For several years now, Ethan, there has been the opensource software that you insisted on having in the form of OpenSim, and Second Inventory, that backs up your inventory, (and other programs that back up builds, quietly used). All of this was very inexpensive, certainly far less than the Beekman Center spent on SL. Yet, you didn’t seem to use it (unless I missed it). Your argument has always been that really less about opensource than about the graphics cards and bandwidth and such required for a 3-D world — they were just too intensive for the developing world you work with. Of course, people in the developing world have joined Second Life, anyway, in droves, without waiting for you to pave the way for them, but I do take your point that they don’t log in just like that form Accra.

Your demand to be able to copy your own build was a demand that we constantly heard from developers who refused to see themselves and the inventions that would have to go with such duplicating ability *in a social context* in which there should be *democratic participation and not coder diktat*.

The extremists like Eddy (once in libsecondlife; today working for Intel, following the trajectory of many a reverse engineer who winds up in Big IT that benefits from this free labour the most!) who claim we “missed the memo” refuse to concede that the technical capacity to copy (not as widespread even then or now as he claims) and the technical incapacity to stop copying (not as futile as he and other extremists claim) are aspects of virtual worlds and social media that not only coders should get to decide on behalf of other people. It is not democratic; it is not just; it is even an incitement to crime.

You know why this matters, and you know why this was not trivial and merely “a game”, Ethan? Because all these very same issues, having to do with opensource software, its coders, their culture, the devices they use, the methods they feel should be used to run communities, all of these are emerging in spades in the Gov 2.0 and “open government” movement that draws on many of the same issues and tools. And now there are people running not just the SL JIRA bug-tracker on the basis of fanboyz voting up or down proposals and killing those they don’t like, but people *running the U.S. government and citizens’ proposals on this basis*. That’s why it was always worth paying attention to Second Life; it’s a place where these processes are modelled and accelerated.
Prokofy Neva

I wrote a short response asking what moral obligation we have, to demand the ability to be able to continue using [creative work] on another platform, before calling something truly open. One can imagine a project all of whose standards and processes are open, but which offers no form of export…

SJ

On the XML export front, my concern still remains – until those objects can exist meaningfully in another space, I’m concerned about Linden’s monopoly on the space. But your comments adds emphasis to Antoin’s comment – the right move may be for someone to start building an open server to create a Linden alternative.

Thanks for weighing in on the thread.

On the topic of exporting content we’ve had the export to XML part for a little while, the tricky part is figuring out how to take those XML representations of procedural Second Life prim data and turn it in to something meaningful in another world.

- I’ve never said that Second Life must be open or that Linden has some sort of moral obligation to open it up. I’ve simply said that I’m not especially interested in using it while there’s implicit platform lock-in. If I’m going to put creative efforts into something, I’d like to be assured my ability to continue owning that content and to have it be functional on another platform.

- While I personally think WorldChanging should use a CC license – and have argued for that with other board members – I’m not an open source or CC absolutist and I can see cases where using more restrictive licenses make sense. You’ll note that almost all content I’ve contributed to WC over the past 18 months is also published on my blog – licensing is one of the reasons why.

“Why can’t property development be related to social change?”

This is the grey area. You say:

“The core objection I raised with Charlie a few weeks back is the fact that Second Life, at present, is a monopoly. If you decide that, for whatever reason, you no longer want to do business with Linden Labs, you’re anchored in place by the content you’ve created within their servers.”

Well now. Property development *is* related to social change – something that always seems to pass Prok by because the change isn’t something which Prok necessarily likes. What property development *is* has broadened to include other models of social change… and actually, marks a return to said social change.

That said, certainly – SecondLife is owned by Linden Labs. And yes, in their very own terms of service (Recent change I found, as a matter of fact) – owning copyrighted materials within SL itself is NOT a reason to allow access to the network. Yet… all the critics along these lines, and who jump up and down and say that the servers should be opened, and what not… NONE of them seem to understand the implications of that; it seems to be an armchair discussion which lacks depth. Economy, assets and many other things have to be assessed. Where Prok is *almost* agreeable in all of her meanderings seems to be about the land values – something which she is concerned with as a land baron in SecondLife itself. That is correct. What value virtual land?

So centalized ownership must remain necessary. To say otherwise would be like saying that Worldchanging.com writes about open content licenses but doesn’t use them – owning the very article which is about open content. Your blog is under a Creative Commons license, but WorldChanging.com is not. Where were you when I had that discussion? :-) Is that a path to social change, is it hypocrisy, or is it a matter of practicality related to social change? The latter is most likely true (at least I hope it is), and yet – the same applies to Linden Lab’s ownership of the core of SecondLife. Practicality.

A few of us have written much of this before, and I for one would like you and others to catch up with the discussion so that you can participate in it. ;-)

As for an earlier question you posted about different shards with different economic systems – yep, I think that will happen almost immediately after multiple servers are available. In the same way that WoW supports player versus player and player versus environment, I’d expect some people to be more interested in a SL that was less money focused and, perhaps, had full duplicability of all IP. Again, this is unlikely to contribute to a single, unitary world… but I’m more interested in the proliferation of a wide set of world around SL and other 3D protocols.

You know, I feel I have to put this comment also in perspective. I myself couldn’t get more “on the wrong side of the Lindens” short of being expelled from the world. I’m a known and very vocal critic of them and their favourites among the residents. I’ve been permbanned from the official forums and from their official blog (I believe these acts to be selective and unjust prosecution). The other day at a town hall I was ejected for an hour for criticizing the open-source friends they have. That sort of thing is routine in SL, sadly, and only when there are more and more RL businesses and nonprofits will we see an end to that kind of arbitrary stuff where they don’t even adhere to their own TOS, which is no stellar document of civil and economic rights by any stretch.

Still, I’ve never felt that they’re going to arbitrarily seize my land or my created content or the purchased created content I have in inventory of other people — without just cause, by their TOS. We could argue their TOS on this is pretty squirrely, as they can seize it for “any reason or no reason” but we can also go by their jurisprudence over 3 years, which has rarely been arbitrary.

I think you’d have to be really out there in terms of violations — a denial-of-service attack, some sort of gross and repeated hate speech against minorities or outrageous bombing of people or something like that repeatedly over many months to have them actually seize your property and expel you. I find it rare that they do seize property of any significance.

So while I wouldn’t want to discourage anybody from making some sort of “offshore account” that could hold the value of Lindens (we used to have that with GOM) or actual creation depots (only scripts can be copied and held offsite) or even land/sim copy reserves (that’s been discouraged, too) that would be welcome.

But I wouldn’t want anyone to be discouraged from coming into SL and using its amazing opportunities for fear if they look at a Linden cross-eyed their stuff will get swiped. They tolerate abuse far more than any game or service out there.

Prokofy