Exiles Pt 2

The closest thing to what I was looking for was OSGrid, which I joined just a few days after the incident on 9th of November 2009. I have to admit, I was sceptical at first, as the project appeared to be very bleak and years and years behind of SL by number of residents, performance of the grid, technology available and in-world creations and economy. It took me a while (and still does, I think) to open myself to what OSGrid is and the different approach it takes on virtual reality. As of the time of this writing, however, I am certain that OSGrid and the Open Simulator project is what I really need and had wanted SL to be all along.

My one base belief is that more free is always better, both for an individual, as well as for society as a whole. The web itself is built around free and open technologies and software, so I am most certain that the future of the web will always take the path of freedom. For a long time I had assumed that LL knows about this, and will eventually open up and become free (just as M Linden stated in his new year’s blog post), but despite all their claims at being open, I had to realize that LL can not, and will never become open. This is not because they’re evil or misguided or plain ignorant, it is due to the nature of their business.

Linden Labs is a webspace provider. They make money (a lot of money, in fact) by renting out servers. That’s the core service behind the Second Life software. In the end, it all revolves around land tiers, and land is nothing else than server space, and tiers are the rental fees for that server space. Linden Labs controls all land in Second Life, and will never open that market up to others (as their competitors will be much cheaper and much better). And most long-term residents own land. Even if they don’t rent it from LL directly, they will pay indirectly for it, as their landlords will have to pay their tiers to LL. In fact, the biggest businesses (and most profitable ones) in SL revolve around land trade.

Even if you don’t have any land for yourself, you still contribute to it whenever you buy something from an inworld store, as the shop owners will have to pay tier for their stores. Actually, to be a profitable business in SL, you’ll have to overcome a certain ‘critical mass’ that will cover your land tiers first. Only then, you’ll make profit. (Not many of the shop owners I know make much profit beyond covering their own tiers. I certainly never did.) Every other aspect of the service serves to bring people to eventually pay tier to LL. And to understand all the improvements and changes that were and will be made, you have to keep one thing in mind: LL’s business always comes first.¹That’s not as heartless as it sounds when remembering that LL is a capitalist venture, and it’s the nature of such to strive for revenue and nothing else. But this also means that: a) there will never be any changes to the SL service which will threaten this business model (which means, there will especially never be a way to rent server space from someone else than LL for use in SL) and b) no matter how things are being promoted on the blog or website, in the end, the driving force will be to further LL’s business. It is not, and never has been, about the residents, unless it means that these residents will in one way or another be drawn to spend some more money on SL.

To make some kind of comparison, think of LL as the AOL of virtual worlds. AOL had the same business model when the internet became mainstream, giving its customers all kinds of content on their own servers, and offering them everything the web had to offer through their own services. Needless to say, in the end the customers didn’t want that protected and walled garden, and left off to the wild spaces that are the real world wide web, and LL knows that the very same thing will happen, once SL starts to open up. Therefor, I think it’s safe to say: they never will.

And that’s alright, because others will. Just as the WWW is based on free and open technologies, so will the future of virtual worlds be based on free and open technologies. Any closed source, proprietory approach is eventually a dead end, as it will lead to a secluded portion of virtual worlds, which will keep some people entertained, but will never further the development of the internet, no matter how good the services are. And for this reason, I decided to stick with the service, that works on building an open sourced and free platform for the virtual reality to come. It certainly will move beyond Second Life, integrating technologies and services which LL will not. Simply because it can, simply because it doesn’t have to make business considerations and fear for losing its hold on it’s ‘product’. As there is no hold. It’s with us all.

1. Some examples for this are the openspace pricing changes of early 2008, the acquisition of XStreet SL in 2009, which was a threat to tiers, as the marketplace offered merchants the ability to sell their goods without needing to have a shop inworld. [↩]