OpenSim Pioneer Wins Prestigious Open Source Award

Video via Joyce Bettencourt

Crista Videira Lopes, a longtime pioneer of OpenSimulator (the open source spinoff of Second Life), just won this year's Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, awarded to developers of "open source software product of significant value to the nonprofit sector and movements for social change", and backed by the massive and prestigious Tides Foundation. Considering OpenSim's use by a small but dedicated group of educators and others, and Christa's talented contributions to it, it's a well-deserved.

"My department chair nominated me," Christa tells me. (She's a professor at UC Irvine, and "Diva Canto" in SL and on Twitter.) "He must have made a good case! OpenSim fits the spirit of that award."

Along with the award, she's winning a $10,000 prize, and for OpenSim users, there's good news there:

"It's for the OpenSim project," says Christa. "I'll use it to pay for infrastructure and other things like that, for the next several years."

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Comments

[Graham Mills]

Congratulations (and personal thanks) to Crista and the many devs and users who have contributed to development of server and TPV code as well as content. Crista has made and facilitated many innovations but enabling avatars to move seamlessly between grids via the hypergrid is an outstanding achievement in my view. Great to see that the funds are going back to support infrastructure from which all will benefit.

[Carlos Loff]

The only thing misding in Opensim is : more people and more contents - Besides that you have very serious and professional grids, an interconections between open grids, a very very cheap quality high oerformance servers to serve us and the freedom to Spread along many miles of continuous land

Also, the way to view, move, build, interact etc is EXACTLY the same as on SL - No learning curve, you just have to be brave enough to move and give it a fair try

[zz bottom]

And she is Portuguese, how could she be wrong:)
Sadly the reasons that made me personally quit open sim and return to Sl still apply.
Mainland and sailing for more then 3 hours straight without passing by the same sim.

[Pathfinder]

Congratulations Crista! Fantastic news for her and the whole Opensimulator developer and user community.

And remember, in addition to inventing and developing the awesome Hypergrid protocol (which allows people to teleport between *any* Opensim grid), Crista is currently working on an Opensim viewer that has a server-side customizable UI (covered by nwn here: http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2014/12/opensim-customizable-ui.html) that is really revolutionary for virtual worlds.