Not a Virtual World, a Platform, Dammit!

You may have noticed some witty and talented new paintings illustrating my blog posts lately. This is the work of Nikolai Sapunov, a Russian artist who I am sponsering. Sapunov first contributed a work to me that he dedicated to Zha Ewry after reading my blog by candlelight in his communal apartment tabbing back and before between lingva.yandex.ru. He is intuitively a kindred soul and I am so happy to have found him.

Kolya explained that he lives with his babushka in one of those ghastly novostroikas out beyond the end of the Yugozapnaya line. They survive on her sale of wilting cucumbers in the metro passageways underground to busy commuters. Weekends, they tend the plot at a dilapidated dacha of a friend who is in rehab or dead, they're not sure which.

Originally active in an underground gay artists' commune named Blue Rose, Kolya had a brush with Suprematism but never really understood Malevich -- he is still contemplating non-objectivism in its many black square forms. Kola then drowned in a lake in Finland in 1912, possibly having had help from some early Bolsheviks but more likely because he didn't listen to his babushka and went swimming after a heavy luncheon.

He has now resurfaced in Second Life, he tells me, as his bad connection flickers and his silences grow longer. I set him up in the Grace plaza where you can find some remarkably ingenius works, including one that I always laugh when I see it featuring a little hippo. Supporting Kolya is supporting Russia's soul and supporting this blog because I'm paying him now per post and I need to get him off the dime.

Meanwhile, this just in: Adam admits OpenSim is not a virtual world. Gasp!

Hadn't I essentially been saying that? It's software in which the makers don't care about the world. They're no different than those heedless and destructive Lindens who merely wanted a test matrix for their VR goggles.

Adam mentions OSGrid, OpenLifeGrid, TribalNet as all worlds (ostensibly, though they aren't so worldly) who use the OpenSim software to MAKE worlds.

Yeah, we got all this a long time ago, not only the first time the Lindens began talking Platform and setting up Aimee to propagate the Platform Party, but when other competitors like Multiverse matter-of-factly explained that you use their thing to make worlds, you don't consider the thing itself the world. That is, the connector of the worlds isn't a world maker, you are. I think it was supposed to work that way in SL, but never quite did.

Unless you count the worlds we make on our sims as worlds, and I do.

What Adam can't explain then is why, with his uh, revolutionary world-making technology, he forgot to put in world-making stuff like, oh, money, economies, and IP permissions.

Zha is always giving out that Adam is young and extreme and by contrast she, Zha is a moderate. Except...the tail is wagging the High-Maintenance Blonde here, as she now talks about "DRM light" which she doesn't explain -- and here Adam explicitly tells us that it merely means MARKING CONTENT.

Marking content, wow, that's like -- revolutionary! NOT! Because if you can't implement a constraint around those marks, they are worthless. I'd love to hear some lawyers and judges with actual jurisprudence comment on what they think about digital wares that are merely marked but not constrained. Perhaps it's enough; perhaps not, let's hear real lawyers not Internet lawyers talk about this.

But...marking intent isn't what c/m/t is. C/m/t is *chosing an implementation of permissions*. You don't just put a mark; you select an option that actually constrains other users.

Adam claims he provides "all the programming hooks" to run an economy. Not. There is no microcurrency. There isn't any buy/sell interface. And if someone layers on Credit Card payments, as I've said before, that's not an internal world economy, but a shopping interface outside of the world. Adam explicitly talks about credit cards; he says nothing about having programmed hooks *for microcurrencies and inworld auctions and buy and sell*.

And is anybody else bothering? No. They're utopianists, communists, techlibs who don't care.

Here's Adam's nasty little reference to your faithful correspondent -- and notice how he tells the Big Lie just like Dale Innis -- it can't be done, therefore we won't do it, and if you claim we should, we'll say it's futile:

"So… should all content running on an OpenSim-powered server be free/oss then?
Nope - despite comments made by a certain individual, that’s not the case at all.

Infact we’ve never ever said anything to this effect. The environment we build by default (and that’s the components we ship to do things like a Second Life™ environment), we’ll try our best to respect permissions infrastructure as best we can - but there are limits to what we can practically do, we cannot alter the fundamental laws of mathematics and computer science (see my previous post for more on this) for example."

Wow, what sophistry! First, say that content shouldn't be freebies and OSS. Then...say it's impossible to make it anything BUT that for fundamental laws of nature. What a hat trick!

While c/m/t as a mark AND as a *functioning constraint* has worked all this time, here's what Adam claims:

"Unfortunately “Mod/Copy/Trans” does not a legal contract make - what we’d like to be able to do is show those, and then automatically generate a contract you can use that backs those up legally. A primitive structure for how to store licensing information was fleshed out on the OpenSim Wiki, you can read the proposal I made (fairly old, from January I think)."

This is totally lame. What is this, a notecard?! Nobody needs another CC device. Or a notice that pops up like an FBI warning on a DVD. They need workable constraints that implement the permissions, and only ideology is preventing Adam from inserting them.

All the grids that are "running free at last" aren't united in a world, but they make up a world of sorts, indeed a likeminded G'riyad'h!

Says Adam, "Our goal is to produce something modular so you can swap pieces on each hook with other matching pieces, so you could potentially have a PayPal™ economy module and a Linden Dollar one, and swap the two depending on your needs."

I don't see PayPal as ever forming the basis for an integrated virtual world -- a separate microcurrency is needed. And Adam is being rather fast and loose claiming that he can enable setting up Linden dollar economy sims when the Lindens control this money supply religiously -- while they may be casual about content and even scripts, you can be sure they aren't going to let anybody else print Linden dollars or even sell them without lots of wiring down. I don't see that Adam is really entitled to make this claim.

In vain, look on the website, I can't find much about the people who want to take money and run a grid -- Sakai and the others. I see their forums are as filled with drama as the SL ones used to be, and the founders have all kinds of politically correct notions, like wanting people not to form national language sims, as this is "nationalistic" and not part of the One World that they should all forcibly be joining and singing Kumbaya in. Or somebody who had a founder's title gets it stripped away when he abandons his land -- imagine, taking that basic status away from someone just because they didn't hold land anymore. Insane.

Yes, reverse engineering SL has its charms -- look what they've added to their TOS lol: "
Openlife Grid reserves the right, in its sole discretion, to terminate your access to the Openlife Grid Web Site and the related services or any portion thereof at any time, without notice."

Comments

[Gareth Nelson]

"The issue is trust"

Bingo!

Though i'd argue that free software is more trustworthy, others may not share that view.

2 types of trust in this context:
1 - "Is this code secure? Will it enforce what we think it enforces?"

2 - "Do I trust the people using the code?"

Free software wins with number 1, but it says nothing about number 2.