[Opensim-users] ReactionGrid Releases Open Source GroupsFunctionality for OpenSimulator

[Diva Canto]

On 12/3/2010 5:48 AM, Chris Hart wrote:
> The majority of our work with OpenSim to date has been working on management
> tools for our customers - groups have been the number one missing feature
> from our grids for quite some time, and we wanted to do it right. We have
> not had a lot of time to give back to the community over the past few years,
> but we are strong supporters of the OpenSimulator project, and we felt this
> was a good opportunity to give something back. I would like to thank Kurt
> Evenopoel for his work on our module - he is a super smart developer who has
> done a great job on this.

Thanks, Chris.
We appreciate free of charge, open source contributions to the ecosystem 
of the project more than anything. It's great when individuals and 
commercial organizations do that. So thank you for your plan to 
contribute another groups implementation. If it works better for you 
than the existing groups implementations, I'm sure others will find it 
useful too.

Whether those contributions become part of the core OpenSim distribution 
or not is another matter. When people put that forward as a concrete 
proposal, we have a process for deciding. As Justin said, long-term 
maintenance is a big issue. Another issue is whether those contributions 
fulfill the project's goal of having a multi-platform core. A third 
issue is how well-integrated those contributions are with the rest of 
OpenSim. There are more parameters for the decision, but those are the 
three basic ones.

One of the reasons why flotsam groups isn't part of OpenSim core is 
because it requires Apache+PHP and therefore it doesn't work out of the 
box with a standalone simulator. We've always tried to make core be the 
minimum necessary to run a standalone and a barebones grid, while making 
it have all the right hooks for people to scale it up however they like.

Diva / Crista