Stay Away from OpenLife Grid, For Now
I’m starting to put the picture together but there is still a lot I am missing.
Today KirstenLee Cinquetti announced she is getting out of the viewer development business, which has its own interesting implications for open source licensing in general. But then I noticed something.
Today I was really begrudging the work it is to bring my own work out of Second Life and into my own OpenSim region to contribute for preparation, which I will post elsewhere (still no sign of the product I purchased for $40 even though I swore I never would). Anyway, while there I read this page explaining why Second Inventory does not work with OpenLife grid, something that made me chuckle earlier.
You will remember a while ago there was some buzz around OpenLife’s move to only allow its own home grown browser to connect. I heard about it by way of people complaining about Second Inventory not working. I connected the dots, I think. Kirsten’s browser is the OpenLife browser, at least as far as I can gather. Now that leaves me with a lot of questions about what is happening behind the scenes.
- Sakai from OpenLife announces no browser but their browser.
- Second Inventory breaks in OpenLife and people squawk
- Someone gives Kristen enough GPL grief about the browser she has been working on to cause her to delete her blog and give it up.
- OpenLife makes no change to their web site and still requires you download and use one of their browsers, no SL, no Hippo.
Am I missing something? If the SI explanation of the OpenLife situation is to be trusted, then that would make Kristen, who is now caving to GPL harrassment for one browser, the most likely author of the OpenLife custom browser, right? And would not the OpenLife browser, which it likely a near replica of the browser Kristen abandonned come under the same GPL scrutiny? Can we see the full source of the OpenLife browser? That is, if it is indeed a derivation of the GPL SL viewer code.
Stay Clear of OpenLife Grid
Ya know. I really don’t care about the browser thing. They are certainly free to do what they feel is best. But one thing is for sure. I won’t be suggesting anyone use OpenLife grid at least until there are more answers about this stuff. Give ReactionGrid a try instead. Or, better yet, fire up your own grid and link it to the emerging HyperGrid.
January 30, 2009 at 7:29 pm
How are you making the connection to Kristen and Open Life… Anything other than timing?
January 30, 2009 at 7:33 pm
Ina, that is the strange thing. On this page from Angelo Biondi defending Second Inventory as not being the cause of the OpenLife woes his customers are having he names Kristen as the creator of their custom browser. This is the only source I have.
February 1, 2009 at 2:48 am
Concerning the Client it is really simple:
Every client that is based on the original SL Viewer (the Kirsten Lee viewer + the OpenLife viewer are) is bound to the underlying GPL forever. There is a small option for a FLOSS exception for added third party modules if they themselves are published under a variety of open licenses.
Therefore OpenLife has no other option than to publish the source code of their viewer or to face a lawsuit.
If they use some special data (encryption keys, passwords, etc) for viewer access restriction to their grid they are not forced to include that with the publishing of the source code.
So it depends on their implementation of access control if the necessary publishing of the source code will hurt their intention of keeping other viewers out and beeing proprietary.
But anyway I totally agree with Mo Hax when he advises to stay out of OpenLife grid. If they would only build a payed grid hosting service it would be fine for me. But their moves to over commercialise the intellectual property of the OpenSimulator community, their lack of understanding the duty of giving back to the development team and mostly their total ignorance of the GPL are three basic no go’s for me.
Remember: Even Linden Lab ™ allows every viewer to connect Second Life ™. And even they work together with the OpenSimulator movement, at least in some small spots.
February 8, 2009 at 9:42 am
That’s funny because I was surfing over the OL site right around the time you are describing and I read some wavering comments and could smell the confusion and tension. Looks like OL caught a case of the Jones’… The SL community got a good taste of that in the middle of the IPO debacle. I’d rather deal with OpenSim on it’s own terms than have any of that other garbage.
February 10, 2009 at 8:55 am
Another reason to avoid OpenLife is its reported adoption of RealXtend instead of OpenSim. This provides the attractive benefit of allowing mesh import and other stuff at the cost of rendering the world incompatible with the mainstream OpenSim work out there.
The decision to use both a their own proprietary and likely illegal viewer combined with leveraging a fringe technology originally based on OpenSim and now no longer compatible with it are enough to brand OpenLife as making consistently closed architectural decisions not in the best interest of those there now nor the greater OpenSim community.
February 10, 2009 at 8:58 am
By the way, the thing to watch is the formation of the HyperGrid, a grid of OpenSim grids to which you can connect even a grid running on your desktop. OpenLife and RealXtend are not compatible with this quickly growing standard. The days of large, propietary, encapsulated grids are numbered. The future will be a grid of grids with avatars as hypernauts teleporting between grids. OpenLife has chosen to make itself incompatible with that future.
February 10, 2009 at 9:08 am
I have just been told by a Linux desktop user that the OpenLife RC16 viewer does not run on her Linux flavor although the standard LL viewer and presumably Hippo do.
February 10, 2009 at 9:24 am
Yeah – I don’t like the OpenLife approach.
Also, I’m not sure I 100% love how realXtend works, for many reasons. However, it must be noted that recently Adam Frisby (a main Opensim developer) worked together with RealXtend team in order to improve “compatibility” – please read these articles for precise information:
http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/2008/11/logging-into-an-opensim-via-realxtend-accounts/
http://www.adamfrisby.com/blog/tag/realxtend/
February 10, 2009 at 9:54 am
Thanks very much for that clarification. It would be great to see RealXtend and OpenSim become more or less interchangeable again. I just don’t see how they are going to deal with worlds that chose to allow mesh content and those that don’t. I know Qarl Linden has been working that on SL but looks like flexible sculpties are coming first.
February 11, 2009 at 8:05 pm
Lack of Hypergrid support by OpenLife grid is a bold step toward the abyss. The walled-garden grid business model (LL, AOL, etc) is not as reliably lucrative as it once was
February 13, 2009 at 6:59 am
[...] be interesting to how these ‘walled garden’ virtual worlds like OpenLife do over the long term. OpenLife clearly has no intention of staying compatible with the OpenSim developments including the …. That said, organic plant life sounds interesting. With control of the server and viewer (despite [...]
February 16, 2009 at 7:08 pm
[...] Mo Hax, in his post titled “Stay away from OpenLife, for now,” makes some very good points about the seemingly fragile future OpenLife holds. 1. Sakai from OpenLife announces no browser but their browser. 2. Second Inventory breaks in OpenLife and people squawk 3. Someone gives Kristen enough GPL grief about the browser she has been working on to cause her to delete her blog and give it up. 4. OpenLife makes no change to their web site and still requires you download and use one of their browsers, no SL, no Hippo. [...]
February 17, 2009 at 10:06 pm
[...] it seems too negative for the tone I want to set on this blog, but I wanted to add my voice to the growing number of people that have concerns over the OpenLife grid, a semi-commercial grid. I pretty much share the opinions of Mo Hax on [...]
February 20, 2009 at 3:39 pm
This may come as a surprise to bloggers and virtual world reports everywhere, but not everyone cares if a grid has currency, what viewer we need, or if in the next year or two (or three, etc) my creations today on my sim will be part of the “bigger grid”.
Sure I love to shop in the VW’s, tour the incredible creations, and fly about aimlessly at times. But for the most part I enjoy the challenge of the VW. I’m a working mom with two kids. I don’t have time, nor the computer power, to create, monitor and tweek my own OS. That’s not saying I don’t WANT one, it’s just that in today’s world my VW addiction must fall to the RL expenses.
Upon my arrival in Second Life the challenge was gone. Pretty much every sculptie has been made, textures are done and redone. The odds of finding or creating any sort of item or niche is like picking the winning lottery numbers. I’ve got a little shop in SL and some mainland I play with. I make enough so that I can go and do some in-world shopping. But nine times out of ten that stuff sits in my inventory collecting virtual dust.
I also have regions (plural) in Openlife. Everymonth when I pay my fees, sure I have a nagging thought of “will I be able to rent my parcels”? But in reality that thought is overshadowed by the shear JOY I have from seeing my creations. These aren’t creations that I purchased, I made this stuff! I’ve done things that I never thought I could (clothes, skins, textures, sculpties, terraforming, building ALL OF IT). Openlife is untainted in so many ways. It’s simple and that bugs the hell out of people… and yes.. the bugs in OL bother the hell out of me sometimes. But when I see that little green dot on the map, I know I’m going to meet someone who is tired of some other virtual life and wants something more simple. To play. Build. Create.
I would love to have just one person find the forums or chat logs from Second Life when they were about TWO years old. Compare them to Openlife’s issues now, I’m guessing they are pretty similar with the same complaints and people warning them to not waste their money. I’ve allowed the year difference because of the code availible to creators now.
I went to Openlife initially for two reasons. 1.- The cost, it’s cheaper! 2. – the prims per region FORTY FIVE FREAKIN’ THOUSAND! (nuff said).
Some say that the cost doesn’t factor in the “downtime”. Welp, If I had the choice between paying the same price for OL and SL, yet accept only the benefits of each, I’d pick Openlife in a second. It may not be geared for the “future” of grids, but I’m not living in the future. TODAY I spend most of my time in OL. That’s not to say that in a few months I may be somewhere else, what it does say is that OL is getting a bad wrap from people who don’t live there. If it goes in the hole, it goes in the hole. So I move, so what.
Who are you, ALL those virtual world reporters out there, to tell me to keep spending the outrageous costs when I don’t NEED to?
Thanks for adding the “For now” to the end of your title. I hope OL does make it. But no one knows now do they. It’s the ever-changing-at-the-speed-of-light-virtual world. Cut the grid some slack, ask some of the old OLD timers in SL how things were back then for them.
Thanks for the posts Mo.
February 20, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Thanks Copper for the comment. I would suggest everything you like about OpenLife can be done for free on other grids such as ReactionGrid or OSGrid, both using all the same backend technology as OpenLife, but based on more sustainable branches of the OpenSim back end technology.
As long as OpenLife, or OpenSim-branched grid, is trying to create an economy (as you point out) or build another walled garden like Second Life, which SL has wrapped up (as you point out), then I am afraid I can’t recommend it personally. If you are going to pay the money, why not support the community that makes it possible by supporting a real OpenSim grid instead of one that takes it and closes it up.
I personally find building out just my one-click installed OpenSim region on my desktop just fine for meeting that creative itch and previewing content I copy to SL with Second Inventory.
February 20, 2009 at 4:51 pm
Thanks for the suggestions Mo, they are appreciated and some new info to me
I’ve looked into the stand alone and hooking up to OS, but I didnt think my hardware would handle it now. Also, it is because OL (and SL for that matter) was “closed” is why I like it, for security reasons, a closed grid releases me from some of that worry. It’s kind of like renting an apartment or owning a home. For now I like being able to call my landlord about issues. ;-P But you never know what the future holds 
February 20, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Copper, you raise a very valid point I hadn’t considered. Many people find comfort in the ‘landlord’ idea that is provided by walled-gardens, sometimes perhaps falsely so. Let me know what you find out there. Thanks.
March 30, 2009 at 8:29 pm
[...] then we went through the Kirsten’s Viewer drama and the follow-up with the OpenLife Viewer drama. And it was clear that all these viewers out there have different agendas, different purposes in [...]
June 26, 2009 at 12:55 pm
If the Anonymous person who posted the comment full of f-bombs that I just deleted today would like to try that post again without all the profanity, even if it carries the same emotion, I will leave it. I don’t make a habit of censoring comments, but I do reserve the right to keep things at least a little civil. Comments with more than a half dozen swear words will get deleted. Believe it or not, I mostly agree with your sentiment, though not the way it was worded.
July 8, 2009 at 2:39 am
Here’s something I received recently. I know some are still following OpenLife so will post it. I have nothing personally against OpenLife, but in it’s current form, along with the continuing challenges the alpha OpenSim software faces I cannot recommend either in good faith, except to preview content during development and for experimentation:
Whatever the explanation for the above, it is suspicious enough to stay far away from, for now.
July 8, 2009 at 2:40 am
And more…
July 15, 2009 at 9:18 am
Dont you have better things to do then to spread/keeping rumours alive?
You could have done your homework to find out we are 3 different people!
How ridiculous to post this….. We never reply to any negative post about KLee but this is silly…… Get your act together and post about the approvements in Openlife or about KLee’s S18! Or come with real negative information, but a post of someone who is angry about an update that took longer then a few days?……….
We are easy to reach in SecondLife and even in Openlife, offline IM’s do work you know, might be handy next time if you want to check a post regarding to us or Openlife!
Best regards,
Dawny
July 15, 2009 at 5:16 pm
Dawny, thanks for your post. Like always, just allowing others to post what they may. I did not make either comment. I will say that several very negative comments about openlife to this post have been disallowed due to profanity. My audience is those considering use of OpenLife, and this dialogue, on either side is relevant though I have no interest in running down the real issues and explanations. I’ve already decided OpenLife is not something I am currently interested in. That is a personal decision for everyone.
August 12, 2009 at 11:21 pm
I’ve been in OL for a while, recently left except for helping a customer build her sim.
I found OL full of problems, upgrades and restarts just added more problems or brought old problems back.
Building was a joke, the unlinking/linking problem was never fixed, along with multiple other problems that have been around for donkeys.
The payment/currency system was a complete joke, many people couldn’t pay their tiers for months at a time and support was virtually none existent with people getting no replies at all.
I also found OL to be full of lies and deceit. Many people were being banned from the OL forums for honestly voicing their opinions, incidently, Dawny was one of the moderators.
Anyone looking for a VW with currency should try Inworldz, this was started by a group of people who were either disatisfied with OL or got banned from it. It’s stable, but is on the up and up and the group are honest and reliable enough to fix things straight away or when they can be fixed given the extent of the problem.
At this moment in time OL is down, so is the websites.
August 13, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I’m a well seasoned traveller of VW’s and have found them all different in some way or another as indeed they should be. I have found the residents of Openlife to be friendly and serious people that enjoy the tranquillity away from the masses.
However, they should be treated with more respect than that which is currently afforded them. Day after day the login screen shows good news about this and that. But is there anything that could be perceived as negative? Anything informing users about which sim is down or warning them about which bug is currently affecting their content? No.
I’m afraid that I would have to agree with Bongo Badango about people voicing their opinions in the forums. Saying anything negative there and you risk being flamed or having your post removed entirely. Incidentally Dawny, that kind of moderation is damaging in the long term, people DO have questions about negative issues that need to be answered and I know quite a few people that are ready to leave OL solely because of the moderation. The recently discovered bugs allowing people to buy for free and the resell/give away copies of anything that is mod/copy are very serious bugs indeed and creators have a right to be kept in the picture.
Personally I don’t care about Second Inventory not working in OL, it helps to keep content to remain different from that found elsewhere on other grids and gives it’s residents the chance to operate a business without the competition of items being brought in from elsewhere but as for OL’s viewer being the only viewer it’s really quite simple. Any door into OL is also a doorway out of OL. By blocking SI and viewers like meerkat not only ensures that content doesn’t come in but it also ensures that OL content stays in OL. This makes anybody that is tired of the bugs less likely to seek other alternatives.
Why is Openlife so bug ridden? Other opensim grids are more and at least basic functions like teleporting and groups work. Is it because OL is a modex/opensim (realextend) mix?
By the way Dawny, offline IM’s do not always work, in fact they more often than not don’t work.
It’s a shame that there are so many bugs and so few answers, if only the 3DX “team” would lay it’s cards on the table, let it’s resident know what is really happening and treat them with the respect they deserve, Openlife would have great potential.
August 22, 2009 at 11:12 pm
Hi Mo, I too watch your blogs with interest as i do most blogs about VW’s. I was in OL for about 3 months & left because I found myself being Moderated & actually kept out of the Forum after i reported a Major Bug to permissions… Being a content creator permissions are important to me & to most ppl using a grid like OL, they have a right to know when things have gone wrong, especially when they are paying money into it, as i was at that time. The lies & deceipt of Sakai & others is what made me give up on OL… I then tried a few others in my search for a place I could have a sim that didnt cost me the earth…. LCO was interesting but empty, then I was invited to Inworldz & I have not looked back since… we have a working currency, excellent Customer services, ATM for transferring lindens into Iz’s & back again, other viewers & SI can be used. This truly is a grid for the ppl by the ppl….. users & content creators who are doing a great Job in keeping this grid stable as they progress & improve to make it a great Alternative to SL. I know you have visited & reported on most of the grids around, a visit to Inworldz might give you a refreshing surprise
Best Regards
Rosa
November 11, 2009 at 10:05 pm
I too used to be on OL, loved it and believed it..but after having my region “down” for over 1/2 the time, customer service that never replied, disappearing inventiry, re-buying textures i already paid to download and finally, leaving, and having a massive amount of credits that i bought just to download simple “disappear” (about 100+USD)…i went to http://www.Inworldz. I am a SL artist and builder of many years, i don’t sell items and just enjoy the artistic experession, this place is better then the OpenSim or Hypergids because it is honestly alot more stable and workable. I’m glad you put this up…take cares
December 16, 2009 at 12:11 am
The interesting thing here is that neither Mouser, nor Rosa have been seen nor heard of in OL for months and months, so honestly … how the hell do they know anything.
Also – if InWorldz was so fantastic, how come their forums haven’t had postings to them since mid-year. And as it was started by a group of disenchanted OL players who thought they could do better – have they really? – NO.
I”m sick and tired of these rants about various virtual worlds by people who really should research what they’re talking about in a contemporary sense, not by an experience months and months ago. In the IT development world, 6 months makes a massive difference.
So get your heads out of your bums – and if you’re going to comment at least make it relevant and current, and actually based on present experience – not heresay and what’s ancient history.
grrrrrr
December 16, 2009 at 8:50 am
Shai your point about staying current in your evaluation of OpenLife and OpenSim in general is certainly fair. Your project looks truly amazing. Perhaps ‘for now’ from the title has passed and it is time to look at OpenLife again. Personally my choice will remain Second Life (purely for the community that remains) and ReactionGrid and Science Grid (where I am seeing the bulk of educators setting shop if not in SL itself). Still projects like yours give a great glimpse into what might be a decentralized future.
December 16, 2009 at 4:44 pm
As a heads up. Our forums are not publicly viewable. You have to join them to read them and of course post. We do not censor them, so anything that is submitted stands. We do however need to approve the first few posts to make sure you are not a spammer. I get enough Viagara ads in my email, I don’t need to read them in forums.
Yes, there are a lot of disenchanted OL users in InWorldz. We are for the time being small, and that’s fine. We have no real hurry to grow fast, as we would rather work out the bugs in the Opensimulator software.
To that end we are currently very stable. The only crashes we have are the ones that nag most of the OS Grids, poorly written scripts! Evil Evil things!
A small list of things that are working, that as far as I know don’t work elsewhere. Or don’t in specific Grids.
Linking. We can link and unlink prim sets. We also can add prims to an existing link set. I had unlimited linking working, but the OS software and the viewer don’t really like that, it times out. In the future. It was nice to have a 1000 prim link set across a region though!
Group Chat. Works beautifully. The whole group ‘module’ was rewritten so it works a bit faster and is more stable than what is in OS.
Profiles. Well, we have Picks and Classifieds working. We should soon be able to allow friends to modify objects. That is being worked on right now.
Webside we have almost from the start had the ability to pay for regions, and information is updated automatically. We just had a new main page put in, which caused us some glitches but they should be worked out now. You can pay for regions, purchase I’z (Our Currency), Partner another avatar. You have the ability to see what land is available, both private and mainland, and purchase it through the map, this may seem confusing, but actually works quite nice. The longest wait a new landowner should ever have is 24 hours, and most are done within hours, if not sooner since this is all automated. Help system available both through website support and forums.
TP’s work flawlessly. Crossing regions does not cause a complete lockup, and HUD attachments cross correctly with you. The Currency module works, there is one small glitch with I’z disappearing on crossing, or TPing, but since it’s just a ‘visual’ glitch, you don’t lose anything, it’s not a high priority fix.
So, if you want a full understanding of our forums, which granted are quiet, as we don’t have a huge number of issues, then at least sign up and read ALL the postings. It’s odd, the more things work, the quieter our forums are. Go Figure!
BTW. We won’t be 1 year old until March. Hopefully by then we might have more of the things that we know we need to work on working.
If anyone has questions, please feel free to drop me a line in our forums, you can use the PM link if you’d rather not be public, but we do not have anything to hide about who we are, or where we want to be. I answer all support or PM’s as soon as I can, most within a few hours, all within 24 hours.
Our goal is a world that works for everyone. We are always willing to listen to ideas, although it’s not always possible to achieve everyone’s ideal as quickly as they would like, we do try and accommodate everyone.
As far not being able to login to OLG, I too had friends there when I left. Last time I was in OL, I think I saw you Shai, and a few others, said hello, and after that I was banned. So, I personally CAN’T come around anymore. Not sure about the others.
Legion
December 31, 2009 at 4:22 am
[...] — mrbs007 @ 9:22 am This is a reply I wrote for another blog written by Mo Hax Stay Away from Openlife Grid, for now For some reason every time I went to submit it I got a blank page, maybe my reply is too long . [...]
December 31, 2009 at 5:06 am
I have been trying to add a reply to this post for a couple of days, but just keep getting a blank page when I hit submit. It was a rather long reply
and may of been causing the issue, so I have stuck it on my own page with a link back to this post. I hope this is OK.
The link to my reply http://mrbs007.wordpress.com/
Just an extra note on the gpl page on the OpenlifeGrid page, that has been off line now for a number of months. http://3dxviewer.com/