[Opensim-dev] Leaving Project

Tue Nov 24 10:58:35 UTC 2009

Hi all,

Very interesting debate you have going on here.

Just to summarise, it seems to me that while the project roadmap so far has
been to implement copy of Second Life the general feeling is that we are now
pretty much there and it is time to go after even greater things and we need
to decide a product road map on our own from here. Hope I am summarising all
this correctly from all emails flying around?

There are as many business models in the mix as there are companies
involved. While my company makes money from utilising OpenSim as an engine
for private virtual worlds and business applications we develop for our
customers, there are people elsewhere whose main interest is to create
global public access grids to compete with other virtual worlds such as
Second Life. I think it is important that the focus remains considering
OpenSim as an engine and this way everyone's business models can be
satisfied (hopefully).

Just quickly about the debate around the compatibility between Second Life
and OpenSim. Which ever way this all goes, long term virtual worlds will
definitely need a standard ways to communicate. It is important that
different platforms can talk with each other if we aim for a 3D internet.
Traditional internet would not have taken off the same way if there would
have been only 1 web server vendor to use (does not matter would it been
Apache or MS IIS). So lets make sure that our product roadmap does listen /
follow what other platforms are doing.

And finally, I sense from some of the discussions an anti SL/LL tone the
same way there has been an anti Microsoft tone in so many Open Source
projects in the past. So many good Open Source projects have been wasted
away in the past because they concentrated fighting the "big evil" instead
of writing code that was great and made sense. There is absolutely no point
diverting OpenSim from Second Life for just sake of it, because we feel now
that OpenSim is great enough product and we can do it all ourselves.
However, if we find that keeping the compatibility is going to stop us
realising some great things in the future then that is a different matter,
but even then each case should be considered carefully.

Regards,

Olli 

From: opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de
[mailto:opensim-dev-bounces at lists.berlios.de] On Behalf Of Impalah Shenzhou
Sent: 24 November 2009 09:42
To: opensim-dev at lists.berlios.de
Subject: Re: [Opensim-dev] Leaving Project

Hi:

Morgaine, I agree with you except:

*	SL is based on highly centralized concepts of identity, storage and
control, which come together to create either a walled garden or a prison
planet, depending on one's perspective.  Whatever one's worldview, the end
result is badly non-scalable in those three areas.  SL suffers hugely from
that non-scalability despite the relatively small size of the service at
this early stage.  Opensim needs decentralized / distributed mechanisms for
identity, storage and control if it is to scale for Internet-wide adoption.

How can I trust anyone who hasn't been authorized through a well known
trusting system? Well, if you mean systems like OpenID, forget my comments.
If not, can you explain that?

About the topic...

Except with the lack of huge, updated and good documentation, and having
into account that there are no money incomes (no business angels out of
here)... it's a miracle for the project to be still alive :-)

No complaints about opensim, no opinions about Blue Mars and the rest...

2009/11/24 Morgaine <morgaine.dinova at googlemail.com>

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 1:06 PM, Len Brown <lenwbrown at gmail.com> wrote:

For me the shock came when I was abruptly informed that "OpenSim is not
Second Life, is not intended to be like Second Life, nor ever will."  I
still haven't the foggiest idea what this developer had smoked for them to
so strongly assert that incredibly false statement.

Len, let me give you an alternative perspective on that quote to help you
see the reasons for it.  I'm not on the Opensim team, but after five years
in SL, two years in AWG, and a year of working on future VW protocols in our
IETF group, I have some background to know why Opensim needs to distance
itself from SL:

*	SL's statically tiled resource architecture is badly non-scalable,
because most resource usage in VWs cannot be statically mapped (demand moves
around).  The inability to assign resources dynamically in SL results in
huge overload in busy places and gross wastage in idle areas.  It also
limits the number of participants in events and the bandwidth of their
interaction, as well as the size and complexity of everything in a region.
This architecture is fundamental to SL, yet it is a recipe for failure.  As
long as Opensim adheres to the SL model, Opensim will be similarly
non-scalable.

*	The LSL scripting language is linguistically weak, semantically
obscure, and lacking in the glue that could allow components to cooperate
effectively.  As a result, individual scripts are quite underpowered and
inefficient, and multi-script constructions do not scale well in complexity
because the overheads of cooperation are so large.  That's a bad restriction
on progress which Opensim needs to leave behind.

*	LSL scripts are not scalable in power or size, and this will
continue to be true even after SL allows C# and other CLR languages to be
used.  There is no possibility of using more CPU power for scripting than is
available in one single simulator in SL.  That is not a good foundation upon
which to build an ambitious future of clever components.

*	SL's simulation environment is non-portable, having evolved over
time into a plethora of special cases that will not be accurately replicable
anywhere else.  In effect this means that there will never be effective
interop with SL's scripted objects.  It would not be a useful goal to seek
compatibility with what could realistically be described as an "ill-defined
mess".

*	SL's object and type systems are non-extensible, so compatibility
with SL means living in the past, and worse, living in a past defined
entirely by one slow-moving company.  Tying the capabilities of Opensim to
that millstone would be a disaster --- it would ensure the death of Opensim
versus any extensible alternative that may appear.  Developing new
extensible forms of world data beyond SL's original set is a must for
Opensim's survival as a modern VW platform.

*	SL's viewer has deep knowledge of SL semantics because the client
and server were designed for each other rather than designed as endpoints of
a standard protocol.  This has the very bad consequence that future VW
viewers would need to know about SL specifics in order to interoperate with
SL, which is a poor approach that doesn't scale to metaverse-wide diversity.
Opensim needs to leave world-specific kludges behind if it has ambitions to
underpin a highly diverse metaverse of worlds, and this means leaving the SL
viewer behind.

*	SL's constructed objects are non-hierarchical, which means that
creators cannot use objects created by others as subcomponents.  This
restriction completely blocks the hierarchical engineering process that is
the basis of progress in RL.  In SL you always have to build from "raw
materials", so it is not possible to ride on the shoulders of giants, nor
harness a huge pyramid of people skills.  Even Philip and Cory Linden
admitted that this was a mistake -- see
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Prim_and_Object_Hierarchy .  We don't want
to live with their mistake.

*	SL is based on highly centralized concepts of identity, storage and
control, which come together to create either a walled garden or a prison
planet, depending on one's perspective.  Whatever one's worldview, the end
result is badly non-scalable in those three areas.  SL suffers hugely from
that non-scalability despite the relatively small size of the service at
this early stage.  Opensim needs decentralized / distributed mechanisms for
identity, storage and control if it is to scale for Internet-wide adoption.

*	From a futurist angle, Second Life has very narrow horizons and
barely pays lip service to the virtual aspect of "virtual worlds".  Nobody
could claim that a Flatland of square land tiles all featuring the same
Earth-like look and physics pushes the envelope of the imagination.  To
boldly go where Lindens did not go before (topologically and geographically
or spatially) will be one of the most appreciated developments in Opensim.
SL's obsession with RL is an unwanted constraint in VWs, and we need to go
beyond it.

That is not the full list of problems with SL, but hopefully it serves to
illustrate some of the concerns that VW developers have to consider in the
light of the SL legacy.  While Linden Lab deserves much applause for their
vision and for their work in creating Second Life, many years have now
passed, and lessons have been learned.  Compatibility with SL must not be
the end goal of Opensim because of issues like those highlighted above.