Credits:

Music by Roger Subirana Mata – “El secret del mar” (cc-by-nc-sa) and ТЕЛЬНЮК: Сестри – “Не женися на багатій” (cc-by-nc-sa)

V is wearing:

• Ce Cubic Effect
• [4mc]
• Fallen Gods Skins
• Redgrave Shoes

El is wearing:

• Fishy Strawberry
• Pig
• Akeruka Skins
• Fashism Eyes
• Siow’s Makeup Tattoo
• EMO-tions Hair

Animations by

• Sweet Lovely Cute

And while I was at it, I finally played a little more with Viewer 3 and took a look at what all that fuzz with Mesh is about, and fell down a rabbit hole and haven’t found my way back yet. I knew before that mesh would be a game changer. That is, I knew it conceptually, like you know that a federated network of interconnected grids (the hypergrid) will be a game changer. But after I uploaded my first mesh, it already changed the game for me:

Not only are meshes much more detailed and diverse than anything you could do with sculpts and prims, they are also much more ubiquitous, since we can start drawing from the non-SL 3D-community as well. There’s tons of resources of free 3D meshes on the web, which can easily converted to collada for use in OpenSim, and in addition to that, meshes can also be created more easily once you get the hang of some basic 3D software. So really, the metaverse of the coming years will look very different from the metaverse we know today.

I love Thirza’s blogs. Not because I’ve been featured on them at times, but because I really enjoy reading them. You don’t subscribe to someone’s RSS feed just because you’re curious if you’ll get featured, after all. Well, I don’t; maybe you do. Have a video.

This situation is pretty irrelevant for most of the world, including most germans. A small group, however, interpret this confusion about the German Reich in their favour and declare the Federal Republic de-facto as non existent, and illegal. They form a pretty ridiculous group, giving themselves titles and ministeries, while being ignored by everyone else. The only reason I know this is because the agencies I worked for receive regular letters from members of this group, which are usually full of insane babble and try to discredit any action of said agencies on the sole basis that the Federal Republic allegedly does not exist, and henceforth all its agencies are without jurisdiction.

Why is this relevant? Well, following the, now almost 130 pages long, thread about the Justice League Unlimited of Second Life reminds me just of that. There’s a very small group of residents (around 40 or so) proclaiming themselves to be persecutors of law and order, and taking their job so serious that they start collecting vast amounts of data – both in-world and real life – about a large number of residents. From the documents that have been leaked so far, there’s a prevailing sense of entitlement, self-gratification and ruthlessness apparent among the members, which not only categorize people according to their own wicked view as “griefers” or “supporters”, but also devise strategies and best-practices on how to get “griefers” banned, or get more information from “supporters”.

The creepy thing is, they seem to be rather successful at that. The fact that this group has been active for long years now, that their wiki has already been leaked more than 1.5 years ago, and had, at the time, already shown a disturbing amount of information, that there were many reports about their actions, which allegedly got innocent people unjustly banned from Second Life, the fact that after all this, the group is still active and alive in Second Life is creepy as hell.

So, in order to get word about this out there: Don’t be creepy.

[Edit August 25th 2011: After following the debate on SLU, I get more and more the feeling that the side leaking the wiki information is not completely unbiased and a little more self-gratifying than they should be. There's especially an angle that aims to make a particular Linden Lab employee look bad without having any solid grounds to do so. So, long story short: It's a somewhat stupid debate, on both sides. While I do feel that JLU and its members have despicable manners, I won't bother much with this issue anymore. I'm sorry if anyone's time was wasted with this post.]

Hi everyone,

I just got home from work, and wanted to get this out asap:

Without much fanfare, but this time with a little more advance notice, SpotOn announced to hold a discussion on “SpotON3D ‘s Patent Pending Plug-in: Is it a threat or a benefit?” tomorrow, Friday, August 19th at 5pm SLT on their expo in Second Life (at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SpotON3D%20Biz%20Solutions/128/126/53/). As this is on – somewhat – neutral grounds, and gives a little advance notice this time, I’ll definitely attend and will be setting up a stream to broadcast the event from in-world, as well as post a summary here afterwards.

Here’s our chance to ask all the things you didn’t get a chance to last time, to voice your concerns and generally have fun! I’ll prepare some signs and other goodies for those who want to come, so watch this space for updates.

Greetings,

V

Stream

[EDIT: I made some signs for this event, which can both be found on OSC and the SL marketplace (freebie). Also, you can hit me up at the event if you want a copy:]

[Edit August 19th 2011: I set up the stream, which can be accessed through the link in either the sidebar or above (the one that says "stream"), on in-world at either the TGIB standalone or the Bay City pub.]

(As already mentioned, I was in Frankfurt on 16th of July and talked a little about OpenSim. Here’s a video recording of the event:)

Previously, SpotOn was about to wrap up the “outreach” event, when, literally at the last minute, Maria of Hypergridbusiness came in and is greeted by an echoing Tessa who introduced her as “Maria from Hypergrid”, then, for no apparent reason whatsoever, starts talking about the new improvements SpotOn has been working on for “at least the people who participate in our community” and mentions (again) Hot Swap, which is “gonna make a major difference in creators and their ability to make money and also the ability for business and education to come in and really utilize this environment without having to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars”. She still does not tell us what Hot Swap is, though.

Adressing Maria, she again tells us about her disappointment in the OpenSim community, how nobody showed up at her invitation, and how she feels treated. While waiting for Maria to respond, she continues to talk about Hot Swap: “Hot Swap is… Sunny Salamander (phon.) he’s our… Thomas …, one of our lead coders on our team and just a genius, I have to say, and this was an idea we kinda threw out there, and it doesn’t use our technology, it uses our database to pull up whole scenes that have been put together by either one creator or many, and it will allow us to sell the rights to use these things without actually giving the content over in an ownership way. (…) Hot Swap works like a ‘holodeck’, and that you can buy these other rights to use these Hot Swap scenes and from a inworld web window you can pick the scene you want to materialize, or rez, on your sim, you step out and then go back in, and there you go.” This basically sounds like loading an .oar through a web module, except that the .oar is not bought, but merely licensed, but I think depriving customers of their rights is one of SpotOn’s lesser worries.

Tessa mentions that she’s a creator too, and a lot of things on SpotOn have been made by her, which is one of the reasons she partnered up with Stevan. Going back to her previous argument in Part 3 (where it’s less worrisome to “steal” from Linden Lab than from a user) I wonder if she’s okay with the same argument applied to her own creations. She tells us that she and Stevan were “right in think as far as the worry about copyright, the worry about IP rights, the worry about people’s careers, and how they were feeding their children. And let’s face it, a lot of people in the OpenSim community are on disability, either for autism or some kind of mental illness, like bipolar, and they have a hard time coping in real life. Then there are the mothers who have children and are stay-at-home, and the people who are unemployed right now, and these people, if we attack them by taking their content, aren’t we really attacking the most vulnerable people in our communities in real life? And that’s one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about content protection.”

She shares a little tale about how she got “DMCA’ed” once over some plants, and how people expect her to know which content is whose, which is also one of the reasons why they’re doing double dutch delivery, so people don’t have a need to “steal” content. At this point I’d like to mention that it’s not my fault when things don’t make sense, I’m just writing stuff down. She continues to talk about something called “sticky IP” where a creation can be shifted between grids, and that SpotOn is in negotiations to make that happen but can’t make any promises. She then repeats her sermon about how you need money to make all that happen, and in order to get money you need investors, and to get investors you need patents when you don’t have any other assets. Stevan also repeats his previous statements.

When being asked if a programmer can explain the technology: “No, I don’t have a programmer who is going to explain it; it is certainly what it is, I’m not going to ask my programmers to sit here and explain the technology at this time.” Tessa adds that, if it really was that easy to do, then “why weren’t people using it in this way? Obviously we’ve done something quite different or this technology would’ve been existing and readily used everywhere, and as it’s not, because somebody else made it before us and didn’t give it back to the community, why are we being beaten up for it?” Which is a bold statement, especially keeping in mind that Gareth Nelson has made his own Firefox plugin for SL available under the GPL.

She goes on to talk, again, about “the exploit that people found” and that they have to close it at some point, because “it definitely has impacted our goals”, which makes me even more curious about it. She now mentioned this particular thing three times without having any reason to do so, as it doesn’t have much to do with the plugin, so it must be something that’s important to her.

She then states that she’s also not a programmer. Stevan, when asked if their patent pending plugin is different from someone elses work, reminds Maria that the patent will take many many years to issue, “so we haven’t done a sit-down-and-compare between his technology, and our technology, so there’s no way to know if it’s infringing or not, and it sort of just doesn’t matter right now.” Sort of. Doesn’t matter. Right now. Sort. Of.

Tessa tries to explain the patent process: “See, the idea when you do a patent is (…) you kinda holler out and say: ‘Hey, we’re getting a patent.’ And people say: ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me! You know, I think I got that already covered.’” Stevan interrupts: “You don’t ‘holler out’. We list it in the patent application.” Tessa: “There you go. And that way, people who do feel it’s infringing on their rights can come forward…” Stevan: “No, it’s a process, Tessa.” Tessa (somewhat unnerved): “It’s a process.” She sounds a little like all these details don’t really matter much and are too tedious to get into, which makes her previous statements that all this “proves that the patent process does work” even more invalid than it already was.

Stevan: “Trust me, the patent examiner that’s gonna review this will look at everything that you guys have already listed, plus probably lots more that many people have never heard of, because this is gonna be a person that’s an expert in the field. (…) People have the ability to write in to the patent examiner and say: What about this is prior art, what about that is prior art, after the 18 months publication period.”

Tessa: “… there’s a really huge misunderstanding between the real nuts and bolts of legal business, IP and trademark and patent law, and what the layman believes should be done, and believes should be carried out with.” Coming from her, that’s either speaking of experience, or rather ridiculous. I’m not sure. “And unfortunately, you know, we have to follow the law, we have to do everything right.” Unfortunately, really?

Again she reminds us that this proves that the patent process does work. She said that now so many times, and it’s just so much bullshit. First off, there has no patent been granted yet, so we don’t know anything about the outcome. What we know is that there is a process, but the fact that a process exists does not automatically mean it works. Also, the way it is designed does not mean that a.: the design is good, and b.: the design is applied correctly, and c.: the design leads to the desired result. Stating, at this point, that anything here proves anything, especially about the patent process, only proves one thing: The person saying that has no clue whatsoever.

Again, she says SpotOn is honest, transparent, etc., then compares the patent process to content on her grid, that she can’t possibly know every content by heart and sort out what’s legitimate on her own. What this has to do with the patent process remains her secret. She concludes: “The point is, because we are a business, because we do need assets to get investors, because we are running a production level grid, not the ultimate sandbox for creators, because we are the selling place that those venues go through, and we bring in the ideas, we bring in the audience, from a large, large, large user community out there, so we bring that market to these creators.” This. Coming from someone who is running a grid that has hardly one person online at the same time. From someone who has failed for years now to bring any kind of traction to her own grid. From someone who has been overtaken left and right by commercial and non-commercial grids alike, both in users and regions. I don’t even know what to call this. Hubris? Desperation? Misleading? A lie? Let’s call it “Tessa’s little wonderland”.

Maria has a question: “I think people are worried that it will be approved despite prior art, like the bread warming, or the Amazon one-click patents, and that it will be too expensive for OpenSim startups to fight it.” Stevan: “Two points. One: Everything everyone listed out there is listed in the patent. All the prior art was listed as prior art. Two: There are a number of other patents out there, that show methods on doing exactly what we’re doing, using slightly different twists. I don’t know what other people who are building plugins are doing, but they might be infringing those already-issued patents, that are already out there, not only published, but issued within the patent system.” He states that one needs to trust the legal system, as it’s the only system we have. The thought that systems can and may need to be reformed doesn’t even seem to cross his mind.

Maria asks what the other patents are, and Stevan promises to look for them after he returns from a business trip. Tessa thinks that’s important, so they don’t give out licenses to something they have no right to do so.

Maria asks about the licensing terms, and Stevan says at this point they don’t know yet what they will be.

Tessa repeats, one more time, the ways she “reached out” to the community and got flamed, ignored, etc., how they are a production grid, and take things more serious. There’s still no pony. She tells us, again, why they can’t contribute code back and how they found an exploit in the viewer, but won’t explain the way it works, “because that would be inappropriate”. I think it would be very appropriate. In order to get it fixed, they went to the core contributor working on the permission system, who asked for 600 $ to fix it, because nobody in OpenSim was interested in the permission system. I think that’s a very reasonable thing to do, if someone asks for custom work to be implemented, they should pay for the work it takes to implement it, and for a grid who can spend 20.000 $ on shows (and is, according to its own statement, “one of the better-funded grids”), 600 $ doesn’t seem to be too much. But Tessa says: “I have a problem with that. In most people’s minds it would be inappropriate behaviour, especially for an OpenSim coder.” Personally, I think it’s much more inappropriate to not even be willing to invest 600 $ for custom code in a project that your whole business is based on, and which you got completely for free.

Tessa goes on to talk about how the exploit still exists, and they have to close it up every single time, which, I imagine, costs more in man-hours on their development team than the 600 $ would’ve cost, but I guess that’s money better spent.

She talks about her show Grid Wrap again, and how they gave the 600-$-lady ear time there. She talks about the double dutch delivery again. About something called SpotOn Synergy. And how all this is about the ability to help other grids, who obviously, in Tessa’s mind, can’t manage without SpotOn’s help. Again, this is from a grid who can’t even help itself.

There’s a little bit of conversation between Tessa on voice and Maria on text chat, that’s hard to follow as it’s not clear what Maria’s typing, and finally Tessa says their recorder is running out of harddisk space. Asked about the usage of her grid, Tessa says that she doesn’t think the stats are really that important, and that it’s more about how many sims and residents one has, and what they do, but states that they have 200 residents and realizes that they’re very small. This realization doesn’t keep her from having great ambitions though, because “there’s a huge market here about to explode as we do this facebook app”.

She talks a little about their dispute resolution process and Stevan says he needs to go, which somewhat marks the end of the recording.

In closing, there was little information about the actual patent, there was a lot of marketing speech about SpotOn’s products, with very little substance about what exactly they are, and very little understanding for things outside the SpotOn production-grade business sphere of thought. We learned that little knowledge is no detriment to big speak, and there’s no limit to the good intentions that pave the roads to hell. Also, nobody really said it, but I think “they” are really THEM.

To sum it up, I think the cat finally got skinned.

(CC-by Suicide Girls – WARNING: Clicking the picture is not safe for work.)

(CC-by Suicide Girls)

After Stevan fell asleep leaving Linden Lab’s patents hanging in mid-air, someone says Stevan’s not making a good argument, as it’s like asking why they (the critics) don’t object to MS (MicroSoft) filing patents. Tessa says people who are against patents in general have a right to their opinion, just like they (SpotOn) have a right to theirs, and again states that the prior art claims prove that the patent process does work. I still wish I knew what she meant.

She says they’re feeling like they’re getting beat up for being transparent, because they could as well have been silent about the patent (like they obviously did with prior patents). She brings up Linden Labs (sic), where “everybody has cried” that they don’t get honesty and transparency, while SpotOn tries not to be like that. At this point it gets hard to paraphrase or quote what she’s saying, as she is trailing half-finished sentences in her wake.

She emphasizes that the patent is “for strictly investment”, since “you have to have patentable technology if you don’t have a brick-and-mortar building, if you don’t have everybody at a central location, if you don’t have all your servers under your own roof, and a big IT staff to take care of them, the investors don’t think you’re real. They don’t take you seriously.” That’s what she says.

According to Tessa all the investors they have been introduced to liked their technology, their idea, their goals, but needed something more substantial they could invest in.

Okay, insert: SpotOn is, according to their own words, desperately looking for investors. They already had 300.000 $ investment, which, frankly, didn’t get them very far, and now need more money. This really makes me wonder, if a grid didn’t break even after 300.000 $ – three hundred thousand dollars – have been invested in it, how much do they really need to be profitable? I mean, so far they mainly demonstrated their remarkable ability at burning money. As Maria stated, other grids, with much less funding (Tessa herself said they’re “one of the better funded grids”) have many times the users of SpotOn. So what is it, really, that will make SpotOn profitable. Patents?

Back to the land of the ludicrous, where we get further insight in the world of investment companies, which, understandably, would like to see some return on their money, not to say to see their money return. To illustrate the situation, Tessa invokes terror, havoc and airplane crashes upon both her and Stevan, and concludes that “maybe the OpenSim people don’t quite realize that because like us – we’ve been buried in this technology for going on 10 years, me 16, plus. So we don’t get it that this is totally foreign to them, that this feels totally wrong to them and inappropriate.”

Stevan would like to make a quick comment about the OpenSim community: “It’s been going on for quite some time and it hasn’t gotten general acceptance throughout the larger internet community. The numbers that are using this technology are relatively quite small as compared to the rest of the world, and obviously compared to the internet, which is almost the same thing as … well, not quite, without some method of putting real money, and gaining real acceptance it’s never gonna grow, and it’s gotta get corporate financing. And this is the only way that I can imagine for us to get corporate financing. If someone else has some other way doing it, I’m always open to it, but there’s gotta be some way to move the technology forward.”

So, assuming the “technology” is OpenSim, there is no other way for it to move forward, than through corporate financing? That’s so wrong I don’t even know where to begin. Leaving aside the fact that the WWW has been invented without corporate funding, that the technologies that power it (apache2, php, html) were developed  without corporate funding, that the operating systems most web servers use are free software, developed without corporate funding, that none of these, naturally, are patented, I also have to say that the OpenSim development is moving forward at quite a remarkable rate. But even if it were true that it’s not going forward, why would it be SpotOn3D, who, so far, did contribute nothing to OpenSim and generally just burned a huge hole in someone’s pocket, why would it be them who are the ones to move it forward?

Tessa, in order to confirm that point, reminds us that during the Second Life “boom” between 2006 and 2008, they had the “richest user base in the world”, because they had “CEO’s of every fortune-500 company of merit, especially technically-savvy fortune-500 companies in there actively using the environment”. What she is not saying is that most of these companies came after SL already was appealing to a large user base of “normal” people, that most of these companies have already left again, and that very little of them were actually funding Linden Lab.

Unimpressed that her comparison has nothing to do with their own situation, she goes on to tell us that “it also, I think, was part of the demise of what they built up, because it’d bring in the ‘I don’t wanna pay for anything; it’s just a game; and where is the cheat – oh the cheat is stealing somebody’s content’. And I gotta get the gamers a break here because a lot of them didn’t realize that the content in Second Life was not generated by Linden Labs (sic) and that stealing it was wrong. I think they were totally clueless when they first came in, that these things were actually made by people, many were doing this as their career. Once they did know that, they should’ve changed their behaviour on their own, but, you know, gamers are so used to cheat, they look for it, they expect it, and they just thought ‘oh, here’s a tool, let’s cheat’…” Wow. Way to go. Not only did we just piss off the whole gaming community (which I believe myself a part of) by branding them all as cheaters, since obviously there are no honest gamers, as we are “so used to cheat”. No, we also made the assumption that if the content would have been made by Linden Lab (who are not “real people”, it seems) then it would’ve been okay to “steal” the content? According to this logic, would it be okay to “steal” (I think she means “copy”) SpotOn3D’s own content off their grid? Really, way to go, both on copyright, and on respect for your users.

She continues that “maybe that’s our failure, maybe we should’ve created more of a game policy built into Second Life or our own standards… and that’s what we’re doing actually, and the way we’re doing it to appeal to the facebook users is gonna be quite different than Second Life’s approach or anyone elses and it’s gonna try to give them a very easy entry so they can come in, really get entrenched and starting to enjoy their time here and move on from there.” I both love how she used “we” when talking about SL’s policies, and how she left the whole copyright/gamer/stealing topic standing in the middle of the room, where it’s trying to be as inconspicuous as possible.

“We’re not naive enough to think we can control our market. I’ve said this for 6 years: No one company can own the 3D web, or what we call virtual worlds. You don’t have an industry if you only have one leader. That Second Life and every company needs competition and they need it on a very competitive level, it pushes us forward, makes us think differently. I mean, think about it: Right now, people are sitting here, like your group, and thinking about different ways to accomplish what we’ve accomplished. That’s creativity, pure and simple.” The thing with following Tessa is that every “and” can indicate a completely different topic, which makes it hard to think about the strange things that have been said before. The point here is that the competition has not made SpotOn think differently, and that there are not just companies on this playing field, but in fact a very large base of non-profit users, open-source projects, educators, and hobbyists, and at the core the project itself is meticulously maintained as free software. All these are jeopardized by SpotOn3D’s “corporate game”.

Tessa: “Sometimes what I hear from OpenSim seems to be such a – it’s so against what I thought open-source was about. I thought open-source was about individuality, expression of how you see the technology going, and I’m getting told here: No, I should just blend in, give up all our assets, don’t patent anything, don’t protect anything that you might have built, even though nobody else wants it and give it all up to everybody, so everybody could be the same.” Okay, which part of “open source” did you not understand? “Open source” is not “let’s all be hippies and dance our names in the flower fields”. It’s what it says: open sourcecode. Of course that way you give it all up. Of course you don’t patent it. Of course everybody can use it and be the same as you. It’s called ‘sharing’. It’s how you obtained that Open Simulator software you’re using, in case you forgot. Hipocrite.

She goes on to call Kitely hypocritical for not releasing their facebook trigger-scripts and expecting them to release their “World on a Web” while making some barking dog noises, then admits that Kitely did submit code, but hasn’t been working on the client, which, according to her, prevented SpotOn to submit any code, which leads us back to the infinite loop of how SpotOn benefits the OpenSim community and that they’re a commercial project which can’t give everything (read: anything) away. “We are the grid that people will do business through, real-life business…” Sometimes, I really wish she would tell us where she got all these assumptions from.

She assures us that there will be a licensing fee for the World-on-a-web plugin, but it will be reasonable, and at a price that almost everyone can afford.

Silence.

Tessa is a little surprised at herself that she seemingly has answered all the questions. Somewhere in the back of her mind there must’ve been the shadows of the issues she left standing around waving at her.

Somebody muses about how boring the world would be if everyone was the same. I’m not sure they mean that someone needs to be the bully, though.

After some moments of uncertainty, Tessa decides to simply repeat what she said before for a little while. I’m not sure if she just likes to hear herself speak, or if she thinks that will make her points more valid. She concludes that she “won’t apologize for making enough money to feed my people.” That Jesus Christ moment gets interrupted by Stevan who reminds her that, in fact, her people don’t get fed yet, but are 300.000 $ in the hole. Tessa agrees, and says that “it’d be great if we had the OpenSim community backing us”. I think this is the point that really made me catch my breath. Not only did SpotOn not contribute anything to OpenSim; all of their “contributions” are actually there to make them money; none of them are free, open, or shared. Not only is it not the OpenSim community’s fault that SpotOn is in debt. Not only did SpotOn just piss all over the community, telling them to go fuck themselves as they will patent whatever they like. Not only did they call actual contributors “hypocrites” and play the victim game. And not only did they also tell us that they don’t have any intention to give anything back in the future, because that’s just the way commercial grids are. No, they actually expect the OpenSim community to back them.

Wow.

Really wow.

“We made some really serious attempts to reach out the OpenSim community and basically got slapped, I get trolled, and flamed in the AW group regularly, it’s really helped me develop a tough skin and in other venues – you know, this blogging, I will tell you, still does impact me, because it really hurts to have my people, and me, and my company, and Stevan misrepresented in this way and make us sound like, let me see: Kitely actually compared us to the mob.”

I need to stop here, or I will kill a kitten today.

Timestamp: 1:18:46 The rest will follow.

(CC-by Suicide Girls)

Tessa wants to use the time it takes someone to write their question again to talk about something else, this time about how SpotOn3D is giving to the community. She mentions double dutch delivery and something called Hot Swap (phon.). How this is helping the community remains her secret.

She also mentions how SpotOn spent “almost 20.000 $” on getting the word out on OpenSim through their platform. She mentions the shows they’re hosting there, and how they had the owners of the biggest other grids on GridWrap, and that she applauded every one of them and did that in support of their grids. Says she feels it’s important to have a choice, and mentions SL had a foothold on “this technology until they open-sourced the client”. It’s not clear how any of that has anything to do with OpenSim, but she says she believes their efforts are benefitting the whole OpenSim community.

She says she realizes they’re “one of the better-funded platforms out there and therefor we have a bit more muscle to throw around when it comes to marketing”. This makes me wonder why they’re not more successful at it.

She says they openly promote other grids for people to go to, which is so open I must’ve missed it. Again wraps this up as “helping the OpenSim community”, and mentions it is highly offensive to her when it’s said they’re not giving back and are a monopoly. I don’t know who said they’re a monopoly, as this is clearly far from the truth, but it certainly looks like they would like to be one, despite all of their claims to the contrary, as all their inventions, and business strategies (double dutch, patents, key accounts, etc.) are of a centralizing, lock-in nature. They just work when it’s SpotOn controlling them.

She states that everyone on their team is working 12 to 16 hours a day “trying to get the word out, not only about our platform, but about OpenSim”. This sounds like an overstatement, but again, if it’s true, they’re not very effective at it. “If we weren’t proud of being an OpenSim platform, we would not even mention the name to every chance we get.” – That’s strange, because the “name” is not mentioned at all on SpotOn’s website and hardly ever on their blog.

Someone else on voice says they have a question. Either this is a late visitor, or the person typing just learned how to speak. The question turns out to be more of a supportive statement that “if there is pre-existing art, there is a legal mechanism there to sort those issues out”. I think Tessa says the person speaking is some admin of the SpotOn team, and states that “this whole thing proves that the patent process does work”. How it proves that remains a mystery. She states they didn’t have to say that the system is patent pending, and they were “trying to be very transparent, as we always have”. This makes me wonder why this kind of transparency was not seen with their previous pantents (as Stevan said earlier, they had four more already filed) and also, why this transparency stops halfway through by saying they’ve applied for a patent without telling exactly what it is for.

She states they “wanted  people to, say, wave a flag, like they have” which “could’ve done more (…) a little bit more constructively”, but still leaves me wondering why now, after all the flag waving has occurred, they aren’t happy about it. Also, Tessa doesn’t want to be Darth Vader, and somehow seems to think that to be reassuring.

Repeats how nobody came to talk to them, which, now that it has been mentioned so many times, really makes me want to know what she means by that. Do I have to drive to… wherever it is she’s living and knock on her door? Do we all need to sign up for SpotOn3D and find her in-world somewhere? Why is stating your opinion in blog posts, comments, tweets, etc. not talk? Or rather, if it is talk, then why is this not acceptable talk for Tessa; something she could reply to.

I’m afraid I won’t find answers here, because she goes on to state that the biggest problem she “always had with OpenSim is mass assumptions about motivations, about reasons-why and how and when and everything, and immediately assuming the very very worst.” Now I find it hard to think of anything good to assume about filing patents on tiny software innovations, and Tessa doesn’t come up with anything good either, and instead reminds us that she’s a “16 year veteran of this stuff”, and if anybody’s part of this community it’s her. I’m not sure what community we’re talking about now, but I don’t think it’s OpenSim anymore.

She continues to give her references as being “here” since the start of 3D and working in all 3D venues (out of which she names a few that are perfectly unknown to me, but then, I’m not a veteran). Someone makes a joke I didn’t get, and Tessa says she’s not mean, but very direct, then asks the person typing if they wanted to say something, because she sees them typing a lot. Her rants seem to create some time-space-continuum.

Silence.

Stevan lost his hair, has a wardrobe malfunction, then flies.

Tessa resumes her rant, reminds people of their, now, over 20.000 $ spendings on TV-Shows, advertisements, sponsoring musicians, promotion of events, calculates the cost of a show, and says it’s all trying to get people to “cross that line, to go from SL to an OpenSim grid, and experience it, and understand that it’s not evil or bad, make sure they understand they’re not disloyal” and thinks that’s made a lot of headway. I think it has not.

For some reason she comes back to “this exploit in the client”, whatever it is (I really would love to know that) and that they haven’t closed it off, but would have to. It sounds like this is dire news, but I fail to grasp the gravity of it all, probably because I have no clue what she’s talking about.

She states they are not sure how they will implement the use of the plugin, are still talking about it and are open for suggestions, but have to use it “as a way to help our company grow”, whatever that may mean, because “that’s what it’s there for”. People need to understand that it’s a business and there are bills to pay. It’s not clear why people need to understand that, but I get the feeling she thinks that a world without SpotOn3D would be at a terrible loss.

Tessa comes up with the odd tale of having asked once a person about what they think it would cost to run the SpotOn3D grid, which gives her an opportunity to calculate their running costs, and to point out that nobody on their team is paid even decent wages, because (!) they are all dedicated to the goal of a 3D web and encourages people to do the math. (The math, by the way, is a wage of 833 $ per employee per month, if all of the 300.000 $ funding was spent on wages.) At this point it’s not clear if she even understood the 2D web. Or the term “web”. Or how to treat employees.

She likes to point out that they’re not trying to be Second Life, or Inworldz, or Avianation (sic), or ReactionGrid, but have a goal that is really different from anybody else, which is why nobody ever asked them for their code, because they are trying to set the standards to make a production-level grid functionable for business and education, and users, and recreation. Yes, that sounds really different from everyone else, especially Second Life.

Tessa continues to compare SpotOn3D to Second Life which really is some way to go. At this point, I’d like to compare OpenSim-Creations.com to the Second Life Marketplace. I mean, both are on a website, right?

During this tirade it becomes clear that all the Evil™ is in Second Life (datamining, abuse, inhuman behaviour), which leads her to a moment of zen, where she realizes that “the real truth is, we are a cannibal to ourselves. That every time we do a misdeed it does cut into us a little bit.” Something to take away there. Also, Second Life is not a game, even though it kinda is.

Luckily person typing seems to finally have finished their job and say that “I think the attitude of the community is that they’re worried that in the future your patent will stop them from developing their grids in the way they want.” Tessa agrees, but says they’re not out to actually stop people. Maybe we can hold her to that statement one day.

She goes back (again) to talk about how Double Dutch Delivery is really there to help “these other grids who are starving for content and cannot get going without it” and to give creators a wider customer base. I don’t think this is getting any more true, no matter how much she repeats it.

We go back to our moment of zen, where we realize the non-gameyness of Second Life and how we can’t “divorce” ourselves from ourselves. People give out signals. Real feelings and real lies clash, and there is a car wreck. Something like that.

Second Life and OpenSim and virtual worlds need new users, because 600.000 is not a lot. Six. Hundred. Thousand. Vladiwostok. Rotterdam. Glasgow. Baltimore. Not a lot. So naturally, SpotOn3D can help expand that. And everybody will benefit from that.

Some people repeat her statements.

Then we get this gem (timestamp 53:00): “We were the most creative because it was being funded between 2006 and 2008 in Second Life, and I know this because I worked with corporations and educations, by no means I don’t think we can point to them and say they’re greedy people, because they educate us, and they have to have beaucoup of real people, blood, flesh, talent to do that and it’s always going to be the most expensive thing you ever pay for in a company is the humans, who actually make it happen, but without it, what have you got, you know?” No. I don’t know. If anyone can explain that to me, I’d be so oblieged.

The technology has the potential to create a global degree, where people can go to any university and pick out a course, which is one of Tessa’s hopes, and she sounds almost moved to tears when she says that.

Again, she talks about all the things they do for the community: Free uploads. Giving free content, islands and pay to community leaders who bring their community to SpotOn3D. And a pony. (Joking, there’s no pony.) And she doesn’t understand the ill will, and if people really knew them as a company, ever watched a Grid Wrap, or the work they did with musicians, would change their mind.

Tessa says she wouldn’t dare to criticize Kitely for their business practice, community or technology if she never experienced it for herself or talked to Ilan Tochner. Personally, I have stepped into SpotOn3D to experience it, and have talked to Tessa, so I guess that makes my criticism okay in her book. I don’t know about Ilan, though.

Someone says in all ages community is needed as well. Tessa says that’s true, because teens will lead us into the future. She mentions her 17-year old who has seen his mother “in virtual” all his life. So we have to hand the technology over to the kids, otherwise it will die with us. It’s not clear what this has to do with patents, other than the patents will kill this technology faster than a 17 year old can get it handed over to.

Someone states that, “from a neutral point of view, the one and only thing they are complaining is the patent, and they” (probably the critics) “would applaud the rest of your work.” This throws Tessa off the trip she’s been on, and so Stevan, who only seems to wake at the word “patent”, chimes in to say that “we haven’t filed nearly as many patents as Linden Labs” and seems to not understand why people are opposed to SpotOn3D instead of Linden Labs. Right now, I’m quite tired of explaining that, and will leave him in his confusion.

Silence. Tessa is off her space drug. Stevan went back to sleep.

Timestamp 1:00:00 To be continued…