[Opensim-users] Announcement of inventory tool (MyInventory), mostly of interest to grid operators/grid nauts

[John Sheridan]

Personally, I've always hated the idea of treating data as property.  
But my hippie ideals aside, mayhaps maybe this would be a good time to 
talk about maybe adding in a "license" field to OpenSim and other 
virtual world assets?  By this point in time, with IP rights and DRM 
being all the rage it seems make sense to try and come up with some sort 
of unified standard aside from the basic copy / mod / transfer 
permissioning system.

/me slips on a rain coat and prepares to be pummeled by rotten 
vegetables.  :)

  - Orion Pseudo / Fhang / (whatever other name on whatever grid)


On 11/15/2012 05:26 AM, InuYasha Meiji wrote:
> Not sure I like this idea.  One reason my Grid isn't connected to 
> OSGrid is my grid has a specific theme in mind.  I didn't want to 
> combine the item I created for my Ryukyu Kingdom early 17th century 
> with all the random items from OsGrid.  I am not open publicly yet, I 
> am still building and only have let a few trusted people in to see 
> what I have so far.  This may take years to finish.   I am trying to 
> kep it in the 17th century without people building flashy clubs and 
> getting around on tanks and planes, if you understand what I mean.
>
> In the meantime, the things I give out for free, to use, on my grid I 
> also sell in Secondlife to pay fees, and my yearly account. I like 
> having friends there as well as OsGrid and my own place. If I loose my 
> SL income I can't afford to be there at all.  I would most likely not 
> stay on SL.  If this program, you plan is used on my system, and 
> people are just taking copies of the free items I give out and freely 
> take them to other grids. including SL, they may even try to sell my 
> items in SL and make a profit.
>
> To me this is almost as bad as the copybot problem SL had, but for 
> opensim creators. who wish to keep some control over where some of 
> their items end up.
>
> InuYasha
>
>
>
> On 11/15/2012 4:44 AM, Snowcrash Short wrote:
>> Hi
>>
>> I've been working on a client side tool for decentralizing user 
>> inventories, which I will release as an open source tool in two 
>> weeks, some of the features may be relevant to grid operators.
>>
>> The basic premise of the tool is that the inventory and the backing 
>> assets of the inventory items really should be controlled by the 
>> user. The tool is born out of a frustration of having visited a 
>> number of grids. Each visit to a new grid presents me with an empty 
>> inventory, and I can then spend time searching for suitable item, 
>> clothing, attachments and other accessories.
>>
>> For this purpose I have created a tool which will allow me to backup 
>> my inventory to a local cache and then upload the contents to another 
>> grid.
>>
>> If my tool becomes popular, both the upload and download mechanisms 
>> may have some impact on the grid-operators, hence this email to serve 
>> as a notice.
>>
>> The basic architecture is pretty simple, consisting of a number of 
>> import agents, which can import the users inventory and backing 
>> assets to a local database, and a number of upload agents which can 
>> upload inventory content to a specific account.
>>
>> Backup/Import
>> There are two import agents, one which will import .iar files and one 
>> which works very much like I believe "Stored Inventory" works, which 
>> can backup the inventory of an avatars inventory. Avatar 
>> backup/Import is governed by a policy. Currently there are two 
>> policies, one complying with a very restrictive interpretation of the 
>> Linden Labs policy on backups, and a completely unrestricted policy, 
>> where anything that can be downloaded will be downloaded.
>>
>> When a new account is registered in MyInventory it checks if the 
>> account is for a Linden Lab grid and limits the choices of policies 
>> to policies suitable for LL's TOS, I cannot and do not know if other 
>> grids have similar policies, I can well imagine that Avination has a 
>> similar restrictions, and would like similar logic implemented to 
>> restrict the download. Any grid operator which would like to have 
>> backup governed by a more restrictive policy are invited to notify me 
>> and I will attempt to implement the policy prior to the first release 
>> of the source code. or supply patches at a later time.
>>
>> Upload/Export
>> MyInventory supports two mechanisms for uploading inventory content, 
>> traditional upload using UDP/CAPS and direct access to the inventory 
>> and asset web-services.
>> Due to limitations in the UDP/CAPS protocol each upload will create 
>> new assets, and as of my latest read of the Open Simulator code the 
>> asset store does not support "single instance assets", i.e. it does 
>> not use a checksum to verify if the asset already exists, for this 
>> reason MyInventory prefers to upload using direct access to asset and 
>> inventory web-services.
>>
>> I would propose that the grids which chooses to support MyInventory 
>> augment their "GridInfoService" entries with the url's for the asset 
>> and inventory web-services, e.g.
>>
>> [GridInfoService]
>>     assets = http://assets.osgrid.org
>>     inventory = http://inventory.osgrid.org
>>
>> Best regards
>> Snowcrash
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Opensim-users mailing list
>> Opensim-users at lists.berlios.de
>> https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-users
>
>