Rival grids threaten Linden’s monopoly on SL technology

By Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, Sept. 6 (Reuters) - Adam Frisby opened his Second Life client and logged into the virtual world, but right away things were subtly different.

In the world in which he found himself — one that closely resembled Second Life but was in fact a universe of his own making — there was no ability to customize an avatar’s appearance, for instance. So Frisby’s look was locked into the default, not Second Life’s white T-shirt and jeans but a light blue shirt and red pants. And Frisby’s walk and flight were a little awkward — the world’s physics engine was turned off to speed performance.

In Second Life, Frisby is known as the avatar Adam Zaius, a programmer active in the open source community. But here on DeepGrid, his avatar is Adam Alpha. DeepGrid is an open source approximation of Linden Lab’s servers that looks and feels like Second Life and is accessed via the Second Life client. With one big exception — the ability to have a persistent inventory that can be carried across regions — Frisby estimates his team of developers will have mimicked Second Life’s features within two months.

An OpenSim region on DeepGrid, unconnected to Second Life

Earlier this month, Linden Lab Chief Executive Philip Rosedale said his company would be open sourcing the Second Life server code, dramatically altering the company’s business model. Instead of collecting tier fees on land it manages, the company would move toward charging access fees for entrepreneurs on external servers to tap into Second Life’s economy.

Eager programmers had already begun open source work on the viewer in April of 2006, ahead of Linden’s move to formally put the viewer into the open source domain in January of this year. Now, as Linden Lab prepares to take the Second Life server code open source, the company is once again finding its timeline challenged by an open source community that doesn’t want to wait.

About 300 servers have installed Frisby’s open source Second Life server code, called OpenSim. DeepGrid, a network Frisby manages, has 20 OpenSim regions running on a near continual basis. While there’s no centralized inventory server, meaning that an avatar on DeepGrid can’t take objects from one region into another, users can cross region boundaries seamlessly, experiencing no disruption as their client connects to servers on opposite sides of the world. Another similar network, called OSGrid, connects ten regions.

Linden Lab indirectly acknowledges the competition. Catherine Linden wrote on Linden’s blog on Tuesday that “Linden Lab is separating Second Life the virtual world (the product) from the Second Life Grid (the technology platform).”

Frisby hopes OpenSim will be especially attractive to users in light of the recent spate of technical problems on the Second Life Grid. “With OpenSim, you can pretty much guarantee reliability, or at least be aware of downtime problems,” Frisby said. “Second Life is a game of Russian Roulette with the login server.”

Organizations are already starting to take notice of Frisby’s work. “I’m interested in his project,” said Larry Johnson of the New Media Consortium (NMC). “It’s something lots of people in Second Life are following.” The NMC is a group of 300 universities and colleges exploring how technology can be used innovatively in education, of which over 75 are active in Second Life. Many schools can conduct their educational activities entirely within a single region with no need to interact with the larger Second Life community.

Johnson was quick to add though that he still had “lots of questions” about OpenSim and that the project was but one of several open source applications the NMC was exploring.

Not all educators feel their school’s virtual presence can be so easily divorced from the larger Second Life community. “Obviously stability is key to us being able to provide a suitable space for our classes,” said Kenny Hudson, whose Loyalist College maintains a robust presence in Second Life. “We feel here we are connecting to the larger community of educators and students, collaborating on the future of education.”

“We are part of that community, and we feel our duty is to help make it better rather than simply looking for tools to teach with,” Hudson said.

Connecting to DeepGrid with the Second Life viewer is a simple process. After creating an account on DeepGrid’s signup page (the open source servers cannot access Linden Lab’s login server), appending the string “-loginuri [website]” redirects the connection away from Linden Lab’s Second Life Grid to an alternate destination. OpenSim works with PC, Mac, and Linux clients.

Frisby also uses OpenSim as a development platform. With open source tools, objects can be built on external servers, then downloaded as an XML file and uploaded into Second Life.

It’s also possible to take objects out of Second Life, Frisby said. But he’s never done it, both because doing so would violate Linden Lab’s Terms of Service, and because of the legal and ethical considerations surrounding intellectual property.

While OpenSim’s standalone worlds will be ready within months, building a fully-featured grid than can either compete with or connect into Second Life will take much longer. Frisby approximates interactivity between Second Life and another grid remains 18 months away, depending largely on Linden’s support for the idea.

Frisby and other OpenSim programmers hope to some day earn a living providing support to OpenSim implementations, in the same manner companies have developed industries around support for open source applications like Linux and WordPress. But he insists he’s not in competition with Linden Lab. If OpenSim together with programmers working on the viewer fix bugs or develop new features they want to see in Second Life, he plans to offer the code to Linden Lab for free. “For Second Life to grow, it will have to get better,” Frisby said. “If Linden Lab succeeds, we succeed.”