Continuing from yesterday's post about OpenSim… What it brings to us? OpenSim is not just a toy for techies, nor a possibility to run your own sim for you and your friends to play far away from the eyes of Lindens and other residents. It is much more than that.

One thing that first comes to mind is freedom. It is not just having sims outside of Linden's kingdom. It is having sims all over the world. Recent banning of all gambling and ageplay came because they are illegal in U.S. and Linden's servers are located in U.S. This way, you can log to a sim which is hosted in some other country, one that doesn't prohibit your favourite sport. I don't know why Lindens don't put some of their servers in Monaco and fix the gambling problem (and make Europeans more happy about overall performance too) but I don't understand lot of things Lindens do.

No, that doesn't mean anarchy or some isolated lawless islands in the metaverse. You are still bound by laws of the country your human is a citizen of, but that thing is not going to be solved by any open source project. It is something you have to fight in your first life.

The other good thing is what comes with any open source project. (BTW, the whole OpenSim project is under BSD license. We'll talk about that later.) Development of the platform is much faster and directed more towards users. Goals are not directed by a single company but by developers themselves. And with a good feedback from the community, that leads to the platform tailored for its users not company's goals. That means, no more Open Letters, protesting, bitching at forums. That means, go to the wiki and say it for somebody is likely to listen. Or, if you are developer, go and do it yourself.

What would happen with security and performance issues is obvious since client code was open. Just take a look at Nicholaz Baresford's releases of the client. Lindens were not out of their mind when they released the client code to open source community. From the official Linden blog:

A lively community of software developers has formed around this project, and as a result, hundreds of improvements (called “patches”) have been submitted. These patches are then reviewed by Linden developers, and so far about 98 patches have been rolled into the official Viewer download that you are all using.

Third, the price of the land. At this moment land price is dictated by Linden Lab. Ok, it follows some rules of the market, but there is no open market as long as there is one main supplier. Going open means going to the real market. We can expect many companies offering different servers for different prices. Just the same as web-site hosting in the flatworld. And yes, with a bit of knowledge (i guess that soon enough will mean knowing how to follow the instructions in a wiki), some hardware and fast connection, you can be on your own if for any reason you like that idea. 

These were some of the nice things that we should see in the not-so-distant future. Tomorrow, we'll have to face some difficulties connected to the OpenSim project which are not technical. Stay tuned…. 

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