1. OpenSim is the software to run your own sims, you can A. download the software, install and run it yourself or B. get somebody else to host it – correct or no?

Correct. The software can be downloaded from opensimulator.org, however, Diva Canto provides a popular preconfigured version of it called Diva Distro, which might be better for newbies, especially in the pre-packaged Sim-on-a-stick.

Other than install it yourself or have someone host it for you, there are a multitude of grids run on Open Simulator that you can join, if you just want to have a quick look at how it works and what might or might not work.

2. What is the OS difference between: A. a sim, B. region, C. megagrid D. megaregion E. grid and what would be the correct hierarchy?

A sim is one instance of OpenSim running on a machine. It is often used interchangeably for “region”, so it can be the same, too.

A region is a square of 256×256 meters of virtual “land”. This unit is standard for Second Life, where the whole world is made up of these standard regions.

I’ve never heard the term “megagrid”, so I’m assuming it’s mistaken for “megaregion”, which is an OpenSim feature that basically allows regions to be larger than the standard 256×256 meters by joining them.

A grid is one instance of OpenSim run in grid mode (as opposed to standalone mode), and it technically means that, while the accounts and assets (inventories) are handled centrally on one server, other users can run their own OpenSim regions on their own machines and connect them through the grid to form one land mass. In practice though, the word grid is used mostly for commercial OpenSim services that host accounts, inventories and regions centrally and basically only allows users to join without giving them any administrative powers.

There is no real hierarchy between these terms, as sim could mean the same as grid, and is often also used to mean the same as region, and even though megaregions are constructed out of single regions, they are on the same hierarchy level technically.

For a small glossary on OpenSim terminology, see my first part on The Road To Open Simulator.

(Note: I’ve always used region, estate and sim as interchangeable but from reading on OS it probably isn’t, so hence why I am asking)

3. What is the OS difference between A. standalone, B. private, C. hypergated? or whatever the actual term is for grid networks?

A standalone is one instance of OpenSim run in standalone mode. That means that accounts, inventories and regions are all handled by the same server (as opposed to grid mode, where regions can be handled separately). It is popular to run standalones for small private installations of OpenSim on a home computer, where there’s only a few users and not many assets and regions to be managed. The difference between a private standalone as opposed to (I assume) a hypergridded one, is that with hypergrid enabled you can teleport to other hypergrid enabled standalones on other people’s machines, whereas without it you’re stuck to your own sim and can only teleport between your own regions.

4. Is it possible for people to teleport between their own “world” to other peoples’ “worlds” and if so, is it just restricted to those hosted by the same service, or does it matter?

See above, the answer is the hypergrid, which enables users to teleport between OpenSim worlds that have hypergrid enabled (regardless if they’re grids or standalones). There are currently restrictions in the hypergrid insofar as it only allows teleports between worlds using the same version of OpenSim, but these problems are slowly overcome again as more and more grids upgrade to the latest version and compatibility hopefully won’t be broken in future releases again.

5. Are hypergates and hypergrids the same thing? In either case, what specifically are they referring to?

Hypergrid is the module of OpenSim that enables teleports between worlds. It is built into OpenSim by default, and only needs to be enabled in the configuration. Hypergates are scripted objects which, in many cases, resemble a gate (but can actually be anything; I’ve got a sundial that is a hypergate) and which serve as a gateway to teleport to a certain world. Think of them as 3D-hyperlinks; hypergrid works without them, but they make teleporting more convenient.

6. The sim on a stick version, say plugged into a laptop or desktop computer one, are the worlds installed available to others to visit or is it completely restricted to the one person?

Sim on a stick can be configured to enable hypergrid, just as any other version of OpenSim can, so it is not restricted to one person at all. It’s a full featured OpenSim installation that can do anything other versions can.

7. Are the worlds only hosted by service providers able to allow public access?

That depends on the provider. When you’re renting a world from an independent provider (i.e. one that doesn’t only rent out regions for their own grid), they usually are. When you rent a region on a certain grid, it’s better to check beforehand if the grid allows hypergrid or not.

8. Please correct/clarify: you can run one single instance of the opensim and related materials on a usb, computer, etc. and make it either a single region, or a grid of multiple regions, and it can be set up to be just for you to use, or can be open to the public.

That’s correct. It’s one of the strengths of OpenSim that it’s highly customizable, so it can be as open or closed, large or small, as you like.

9. More than one instance of opensim can be run on the above options? If so, how to keep it from conflicting, and would the settings or whatever be the same?

Again, you can run as many instances of OpenSim as you want, provided your hardware can handle them. To keep them from conflicting you need to specify different ports for each instance. (Ports are the parts of an internet connection that a certain application will listen to for data.) The settings of the different instances can be as different as you like; in fact, the different instances don’t even need to be the same version of OpenSim. I’m currently running four instances on my own server, three of which are different OpenSim versions.

10. If it is possible to visit other grids no matter where they are hosted, as long as they are open to the public, is it a case that whatever personal account you set up to run your own goes out the window, and you have to make multiple accounts to visit other places? And this includes none of your stuff being usable (see SL/OS export inventory problem)? In some of the info I got the impression that while we can visit more places, we still can’t do it with one viewer with all our inventory and avi intact, but have to get different stuff each place we visit, and if so, that seriously is just retarded

Well. That’s complicated, but I’ll try to clarify that. Basically, the answer is no: You don’t need to make several accounts, and of course you can take your inventory with you. But as with all things, this is too much freedom, so there are some optional “security” settings that can be implemented.

By design, hypergrid will always use the account you logged in with; when you teleport to another grid, your account will appear as “Your.Name@your.opensim.ip” to show where you’re from and to keep from conflicting with another avatar on the grid you’re visiting that might have the same name.

Newer versions of hypergrid introduced the “suitcase” which is a protected folder in the inventory. It is the only inventory folder that’s accessible when hypergridding, and is supposed to protect your inventory from being ripped by malicious owners of a region you might visit. (Currently, this feature is terribly broken, and hypergrid inventory is a mess, but it works somewhat, once you figured out how to get to it.)

Finally, the latest version of hypergrid introduced an optional setting in the OpenSim software that would prevent assets from leaving the grid, even when people can come in through hypergrid. That means your inventory is still with you, but you can’t buy or take anything from a grid that has this setting enabled when you visit there. So far, only few grids make use of this feature, though.

11. What kind of size/features are the opensim regions? Are they actual full SL style regions with at least the 15k prims or more? Or are they watered down, scaled down and more like those openspace or homestead things where you can’t do anything but watch the water flow?

OpenSim doesn’t think much in prim limits. As a software, it doesn’t have many hardcoded built-in limitations, everything pretty much depends on the hardware you run it on. That means, yes, OpenSim regions are full scale SL regions, and most of the time allow even more than the 15.000 prims that an SL region does. A prim limit of 30.000 per region is rather normal.

That said, prims are a bad measure for performance, and you’ll have to learn what things will use hardware ressources and how many. For example, avatars visiting a region have a much bigger impact on performance than any number of prims on there. Scripts can also severely influence performance, as do a large number of sculpts and textures; physics are especially bad. You’ll have to learn to think about what OpenSim actually does right now and which elements are putting strain on it.

12. The 4 region mega thing – are these actual full size SL style regions or is that the watered down region?

See above. Everything that applies to normal regions, applies to megaregions as well.

13. What prim allowances are available?

See above. There’s no set allowance when you run it yourself, and there have been experiments of up to 500.000 basic box prims or 130.000 prims of a large build.

14. Do SL scripts even work? I read that the import/export of scripted stuff from SL to OS doesn’t actually “take” so if I made anything scripted and moved it to my own os world, it wouldn’t work? Or did I misunderstand?

SL scripts work 90% of the time. There are parts of the LSL that haven’t been fully ported yet, mostly everything that has anything to do with physics (like vehicles and such), but many LSL scripts can just be copy/pasted to be used in OpenSim.

When exporting stuff out of SL the scripts (and all other contents of a prim) will not export along with it, so they have to be saved separately and re-assembled again in OpenSim. This is probably what was meant with “doesn’t take”.

15. I am interested in making a lot of open content, and perhaps even full region/sim/estate/grid??? packages with terrain available – if I set up a multiple region install and set one aside for making that, would I be able to save that into one of those .oar files for JUST that little region as a sandbox and it wouldn’t effect any other region I might have installed?

Yes. In fact, that’s how OARs work – they save one region at a time.

15A. is it difficult to make prepackaged region/terrain conglomerations to make available to people setting up their own stuff? Would the objects/builds/scripts/trees/etc. especially scripted things be included or is it just terrain? Not sure how that works, some clarification would be helpful. I visited some site that had free oar stuff and if what was being offered in the pics was what the region would look like, I’d just as soon make my own. No offense but some of them were ghastly.

OARs save everything that is on the region, also nested objects (objects within objects) like scripts, sounds, animations, etc. You can pretty much assume that the region will be preserved exactly the way it is. If you want to share your creations with the world, feel free to join opensim-creations.com, which I started for that very same purpose.

16. Is there a repository of free content, namely scripts that do more than just open doors and make particles, available for os? The cool scripts that make interactivity interesting – if so please share.

See opensim-creations.com. Also, for scripts, see Fleep’s script library, and the OSGrid forum.

17. What is the best way to make content available for people inworld and out of it? Should there be two options – in world and out, or should it be best done via some webpage so they can download it directly and use it themselves? If a website download, what sort of file type would it be if it’s a skin, shape, hair, clothes, object like a plant, a gun, a car, boat, pet, etc? Would it be different for each or does it all save in one format?

Personally, I prefer off-site transactions, for several reasons: The transactions are reliable (hypergrid transactions are still kinda wacky), the user automatically has a backup file if something goes wrong, and it’s searchable.

For the export files, I’m using the Imprudence viewer, which is pretty much the standard viewer for OpenSim. With it, you can save any prim object with all textures (including sculpt maps), and export shapes. For skins and clothes I would simply provide the UV textures.

This approach is fine about 80% of the time; if you’re trying to export a heavily scripted object, it’s still a problem, as all prim contents need to be saved separately and manually put back upon import. The Astra Viewer adresses this problem, but it’s not in widespread use.

17A. If I build a scripted car that works on my own world, give it to whoever and they take it to some other grid/region/sim/estate unconnected to mine, would it work?

Mostly yes, unless your grid or their grid differ greatly in terms of OpenSim versions used, or extra modules, etc. As long as you both use the same software, it will behave similarly. A lot of the performance, especially of scripted objects, depends on the hardware, though.

18. What, specifically, is the case about giving stuff away, or buying, whichever and someone taking it to some other grid, and that person being able to access some database? (Answered here – this is what I was confused about, so this helped clear it up.)

I can just repeat my answer from that thread:

These are two different scenarios:

1.) Grid owners: These are the ones providing the basic services (user accounts, inventories, etc.) Whatever you “have” (in terms of inventory) is stored in their database, so while they don’t automatically have a copy of it, it’s trivial to do a MySQL query and change permissions and ownership of assets.

2.) Region operators: These are people running an OpenSim region. They may be the grid owners themselves; in that case, all of the above applies. However, if they only connect their regions to someone elses grid, they do not automatically have access to the inventories of people visiting the region. Yet, if you rezz (and leave) anything on their region, they may be able to get a copy of it through an OAR (region backup).

That said, please relax a bit when using OpenSim. Just because people can maybe get your stuff doesn’t mean they will.

19. What viewer should I use and how compatible is it to anywhere else?

Imprudence. Seriously. Because they’re awesome.

Imprudence is developed primarily for OpenSim, and is in active and thoughtful development; they included a lot of OpenSim specific things into it (different maps, Lightshare, etc.) and, as stated above, most off-world backups are made with it.

20. If I set it up okay and things don’t implode into insanity, what would be the next step to making it accessible to others out there?

Enable hypergrid. Diva Distro and Sim on a stick already have it enabled, otherwise see how to install and run hypergrid.

20A. anyone who visits my world I self host – are they required to have an account? If so, do they end up Ruthed? Will I need to supply a welcome kit or something to help them not look hideous? I would like to be able to direct them to other sources to get fixed up. Is an acct required? Would they need to use the same viewer I use?

No, no. If someone visits your world through hypergrid, they will appear there just as they were in their own world. (Well, almost. Hypergrid appearance is still a little wonky, and sometimes attachments won’t show right.) They also don’t need an account or anything. If they make an account in your world, however, they will end up ruthed, and you should direct them to a hypergrid freebie place at least.

20B. Is it feasible yet to use that unity web based option for people to visit my os world? I have seen what appears to be others doing it, but I’m not positive that’s what it is they’re doing and not something else. If so, how much interactivity would a visitor have if accessing my world off a webpage (embedded??) – could they still interact with scripted stuff, fly, build? Or is it just one dimensional moving around in a 3d space? If the webbased option is available, where would I go to learn how to implement that?

The tipodean viewer is still in an early stage, and things there don’t look quite the way they should. I haven’t spent too much time with it, though, but my impression was that it was rather clumsy and not working too well. I don’t think that it’ll be a feasible alternative in the near future.

You can find the resulting animation on OSC.

Get the pose on OpenSim Creations.

The class was a little short and not very in-depth this time, but I hope it can give an introduction to making skins. I might make a speedbuild tutorial on that soon.

1. Copyright

What we attempt to do is to make a digital copy of an artistic creation. The law that governs these things is copyright, and sadly, they differ from country to country, so I can’t give an in-depth look into each and every variation on copyright here, but since most of our readers are from the U.S.A. and germany, I’ll try to give a general overview on copyright in these countries. Please note that this does not replace legal counsel by attorneys, should you require complete certainty about whether or not something you do is legal.

Subject of copyright is a work, which needs to be created by an author. In most cases the work needs to be a significant artistic or scientific effort by the author. This means that a single prim box will not be protected by copyright, just because the effort to create it is not significant enough to consider it a “work” in terms of copyright. This also means that anything that’s not created by a human is not protected by copyright (because it has no author). For example, a texture created (solely) through applying a filter in FilterForge might not be protected by copyright, since it is created by a computerized process. (Note that the filter itself, i.e. the process describing how to create said texture, will indeed be protected by copyright, just its results may not be.) I say “might not” because copyright is a case law and whether or not a work is protected by copyright is decided on a case-by-case basis. If you’re in doubt, it’s best to consider something copyrighted, though.

Copyright is automatic. The author doesn’t need to do anything to have his works protected, they are covered by copyright from the moment they’re created.¹ Copyright is transferable by US law (and can even be given up). It cannot be transferred by german law (as it is considered part of the “personality right” of the author, and is inextricably linked to the author’s personality), but can still be “licensed”. A license is basically a contract between the copyright holder and the person about to use the copyrighted work, describing what can and can not be done with the work, and as with all contracts, these are mostly free and can contain any kind of regulation.

Copyright is limited, and currently expires 70 years after the death of the author. When it expires, the work falls into the public domain, and can be used by anyone for any purpose; it cannot be re-copyrighted. (This doesn’t mean public domain works can’t be sold; obviously there are lots of old works still being printed and sold, even though everyone would be free to make a copy themselves.) There are also legal exceptions when use of copyrighted material does not require the permission of the author. According to US law, these cases are regulated by the fair use doctrine, which does not clearly define the circumstances, but describes factors that need to be considered when deciding if a use was a fair use or not. German laws however define specific exceptions to copyright (for example quotations, satirical purposes, public places, private non-commercial uses, etc.).

Breaking copyright (using a copyrighted work without neccessary permission) can have both civil and criminal consequences; the author can ask for compensation for the unauthorized use, and it can additionally be punished with a fine or, in extreme cases, with jail time.

These are the basic cases, where copyright is fairly easy and clear. However, most cases involving copyright are far from easy, because many works have several authors (with varying degrees of involvement) or make use of other works (with or without the consent of their authors). Some of these cases are specified in law, others have been covered by court cases, and a large number of cases are simply unclear.

2. Terms Of Service

Terms of Service are, by their nature, always more limiting than copyright law. Because they cannot replace or extend the law (since the law is stronger than a company’s terms), all they can do is further regulate uses which are already regulated by law. Also, their nature and binding force is subject to discussion; at best they’re a contract between the provider of the service and the user, at worst they’re useless.² For the scope of this article we will cover the Second Life Terms of Service (TOS in short).

While the TOS clarifies that you retain copyright to everything you create within Second Life, they also state that the actual data is property of Linden Labs and to be used at their sole discretion. This means that, while you are still free to define who may and may not have a copy of your creation, you have no right to get an actual copy of the data your creation consists of, off the servers operated by Linden Labs. It also means that Linden Labs can restrict your access to their service (and your creations along with it) at any time without being oblieged to hand you a copy of your creations, or any compensation for their use. The Terms of Service do, however, allow you to export your creation with the use of third-party solutions, provided you are the sole creator of every part the creation consists of. This means, every prim and every texture on every side of the prim needs to show your avatar as the creator for the export to be legal according to the TOS.³

Additionally, the Second Life Policy on Third-Party Viewers (TPVP) disallow the access to Second Life with software that circumvents the permission system or alters content metadata (like creator name). This leaves only a small window of exporting creations out of Second Life, as allowed by the TOS, and many uses that would be legal under copyright law are restricted by the TOS. For example, any building that uses megaprims can, effectively, not be exported, since megaprims have been created by only a handful of users during several short occasions when a bug in the SL server software made their creation possible, and are being distributed with full permissions, but still state the megaprim creator as creator. So if your building uses megaprims, they will show the megaprim creator in the creator info, while all other prims show your own avatar name, which means the build is not completely, technically, made by yourself and can not be exported. The same applies for creations that were made by several people, or use someone elses creation as part of themselves.

Breaking the TOS can lead to a suspension or ban from Second Life, even if the act in itself was legal. Note that bans affect not only one avatar account, but most probably all accounts that were accessed from the same computer. Also, all inventory assets, land holdings and L$ on all banned accounts will be irretrievably lost without compensation.

3. Technical

Having covered both the legal and contractual framework of copying Second Life creations, this entry will cover the technical means. Note that the methods described here are tools, their compliance with the law is up to the user. That said, several of the below methods are in violation of the TOS and may result in a ban from Second Life.

One of the first tools for exporting prim creations from Second Life is the libOMV test client. This tool has been around for several years now, and its use is described by Rock Vacirca in a recent blogpost. LibOMV is historically linked to copybot, which was basically a bot using libomv to rip and export content out of Second Life. Today, copybot is a synonym used for any viewer that is capable of exporting/copying SL creations regardless of their permissions.

By now, there are countless copybot viewers available for Second Life, many of which are simply rebranded older versions. Since the SL viewer code is open source, anyone with some basic knowledge of code can use it and create their own viewer from it, with or without copybot capabilities. Many copybot clients have been hacked and featured by Inf, who are also developing and selling their own viewer. Please note that the source code of these viewers is not public, so their use may disclose your Second Life password or other sensible information to a third party. Also, use of any of these viewers is clearly a violation of the TOS.

Many other Third Party Viewers offer some limited exporting ability. Both the Imprudence Viewer and the Phoenix Viewer allow the export of prim creations out of Second Life, as long as the creator name on all prims is the same as the avatar name of the exporting avatar. To be fully TOS compliant, Imprudence does not export textures along with the primset from Second Life, since there is no way to check the creator of all included textures in the viewer yet. Please note that the export files are incompatible between viewers, so a build exported with Imprudence can not be imported with Phoenix and vice versa. Also, objects will be exported without contents, so anything that was inside a prim (scripts, sounds, landmarks, notecards, etc.) have to be manually included after importing them to another grid.

On a side note, backups and exports from OpenSim are considerably easier to do, since the OpenSim software includes functionality to do these from within the console. OpenSim can create OARs, which back up regions including all rezzed objects, their textures, contents, permissions and settings (but currently do not retain the creator names when uploaded to another sim), and IARs, which create an archive of inventory assets, either of a user’s complete inventory including subfolders (including object contents, textures, permissions and related assets) or single folders. Usage of these require access to the opensim console though, so they are only viable for users running OpenSim themselves.

4. Conclusion

The only way to back up creations from Second Life that is both within compliance of copyright laws and the Second Life Terms of Service is to export a prim object with either the Imprudence Viewer, the Phoenix Viewer or any other Third Party Viewer that allows exports while checking for creator, then to save the textures of the object separately. Included scripts, sounds, animations, notecards, etc. can not be exported, but should be already available on the creators computer if they made them, otherwise contact the creator for a copy of the original file.

Exporting creations using a copybot viewer may result in a ban from Second Life, even if they’re within the scope of copyright law. It is therefor currently not possible to create backups of collaborative builds, objects that have been created by others with the license to export them, or objects that are publicly licensed (for example with Creative Commons, GPL or BSD). Only use a copybot if you do not plan in staying with Second Life at all, and even then make sure you stay within the scope of copyright laws, as violating these can result in lawsuits from creators and investigations from authorities.

Full disclosure for the scope of this article: I have been hardware banned from Second Life for the use of the Cryolife client. I am also a german judicial executive.

1. It might be difficult to prove the exact time of creation in every case, but I don’t want to go too deep into details about copyright cases here.
2. The argument against their contractual nature is that a contract is an agreement between two parties, which requires some sort of “freedom of negotiation” on both parts, whereas Terms of Service are usually non-negotiable.
3. The regulations for exports mainly cover prims and textures, since every other creation (avatar layers, sculpt maps, sounds, animations, scripts, etc.) need to be created off-world first, and therefor the TOS assumes that the legit creator already has a copy of them.

Links from the class:

• LibOpenMetaverse: http://lib.openmetaverse.org/wiki/Download
• Backing up with LibOMV: http://rock-vacirca.blogspot.com/2011/03/moving-objects-between-opensims.html
• Imprudence Viewer: http://blog.kokuaviewer.org/
• Previous versions of Imprudence: http://wiki.kokuaviewer.org/wiki/Imprudence:Downloads
• OSAvatars: http://osavatars.com/
• Rexxed: http://www.rexxed.com/
• Jon Brouchoud’s website: http://jonbrouchoud.com/
• TGIB: http://tgib.co.uk/
• TAOS (TGIB forum): http://taos.name/
• Hypergrid Adventurers Club: http://becunningandfulloftricks.com/hypergrid-adventurers-club/

[Edit 22nd March 2011: Re-uploaded the videos, used the wrong aspect ratio on first upload.]

[EDIT 15th March 2011: Uploaded the second part again, since the audio stream got out of sync at the first try.]