|
My Virtual Press - because the freedom of press applies only to those who have one.
|
|
My Virtual Press - because the freedom of press applies only to those who have one.
|
|
Call it vanity, but I just need to answer these posts (1st - 2nd) by Prokofy Neva. Even though he probably does not believe me, but I do assume his worries about SL are genuine and the OSS-bashing he’s doing have their origin in real concerns. But I also think that OSS-concepts are well-tested and proven “griever-resistant” for large public projects. The whole internet runs on OSS, so why should SL be doomed if it is open-sourced. I picked some lines from the transcript Prokofy published on his blog which _I_ think represent his main points. These statements have been taken out of their context and have been selected by _me_. So don’t make assumptions about Prokofy based on this article. Go, read his blog if you want to get to know him. It’s worth it, _especially_ if you disagree with him. I also commented on some comments that other people made during the conversation. Also, I have not been present at the meeting. That means that I have the advantage of being able to think about my statements for a while. Prokofy’s remarks were probably more spontaneous, since he made them in live-chat. Here we go:
Stef Wade: There is much evidence on the internet that that this process works. Take the Linux kernel (or the BSD kernel), take the Apache webserver, take OpenOffice.org, take the Mozilla projects. It works. It works so well, that Apple as a proprietary company took that OpenSource-BSD-Kernel and built MacOS X from it. In fact, the internet as a whole runs on OSS! Before any piece of contributed code is being merged into the product, it will be tested and evaluated by others. Not only by LindenLab, but also by those people who are also working with the code. Many eyes examine the contributions and each change is discussed by a group which is familiar with the project. If LL does not have the time to look at a contribution, that contribution will not become part of the official release. If you don’t trust third party viewers - don’t use them.
Stef Wade: Well, I am not really into land-pricing. But right now, the land-market is a monopoly marked. The only company you can buy land from is LindenLabs. Even if I buy or rent land from Ravenglass, not paying anything to LL, they still get to dictate the price of my rent. Because down the line, they are the one to charge tiers. IF LindenLabs were to open up the _servers_, then there would be a real free market. Yes, a free market NOT socialism. Anybody could set up servers and sell land. Yes, the price of land would drop, as it always does when monopoly markets are opened. I assume that you will argue that this is the closed society of tekkies you have warned about all along, since only people who have the technical know-how to set up SL-servers will be able to do so. But that is only half the story: Those who do not want (or are not able) to set up servers can hire tekkies to do so. It happens all the time, on the internet: People who do not run their own webserver can either employ somebody to do so. Or they have the even cheaper option to rent some webspace on some provider’s server. It’s a proven business-model. Very capitalistic: I want something - You provide it - I pay you. Sure, the revenues of real-estate vendors like Anshee (and yourself) will drop. But that it NOT an open-source issue. The same problem would arise if LL chose to sell some closed-source-SL-server. The difference? With open-source servers, you would pay to people with tech-know-how who can afford a fast computer to provide you with land. It’s a matter of preference :)
Stef Wade: With coding-skills it is just as with any other skill. You can aquire them. I cannot terraform at all. I cannot build well. So I am unprivileged? No. I just can’t terraform or build. So I either need to sit down and practise. Or pay somebody to do it for me. Again, this is not open-source problem: The “tekkies” and “coders” at LindenLab can implement or not any feature you like. At their will, they can give or take you “search” and “traffic”. In fact, you don’t just need to pursuade the coders at LL, you also need to get through the “political level”. With open-source, if you want a feature bad enough, you can implement it on your own server. Or you can get somebody to do it for you. It might not be easy, it might not be cheap, but at least it is possible.
Stef Wade: Profky? It that really you? The same guy who is constantly ranting about being treated unfair by the Lindens? Can’t be :)
Stef Wade: It’s not even that. LindenLab is in charge of the viewer. The community can modify the viewer, but the community cannot write into the official viewer-code. All the community can do it offer alternatives.
Stef Wade: The way I understood the voting-feature is that it enables the “non-coders” to tell “coders” which features they want most. I also think that that is the reasing for the missing “no” option on votes. I might repeat myself here, but open-sourcing SL will increase the number of “coders”, thus making it faster to get the “wanted features” implemented.
Stef Wade: Open-sourcing the viewer (or all of SL) does not mean that LL stops coding, does it? Sun contributes to OpenOffice.org. Netscape contributes to Mozilla. Linus Torvalds contributes to Linux.
Stef Wade: Not everybody needs to programm to make use of an open-source project. There are a lot of user-friendly projects. You don’t even need to contribute at all to use. And if you want to contribute, there are MANY other ways than to program.
|
 |
© 2008 stefan.waidele.info StarScape Theme (1.5.3: Scorpius) | Design by: GDragoN Powered by: Wordpress Valid XHTML Valid CSS |
Posted on 00:31, January 11th, 2007 by 
Posted in 
Comments:
The “whole Internet” does not “run on open source”. That’s one of those things open-sourceniks tell you in debates, but it really isn’t true. Oh, sure, there is open source stuff upon which the Internet depends. But most people’s experience of the Internet comes from cites like amazon.com or cnn.com and these continue to remain sites that pay workers, have proprietary code, and commercial items to sell. It’s not the socialism you imagine, with some kind of grand giveaway that somebody has to pay for.
Your notion that most OS projects aren’t filled with griefers isn’t informed by the experience of SL, in which all the main scripting groups are packed with griefers who constantly harm people.
And stop all your fake apologizing and bending over backwards as if you are “all ears” to understand my point of view. It’s cloying. It’s not persuasive. You don’t *really* think anything of the kind.
The examples you cite aren’t at all persuasive. Linux isn’t anything that any mainstream person or company uses — it remains a cult, basically. Mozilla is a non-profit corporation that still finds ways to get funding and even sell stuff. Also not the freebie giveaway that you imagine. In Second Life, people work hard, they labour, they create, they buy and sell things and they wish to retain value. It’s no more going to retain value to rip open this world and make everybody’s work copyable than it will retain value for countries to fling open their borders and have everything carted away.
The idea that there are all these eyeballs on changes to the platform and this serves as some kind of check and balance couldn’t be FARTHER from the truth. Go and look at the JIRA bug and feature tracker. It is pulled to and fro by a small group who keep pushing their own agenda. You don’t get to stop the excesses of the geek squad, even for the overall good of the platform. There is atrocious self-serving that goes on.
There is a wide range of rents possible under the controlled land market because it is affected by the level of content and the type of use. But it doesn’t matter if somebody else thinks they can buy cheap servers and offer land cheaper. People have less reason to trust geeks in their basement with a snotty attitude that they can do it better and little sense of the ordinary customer. Many people will stick with LL even if SL is broken up by open source simply because as uneven as they are with customer service, they are still a known and trusted quantity that has ironed out a lot of the kinks in this world.
Please don’t lecture me about hiring tekkies. That’s not the issue. The issue is how to retain value in land and content when the software is open-sourced. Nobody has a good plan for that. Open-source doesn’t appear justified.
Your hearty assumption that the revenues of small “barons” like me or huge ones like Anshe will drop is based on your own likely wishful thinking and loathing of land as a commodity in the contiguous world — I find most open-sourcerers and extreme Linux using geeks to hate land because it represents a class and a bastion of power against themselves. But that’s a good thing, as it serves as a check and balance on the overweening powers of coders in making the world.
It’s not at all clear that when tekkies go and get batches of servers, that in fact they will be able to offer the same level of service with the same level of content, interactivity, and robust economy. Likely not.
Coders indeed ARE privileged. They are getting to decide how the very stuff of the world will be made; whether there even *is* a world. I think a wrench has to be thrown in their machine. They have not paid what we have here on this platform such as to be deciding these things unilaterally. Nothing about us/without us.
It’s silly to expect everyone to run out and learn coding, or hire coders, just to be able to participate in the world. Coders are garage mechanics. The shape of the world should be decided by those who pay for it and use it and live and work in it, not by people who use it as a sandbox and can’t wait to trash it and destroy its wealth.
The Lindens indeed are more fair — as unfair as they are writ large — than any self-starting geek with a chip on their shoulder champing at the bit to break off from the motherland.
The community is not Kamilion Schnook and his little friends. They constantly call themselves “the community” but they are merely a little elitist group of programmers in with the Lindens, not the larger community — or multiplicity of communities — in Second Life. They cannot speak for all of us. They cannot *remake the world* for all of us. The idea that this is “the Lindens’” is also merely yesterday’s argument about game-god worlds. This is an open-ended world which we pay for and monetarize, and the Lindens know that, and even they don’t go around ranting that it is their property as much as geeks like yourself.
The Features Voting Tool was indeed trashed in horrible ways — simply erased just because a few Lindens and fanboyz felt that it should be merged (eradicated) into the JIRA.
No, the reason for the missing no option is a deep-seated ideology held by Cory Ondrejka, formerly of the Lab, who served as CTO, who really believed that all this “wisdom of crowds” stuff involved voting up positive proposals or making alternatives, not having a straight up and down yes and no as in a normal real-life situation. Extremists like him and his fanboyz loathe real-life representative parliamentary politics.
I contribute vigorously to the open-sourced project by asking over and over again a wide variety of questions about how this is being done, about process, and about content (i.e. in the use cases, the put in exotic crap, and don’t put in “use land to socialize or run a virtual store on”, i.e. “the world as we know it).
Open Source=Closed Society.
If you call me dishonest in what I write, there is no need to answer any of this.
Have a merry christmas.