On HyperGrid Business, my colleague Adam Frisby shares some fascinating thoughts on co-founding OpenSim, the open source spinoff of Second Life, and what they can teach about building new virtual worlds that can scale to a broader audience. Couple big surprises to me: OpenSim "was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times" during its first few years, and had incredible buy-in from Silicon Valley:
For a while, there were some big names adopting the project in droves. Nearly every major tech company had some involvement — or at least one employee contributing — to OpenSim at some point. IBM had an entire team of OpenSim developers and was running internal conferences using the project.
OpenSim, sad to say, couldn't sustain that momentum, and Adam has many insights for why. Here's one worth discussing as a group -- "IP protection needs to be baked into the virtual world from day one":
The Second Life-OpenSim model relies on copying assets and storing each copy separately — so deleting copyright infringing content became insanely difficult, since there’s no easy way of delete all the copies.
Any active user of either platform knows the massive drama and IP theft allegations that plague a system where IP protections are added long after launch. Worse, this creates a strong disincentive for content creators to remain faithful to the world.
I’m convinced this is a key reason for creator burnout in the larger worlds, and why OpenSim failed to take off: Without confidence that their intellectual property is safe, much of the creator class quickly lost faith; and the treadmill of building new content constantly to stay ahead of pirates harms the mental and financial health of existing creators.
While it’s far from perfect, OpenSim and Second Life should have followed Apple’s App Store review and approval model – at least for mass distribution of content. While it adds some friction to publication, it’s created a massive new community and market of successful app creators. Developers who build apps for iOS make a lot more money from their apps than over on Android, despite Android’s far larger audience.
Disclosure: Adam is lead developer of Sinespace, a sponsoring partner to this blog.
In what way is Adam Frisby your Colleague?
Posted by: Frans | Thursday, October 11, 2018 at 07:08 PM
nice information ...thank you
Posted by: adam christ | Monday, October 15, 2018 at 04:42 AM