Why Leave Second Life For OpenSim?

Metaverse developer Zonja Capalini recently wrote a long and thought-provoking post on why she moved her company from Second Life to OpenSim; it's a process that began during last year's OpenSpaces pricing rebellion, which is also the time other disgruntled SL landowners began contemplating such a move. Still very much bitter with the Lindens, Ms. Capalini lays out her case for preferring OpenSim. (Short version: it's much cheaper, you have much more control of your data, and platform innovations seem to be happening more rapidly.) A great companion to her post is this side-by-side comparison of SL and OpenSim from RightAsRain Rimbaud of Rezzable (a partner to this blog.) While OpenSim compares favorably on most fronts, Rimbaud notes that Second Life's major advantage is the world's existing community.

Taking both posts together, I think we're seeing a very likely near future for the metaverse business:

Companies and organizations primarily interested in virtual worlds for enterprise use will steadily invest more in OpenSim-based worlds, while decreasing their presence in Second Life; they won't entirely leave, however, as to maintain a consumer-facing "lobby" in the preeminent immersive virtual world. (Or as architect Jon Brouchard trenchantly called Second Life, "a community hub, and the 'town commons' of the metaverse.") It's unclear to me how Linden Lab would reverse this trend, at least with existing prices and policies, which is why I'm skeptical Second Life can thrive as an enterprise platform. (If you mainly use a virtual world for internal business applications, why prefer the more expensive, less controllable alternative?) Which, again, is why I think Grace McDunnough is onto something when she describes Second Life's "killer app" not conferencing or other work-related uses, but a platform for binding weak ties between a large, culturally diverse community. (I'd subsume SL's internal economy and user-created content under the "community" rubric.) Since OpenSim is still just the province of extremely early adopters, Second Life's community is the Lindens' main advantage.  Given the high rate of innovation and the major players already involved with OpenSim, that might soon become Second Life's only competitive edge. Image from Zonja's Flickr stream.

Comments

[Zonja Capalini]

Well the fiasco continues: https://blogs.secondlife.com/community/land/blog/2009/05/26/good-news-homestead-pricing-to-be-grandfathered-if-purchased-before-july-1st-2009

To me this last announcement makes it very clear that LL is not interested at all in business customers. Who would like to invest in a company with such erratic price policies? The worse is that some players (er... "residents") seem to suffer an accute form of Stockholm syndrome and are actually... thanking the Lindens!

Sic transit gloria mundi... :-P

[Dylan Rickenbacker]

Well I just found USD360 in my pocket that weren't there before. Why not say thank you?

[Doubledown Tandino]

I wonder why the education people that were so opinionated in wiping off adult content from the second life grid.. I wonder why they couldn't just move to an open sim to conduct their classes and workshops. Seems opensims have everything that educators are looking for.

[Iggy O]

Doubledown, you really misrepresent the EDU crowd. I'm just getting fed up with all of the misinformed edu-bashing in the blogosphere. We are not a bunch of fretting puritans.

Who ARE the educators you cite as being "so opinionated in wiping off adult content from the second life grid"?

Please list some names and URLs, because I don't know them and they've not been coming to our conferences or posting to our e-lists.

In fact, the hottest arguments on the SLED list erupt whenever someone frets about adult content.

Most of us defend the rights of residents to do as they please. At best, the consensus has been that adult-zoned sims are a good move by LL, but we lobbied to be sure that artistic forms of nudity or academic studies of adult topics--what I call the "Michelangelo Test"--cannot be banned in a mature sim.

In fact, we rezoned our campus island from PG to mature in response to clearer guidelines from LL.

As for Opensim, it would be great for educators who want a little walled garden for discussions and lectures: activities that, in any case, work better face-to-face on traditional campuses. Virtual meetings have great utility for distance ed as well as multi-campus (and multi-national) conferences of teachers, but those events work better for now in SL, where most of us have avatars already.

On the other hand, if you want content to explore/study and community to join/study, SL and, increasingly, Metaplace, are the places to be. Blue Mars looked promising, too, until I found out there will be no UGC except by professional developers, so students would be mere tourists. That won't work for most educators, and even Opensim's ability to host UGC projects limits the audience--unless we can easily join sims we host locally to the main grid for outsiders to come by for, say, an art opening.

Case Western's "Behind the Firewall" solution using SL still seems the better route to that end than Opensim.

[Thorn Witrial]

This is what I've been trying to get through to the Lindens - they are killing the community and that will bite them hard later. The forced move for adult content, the difficult/confusing/pointless age verification requirements, the prim limit for picking up or rezzing coalesced blocks of prims (they raised the limit from 1000 to 4000 recently but that doesn't keep lots of inventory from being broken), the haphazard and capricious application of the rules (i.e. AR punishments) and the fact that basic services are not reliable all add up to breaking the community ties that are essential to SL's success.

Let it be know that the JIRA against the current plan for segregating content and people is now the NUMBER ONE issue, even topping the Openspace JIRA, at 4,257 votes JUST SINCE April 9th.

The Lindens haven't commented on it at all except one anemic little plea for people to 'keep it professional'.

I have floated the idea to several people on the SL blog that we migrate deliberately and as a group to openlife. I have the feeling if we created an advance team of builders and scripters bent on working together, we could do wondrous things there, and faster, because of our collective learning, savvy and skills built up over our time on SL. No one's seriously taken me up on it, but I think it will happen sooner or later.

If you build it, they will come.

[Zonja Capalini]

I wouldn't advice to migrate to Openlife. Second Inventory doesn't work there; they are using Opensim and modding it without giving anything back to the Opensim community (they are legitimate in doing so, because Opensim is BSD licensed, but still...), so that they've been expelled from the Opensim wiki; they've also had problems with their modded viewer, not releasing, or releasing late, their mods -- which they are forced to do because the viewer is GPL licensed anyway.

I would advice to join OSGrid, which is free and has excellent volunteer support, or to create your own mini-grid and open it to hypergrid, as I've myself done. It works very well, and it's a pleasure to know that your stuff is yours. Heck, you can even copy the whole world into a pendrive and put it in your pocket! :-)

[Robert Graf]

Stockholm Syndrome is exactly right. With Opensim I have total freedom. I can run entire region(s) absolutely free, backup my region(s) and content, and do it all thru my existing equipment/internet connection.

Opensim must really have Linden Labs and their insiders worried. Seeing more and more of the "opensim is lame and going nowhere" posts. The old business model of one company and a few insiders controlling everything is done.

We have options now and some of us are taking advantage of them. Seeing new refugees and old friends from SL showing up every day on OSgrid.

For more information go to www.osgrid.org. You can download opensim there and the hippo viewer and see for yourself what has Linden Labs and the insiders concerned. lol ;)

[Sioban McMahon]

Aside from the discussion of pricing, the real difference between Open Sims and the SL grid is how you see your community.

Do you want an open place where people can find you and your program/issue/product/etc when wandering the grid? Go with SL.

Do you want a highly controlled environment to put on a program/event for a discrete group of people? Go with an Open Sim.

[Robert Graf]

Stockholm Syndrome is exactly right. With Opensim I have total freedom. I can run entire region(s) absolutely free, backup my region(s) and content, and do it all thru my existing equipment/internet connection.

Opensim must really have Linden Labs and their insiders worried. Seeing more and more of the "opensim is lame and going nowhere" posts. The old business model of one company and a few insiders controlling everything is done.

We have options now and some of us are taking advantage of them. Seeing new refugees and old friends from SL showing up every day on OSgrid.

For more information go to www.osgrid.org. You can download opensim there and the hippo viewer and see for yourself what has Linden Labs and the insiders concerned. lol ;)

[Robert Graf]

Stockholm Syndrome is exactly right. With Opensim I have total freedom. I can run entire region(s) absolutely free, backup my region(s) and content, and do it all thru my existing equipment/internet connection.

Opensim must really have Linden Labs and their insiders worried. Seeing more and more of the "opensim is lame and going nowhere" posts. The old business model of one company and a few insiders controlling everything is done.

We have options now and some of us are taking advantage of them. Seeing new refugees and old friends from SL showing up every day on OSgrid.

Download opensim there and the hippo viewer and see for yourself what has Linden Labs and the insiders concerned. ;)

[Nexus Burbclave]

Some interesting articles, but it seems like nobody is discussing the gorilla in the room known as currency. While Open Sim has taken some important steps toward transaction support, there doesn't seem to be an out-of-the-box convertible currency to compete with the Linden Dollar yet. Having such a currency or multiple currencies with currency exchanges is going to be critical to the success of a post-walled-garden metaverse.

[Zonja Capalini]

@Sioban: As of today OSgrid has 2235 regions, plus all the others that can be accessed by hypergrid tp. For example my grid is hypergridded, so that people from OSGrid can visit me, I can visit OSgrid, etc. The same is true of many other hypergrid-enabled minigrids. I wouldn't call that "a discrete group of people" :-)

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I'd seriously consider my own sim server if I could get 50+ concurrent users on a residential DSL line, or a really good price on third-party hosting, especially if I could link to a cloud of compatible small-scale users. Linden land pricing and sales channels are aimed at Chungian land pimps and the educorps. The rest of us are just eyeballs and purses.

I see LL scrambling for revenue streams. But I don't see them scrambling hard enough for retention. As alternatives become more stable and viable, LL's going to dry up and blow away unless they refocus radically on customer satisfaction (all customers, not just the rich ones).

[Kevin Tweedy]

I think you have to really look at your targer market and what they need. Not every use case requires everything SL has. There are tons of use cases that I believe OpenSim is a solution for. But opensim isn't free there are still cost in hosting, in develeping content, in staff, in fixing things that aren't working, in adding modules that don't exist or don't work. So just depends on your targer market and you technical skins to make it work.

[Sioban McMahon]

Zona,

That's great, but I will bet you that most SL residents don't know that. You are still limited to the reach of your advertising.

In SL, you put things in SL events and you are easily found.

[Zonja Capalini]

Of course that's true. But the company I work for was not making business with SL residents (remember: they are educators) but was using SL as a tool to allow remote real-time presence in mixed RL/SL classrooms. Nothing lost by being in Opensim :-)

[Sioban McMahon]

Zonja,

Exactly. That's a marvelous use of Opensim. :)

[Troy McConaghy]

Another thing keeping people in SL is the healthy SL economy:

Consumers like SL because there is a lot of selection (over 100,000 items for sale on XStreet SL, for example). Content creators like SL because it has a fairly good permissions system (the mod/copy/trans stuff) and many potential customers (as many as a RL city). Also, SL connects to the outside economy via the LindeX and other money markets.

[Court Goodman]

As an artist who loves building in 3D environments but doesn't build to make money, OpenSim makes much more sense. I can no longer afford to keep the hole in my wallet open for my sim in SL, and plan on getting a smaller parcel and then moving my building hobbies over to OpenSim.