Sad but not entirely surprising news: After operating on a regular basis for over 9 years, HyperGrid Business is slowly closing down. By far the biggest news source for virtual worlds built on OpenSim, the open source spinoff of Second Life, publisher and lead editor Maria Korolov savvily built up a strong and passionate following for her outlet. But in her closing note, she suggests that OpenSim -- and Second Life itself -- has already been remanded to irrelevance:
[T]here was once a strong possibility that OpenSim would evolve into an open source, virtual reality metaverse. That’s not happening. Our viewers are still stuck where they were ten years ago, without any real support for web or mobile access or for virtual reality headsets. All projects to address that issue seem to have faded away. Instead, the focus has shifted to VR-native platforms from Google, Facebook, and, to some degree, Microsoft. We don’t know yet what Apple is cooking up, but they’re busy as well.
It’s increasingly looking like the whole SL-OpenSim ecosystem has hit a dead end. It will probably continue to exist as a niche platform for its half million active monthly users, shrinking slightly each year until it’s just a nostalgia thing, like text-based adventure games or manual typewriters.
I don't quite buy that last bit, because unlike OpenSim, Second Life is still backed by a profitable company with a highly engaged, highly monetized userbase, giving Linden Lab enough money to evolve (as we see with Sansar, albeit in fits and starts) . As with many open source-based projects, OpenSim was relying almost solely on the community spirit and voluntary work of assorted tinkerers and enthusiasts -- and that rarely leads to a commercial product with a consumer userbase. Still, would be a shame for HGB to totally go away, especially because much of the OpenSim community is still around -- the site gets almost 150,000 monthly pageviews, a quite decent number -- maybe a benefactor could buy the site and take over?
