

Not at all. 

Consider OpenId. Yahoo is an OpenId provider, but it isn't the only one.
In fact, if you like you can be your own OpenId provider. 

How does Yahoo profit from providing OpenId authentication? It certainly
doesn't have designs on owning all identities for the whole internet.

This is about establishing trust networks. If someone authenticates with
a 3Di partner company, perhaps you trust it. If someone authenticates
with IBM you most likely do. If someone authenticates from
flybynight.com, you might be hesitant.

This is about breaking down walls, not building them up.

> How would you see this working in a world with multiple grids and
> multiple use cases?

The only use case is this: 

If you create an avatar on grid Foo, and you decide to hang out in grid
Bar, should you have to recreate your entire profile from scratch?

We think that's unnecessary, and I think most people would agree. Its an
order of magnitude more annoying than asking someone to create a new
password for every other website on the internet (the problem OpenId
tries to solve).

If you assume that creating a new avatar for each grid you might ever
visit is unreasonable, then the next question how do you enable
portability?

That leads us to this point.

> Charles

Lastly, Id like to point out this is an inherently technical discussion
about consolidating assets on the Inventory server, not security or
walled gardens. What 3Di intends to do with asset portability isn't
overly relevant because there is absolutely nothing mandatory about
using asset portability -- only ever use it if it makes sense for you --
don't if it doesn't. That's what makes OpenSim ecosystem fundamentally
different from the SL one.

Cheers,

> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Johan Berntsson <johan at 3di.jp>
> To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
> Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2008 2:11:36 AM
> Subject: [Opensim-dev] More on asset portability
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Recently lulurun mailed about asset portability. Today I had a long 
> conversation with him, and I would like to restart the discussion from
> a 
> slightly different point of view.
> 
> What lulurun wants to do is to disconnect the asset and inventory 
> servers from a particular grid, so that it is possible to login on 
> another grid and still have access to your avatar, belongings etc.
> There 
> are already two fields (asseturl and inventoryurl) in the user server 
> that can be used for this purpose. The problem is that not all avatar 
> information is contained in the Inventory server. The user server 
> contains "wearables" data (list of UUID's). Now, the question is why 
> this information supplied by the user server. Wouldn't it be more 
> natural to have it in the Inventory Server?
> 
> If we clarified the roles of the user and inventory servers, and kept 
> all asset information in the inventory server, then it would be much 
> easier to use external inventory/asset servers. This means that we
> want 
> to move the AvatarAppearance API from the User server to the 
> InventoryServer. The logic would be changed so that the default 
> inventory and asset servers are used unless the asseturl and 
> inventoryurl are defined. That is, the grid would continue to use its 
> own asset and inventory servers unless you supply more information.
> 
> We plan to do work in this area soon, and welcome any feedback and 
> comment you have.
> 
> Cheers,
> joha1
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