Socially Mundane

According to HyperGrid Business web site, it’s time for OpenSim developers and founders and whatnot to celebrate as a foundation has been created that will allow things to move forward on “solid legal ground”.

From the article:

The major problem that has been plaguing OpenSim until now is that OpenSim is distributed under the business-friendly BSD license — the entire code base is open source, but companies that build commercial software on top of that code can keep their projects proprietary. For example, IBM sells a distribution of OpenSim that is optimized to work with their enterprise software for around $50,000.

However, Second Life’s viewer and the third party viewers are all distributed under a GPL license — that license does not allow for proprietary commercial distributions, and any software built using the viewer code automatically becomes open-source. If any GPL-licensed viewer code were to make its way into OpenSim, then the entire OpenSim code based would be contaminated and would have to be licensed as GPL — the six-month policy was in place to prevent that from happening.

I’m not an attorney by any stretch of imagination, I am curious how Linden Research, D.B.A. Linden Lab feels about all this.

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(Source: hypergridbusiness.com)

I wrote this a couple years ago and re-found it as I was going through my archives. It still highly applies, not only in the virtual world of Second Life, but in real life also (for the most part). I strongly recommend you read, comprehend, then embrace these best practices. I’ve updated where it was feasible to do so.

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Four years on the Second Life grid and I can count failed “customer support” from in-world creators on one hand. And in those cases, it always was a case of “AWOL” where no response to my inquiry was never received. Of course, I’ve dealt with my share of rude, crude creators, but as a rule of thumb, I’ve always received excellent support from practically any creator when I needed it. I am willing to share my simple recipe for success in the scenario of needing creator support. When I say creator support, I am referring to those times when you need to contact the creator of something you have purchased in-world or through the Second Life Marketplace. These scenarios include, but obviously are not limited to:

• Failed deliveries on purchases
• Wrong permissions from those advertised
• Missing portions of a “package”
• Something does not operate as expected
• Something becomes broken
• Something becomes lost

Before I go into the “best practices” for obtaining creator support, I’d like to pass a quick message to the creators themselves:

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The Zindra thread at the SL blog is 95% whiners and crybabies.

So, what else is new?

My input is here:

”@ Jack: [who posted the article]

Isn’t it amazing how unlike first life where you can please some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of the time, in Second Life, you can’t please any of the people any of the time.

/me sighs

@ the detractors: [a.k.a. crybabies]

All you detractors and whiners need to take a chill pill. Look at the bright side for once in your (second) lives.

You can whine about it all day long. It does nothing but get your blood pressure up. The fact is that it’s coming whether you like it or not. So you may as well take a positive attitude, look at the bright side of it and start preparing. Of course if it bothers you that much, you can always run-off to one of the open-sim grids or another virtual environment altogether.

The fact is this whole process is because of policy that certainly Jack might have input on, but I highly doubt he is the final authority and decision-maker on it. No, I am not a fanboy or an apologist for Linden lab. But I am a realist.

I am not planning to have anything on Zindra. But if I were, I would think a feeling of excitement might be in the air as it is a fresh new place. A blank canvass. A new place to build and set-up as I choose. A new place that will be popular and a “destination”. A fresh chance to get the land I really want (whether it’s seaside, on a mountain, whatever.)

But no, there are people who bitch and whine for no reason other than to bitch and whine and what makes it bitching and whining is the lack of a counter-idea that present a single iota os constructive feedback.

@Jack Linden

Thank you for this heads-up and the instructions to actually prepare.

Hell, I might follow through, buy a cheap mature parcel on existing mainland, plop a sex bed down, then shop for a prime spot on Zindra just so I can do the swap.

If for no other reason than to show: complaining about it does nothing, but preparing is everything.

Art: Mike Groseth (Flickr)