An Introduction to OpenSim's Hypergrid; Will It Eclipse IBM/Linden's Interoperability Initiative?

Here's a short introduction to OpenSim's Hypergrid, a new architecture which links various OpenSimulator worlds together, that I just wrote for OStatic.  I'm not an OpenSim developer, but this one point from someone who is, Justin Clark-Casey, sticks out for me.  When I asked him why Linden Lab and IBM aren't actively working on Hypergrid protocols, he said this:

"[T]his is very much a code-led, bottom-up effort which fits fairly intimately with the way in which OpenSim is architected... [I]f we tried to determine specification up front with parties such as Linden Lab and IBM without any kind of prior implementation, then we would probably still be arguing over the document right now."  

Both companies, of course, are working on establishing their own protocols for virtual world interoperability.  But judging by the history of the Net's evolution, it seems at least as likely that OpenSim's Hypergrid becomes the standard.  Anyway, read it all here.

Comments

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

To answer the question in the article's title:

Yes. :)

http://gwynethllewelyn.net/2009/01/01/opensimulator-the-choice-for-2010/6/

[Pavig Lok]

Hooray for hypergrid and congrats to the code-monkeys that are making it happen. I would caution though that perhaps IBM and co, in arguing endlessly about the architecture and moving slowly, may be doing the right thing.

Rapid development certainly gets stuff out the door quick, but usually hits at some later point with scaling issues or code splits. This works well in a competitive environment where many smaller players compete, but less well in creating widespread interoperability and scaling up to an enterprise level.

For that kinda stuff sometimes a sober slow moving approach to banging out the planning before rushing ahead may be more workable in the longer term.

On-the-fly architecture development certainly worked for the lindens in the early phase, but has been a major problem later in re-factoring their systems to kill bottlenecks... as they were saying yesterday: http://blog.secondlife.com/2009/01/19/weekend-grid-outages/#more-3520

[Elfod Nemeth]

I couldn't agree more Gwyneth, the Lindens are definetly feeling the pain of a poorly planned early implementation, which is exactly what will see them possibly eclipsed by opensim.

Lets hope opensim, through hasty devlopment doesn't in turn get eclipsed...hopefully not since some of the devs are still IBMers (or am I wrong?).

Also, sadly, it's not always the best implementation that wins the audience but the one that's got more shiny bits/is sticky/cruchy (features, retention, variety).

[Elfod Nemeth]

lol, actually I agreed with Pavig and Gwyneth (sigh)