OpenSim charts path away from Second Life

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.”

OpenSim的字典里没有Second Life

OpenSim与林登实验室的Second Life非常像。但顶尖的OpenSim开发者却预见,在未来他们的软件将是一个通用性的3D软件平台，可以同Second Life互通却不一定与它相似。


周三晚上，在纽约举行的Metaverse Meetup会议上，2位最重要的OpenSim程序员--IBM的David Levine（中间者）和Deep Think的Adam Frisby（左），向人们描绘了一个与Second Life渐行渐远的虚拟世界。

IBM 的雇员Levine，Second Life中叫Zha Ewry，在上个月Second Life与OpenSim第一次传输中一展身手。Frisby，在过去的一年中是OpenSim开源项目的最杰出开发者，该项目是分散式的开源项 目，Frisby坚称没有所谓的领导者。这位定居澳大利亚Perth市的程序员频繁穿梭于全球的各个会议，传播OpenSim的福音。

昨晚，Frisby将OpenSim描述成一个与Second Life迥异的的产品，它能被定制成各种不同的虚拟世界。他希望OpenSim中模仿Second Life的组成部分能够从核心代码包中去除，变成OpenSim模块配置中的一个可选附件。
Levine 也同意，“OpenSim是一个平台，并将被设计为一个可塑性很强的平台。”他对OpenSim的愿景是，一个组成者数量巨大的，可互联的世界，在这个世 界中既有人提供象暴雪的魔兽那样的游戏式体验，又有人提供象Second Life那样的社交类场所。“这个愿景如果能实现，那么在这个世界中玩，就像是这么一幅场景：杀死一条龙，然后拎着它的脑袋，去了另一个网格，找家夜总会 跳disco舞。”这样的舞及其所需费用与林登可以毫无瓜葛。“如果我在Second Life之外搞一个经济体会怎样？也许有很多人会为此非常兴奋。”
Frisby 和Levine还强调了OpenSim的知识产权模式也将与Second Life的截然不同。Second Life中，物品可以被其制作者设置上“不许拷贝”的标志，林登的服务对此提供支持。但是，这种产权保护模式的诸多‘成效’也是众所周知的，Second Life中无耻的产权窃贼横行霸道。
在OpenSim中，默认情况下，根本没有产权保护。Levine说“人们不可能知道，当外部软件接受到数字 内容时会干什么。”他解释道，在OpenSim中加入数字权限管理工具只能吸引黑客来犯罪，想方设法绕行并蚕食OpenSim这个软件的信誉。“这方面的 事情只能用法律来保障，技术性的方法不可能使之简化”Frisby赞同到。


当座谈会进行到听众开放提问时，Catherine Fitzpatrick对OpenSim缺乏内容保护工具提出质疑，Fitzpatrick女士在Second Life中叫Prokofy Neva，是一位多产的博客。“你们给出的处方是找律师，可多数用户没有或者不易找到律师帮忙。”Frisby的答复是，增加知识产权保护条款没有意义， 那样做不会有效果，“如果有人想破解Second Life偷点东西，他们就能办到。”Levine的答复是，他认为会有很多网格尊重知识产权，并把它作为可选模块来强化。将来也许是这样，Second Life只允许严格遵守版权的OpenSim链接到自己的世界。

最后，Levine说，OpenSim将需要开发一个类似Creative Commons（创意共用）的框架，有专门针对虚拟世界的法律用语样板文件。“用户不必请律师，直接看服务条款就可以了”Levine告诉Fitzpatrick。
除了OpenSim雄心勃勃的计划，演讲者们还坦诚有许多法律和技术上的工作要完成。程序员们每天仍然在为OpenSim能运行于多种图形卡上而努力，Levine也注意到，在化身身份验证管理上至少有17个不同的提议。

“5年后这一切将会如何？没人所描绘的愿景能解答这个问题”，Levine说到“人们也许会有一些灵光乍现的点子，但没人知道大局是什么样的。”

更多消息可见Second Life中文网