Openspace Or OpenSim? Linden Land Price Hikes Provoke Registration Spike In Open Source Alternative

24 hours after Jack Linden announced the highly contentious price hikes of the company's Openspace regions, reports Bettina Tizzy, "800 new registered users signed up on the Openlife Grid.  That's up to 16 times the average 24 hour sign-up rate." Openlife is an in-beta metaverse derived from OpenSim, the open source spinoff of Second Life. Among those 800 was Ms. Tizzy herself, depicted here in Openlife avatar form.  Bettina is the renowned founder of Not Possible In Real Life, a large and highly influential Second Life arts group.

New World Notes' coverage of the Openspace pricing turmoil is here; our related user survey is here.  (Image: npirl.blogspot.com.)

Comments

[Renmiri Writer]

I've been in Open Life for a month now. Yesterday, all of a sudden we got "invaded" by tons of Ruth avatars full of good SL builders looking for a place to build. I am glad they came.. Maybe we can get an alternative to SL going with their help

[Botgirl Questi]

I posted back in June about taking steps to protect your identity on virtual worlds outside of Second Life. Here's the link: http://botgirl.blogspot.com/2008/06/botgirl-on-road-protect-your-virtual.html

[Osiris Indigo]

Please consider OpenLife Grid http://openlifegrid.com

It is one of the closest opensim developments to be usable and closer to completion than the others... It will have a working economy in the next couple of weeks.

They sell entire mainland regions for $59/mo with marginal setup fee..

Each region supports 45,000 prims (yes 45 THOUSAND)

Each region supports regular prims to 100m

Each region supports regular building up to 4096 meters...

There are currently 35,000 registerd users and over 300 active regions.

There are brand new personal clusters that have a setup of about $500 and monthly fees of $235 (I think) that are 4 regions controlled together..
(180,000 prims at your disposal)

and one of the nicest crews and admins around.

Steve Sima (Sakai) has invested a personal fortune in the backbone of this system. Every server is equivalent to what Lindens call a "Class 5" and he has a access to a server farm in San Diego that has room for 1,000s of region servers. He is also making alliances with 2-3 other 3D development companies to add features to OpenLife that SecondLife people have never seen before.

Please come check us out and make us part of your decision!

[Christophe Hugo]

M Linden, a MBA grad like you should have read a little more carefully the seminal 1995 Harvard Business Review article "Why Satisfied Customers Defect."

The exodus has begun.

[J L]

Bah. Let 'em eat cake.

[Gahum Riptide]

Well, polling people I know doesn't indicate an exodus. In fact, many have said "hell no" to leaving. I'll wait to see how this develops before saying the sky is falling and abandoning SL.

[CyFishy Traveler]

I crashed a couple of times, lost my freebie hair after teleports, exchanged names and friended dozens of Second Lifers who were there to explore, and had a blast.

[bold is my emphasis]

Seems this is where the 'pioneers' will wind up--people who are willing to put up with less-than-ideal conditions in the name of greater freedom.

Meanwhile, one of the reasons for the OpenSpace debacle in the first place was because Linden Lab was dealing with the stability issues that overuse of the OpenSpace sims resulted in.

So I guess it really depends on what's more important to you.

[Macphisto Angelus]

I have been on the OpenLife grid for a few months and LOVE it. As CyFishy says many of us are pioneers who "are willing to put up with less-than-ideal conditions in the name of greater freedom."

Yep, we put up with crashes, losing our prim hair on some region crosses, LSL being only 65% implemented and other little bugs that happen in a day. But we love every minute of it knowing the past lie of "Our World, Our Imagination" is a reality there.

Don't expect Second Life if you come. It looks similar but there are things coming that will surpass the looks of SL very soon. People who are concerned with stability should know that one of the reasons features are behind SL is because the backend things are being prioritized. Sakai's famous mantra to us is "stability before everything" and we that live there virtually are ok dealing with the flaws that come with beta testing. I think the people that go on about the bugs have never beta tested and certainly did not see SL in it's infancy. ;)

Yep.. there is a long road ahead but it is amazing how many miles seem to traveled already. OpenLife celebrated it's first birthday this week. There will be many more birthdays ahead.

[pyotr wolf]

OLG is clearly great. Why? Because Prok's already complaining about it.

[aboutos]

It most likely won't last unless the people understand that the software is not SL and that there are several areas needing work on before it will produce a stable platform for advanced scripting/building etc..

I love it, I have a grid, and pretty much left SL about a year ago to work at it. But for people to come to opensim grids for the wrong reasons won't solve the issues. It's simply not on par with the abilities of SL at this point but getting closer by the month.

[rightasrain]

we need to balance the present capabilities with the future of where the platforms are going. No one knows where SL is headed right now--not even the Lindens. Opensim has huge potential--why? 'cause IBM is supporting it and using it actively for there 3D web developement. It could be like Apache one day soon enough and enable people to build their own grids and interconnect them.