OpenSim charts path away from Second Life

By Eric Reuters

SECOND LIFE, July 24 (Reuters) - OpenSim looks and feels very much like Linden Lab’s Second Life. But top OpenSim developers see a future in which their software is a generic platform for 3D software, hopefully interoperable with the Second Life Grid but not necessarily resembling it.

Speaking at the Metaverse Meetup in New York City on Wednesday night, two of the most prominent programmers working on OpenSim — IBM’s David Levine (middle) and DeepThink’s Adam Frisby (left) — plotted a course that diverges further and further from Linden’s Second Life as time goes on.

Levine, an IBM employee known in Second Life as Zha Ewry, was instrumental in coordinating the first Second Life to OpenSim teleport last month. Frisby, while adamant that OpenSim has no formal leaders (consistent with the project’s decentralized, open source ethos), has emerged over the past year as one of the most prominent developers working on the project. The Perth, Australia-based programmer frequently travels the globe to evangelize OpenSim at meetings and conferences.

Last night, Frisby described OpenSim as a product very different from Second Life, capable of being customized to support a wide range of virtual worlds. He said he hoped the parts of OpenSim that emulate Second Life will be removed from the code’s core package and made an optional add-on within OpenSim’s modular configuration.

Levine agreed. “OpenSim is a platform. And by intent, a fairly malleable platform,” he said.

Levine said his vision for OpenSim was a vast array of interconnected worlds, where some provide game-based experiences like Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, but others are social hangouts for avatars similar to Second Life.

“Success in this space means killing a dragon and taking its head to another grid, slapping it down in a nightclub and having a disco,” he said.

That disco — and its cover charge — may have nothing to do with Linden Lab. “What if I want to hook up to an economy outside the Second Life Grid? That’s something I think a lot of people find exciting,” Levine said.

Frisby and Levine also backed an intellectual property scheme for OpenSim very different from Second Life’s. In Second Life, objects can be set with flags like “no-copy” by their creators, which Linden’s servers enforce. But numerous exploits to Second Life’s copy-protection model are known, and brazen theft abounds in Second Life.

In OpenSim, by default, no copy protection will exist at all. “You cannot know what a foreign piece of software will do with a piece of digital content once it receives it,” Levine said. To insert a digital rights management tool into OpenSim is to invite criminal hackers to find ways to circumvent it and undermine the credibility of the software, he argued.

“These things have to be legally enforced, there’s no technical way to make it foolproof,” Frisby said.

When the panel was opened to questions from the crowd, OpenSim’s lack of content protection tools was challenged by Catherine Fitzpatrick, better known in Second Life as the prolific blogger Prokofy Neva. “You mentioned the recipe of calling a lawyer, but most avatars can’t afford lawyers and don’t have access to them,” Fitzpatrick said.

Frisby responded there was no point putting in an intellectual property provision that couldn’t be made to work. “If someone wants to rip off Second Life they can,” he said.

Levine, in response to the same question, said he thought many grids would want to respect intellectual property and may put in optional modules to enforce it. He imagined something like the Second Life Grid would only allow access to its world by OpenSim grids that rigorously respect copyright.

Ultimately, Levine said, OpenSim would need to develop a framework similar to Creative Commons, with boilerplate legal language specifically adapted to virtual worlds. “The user won’t hire a lawyer, they’ll just read the Terms of Service,” Levine told Fitzpatrick.

Despite ambitious plans for OpenSim, the speakers admitted many steps in both law and technology remain to be figured out. Programmers still struggle daily with getting OpenSim to run on different graphics cards, and Levine said he’d seen “at least 17 different proposals” on solving problems like avatar identity management.

“No one has a vision where they say — in five years it will look like this,” Levine said. “People might have some glimmers of that, but no one knows.”

Photo: Eric Krangel / Reuters