[info] [croquet-dev] Second Life Architectural Working Group (AWG) URLs

Tue Oct 9 09:11:22 UTC 2007

----- Forwarded message from Erik Anderson <odysseus654 at gmail.com> -----

From: Erik Anderson <odysseus654 at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, 8 Oct 2007 22:03:47 -0700
To: croquet-dev at duke.edu, Andreas Raab <andreas.raab at gmx.de>
Cc: Lawson English <lenglish5 at cox.net>
Subject: Re: [croquet-dev] Second Life Architectural Working Group (AWG) URLs
Reply-To: croquet-dev at duke.edu, Erik Anderson <odysseus654 at gmail.com>

   I have been in SecondLife for over a year now and have been very
   interested in trying to use it in a platform and rather excited about
   the architectural discussions that they have been having.  It does
   sound like they are almost trying to setup different "countries" of
   server clusters, with customs at each border saying what foreign
   accounts are allowed in and what they are allowed to do, what local
   accounts are allowed to other clusters and what they are allowed to
   do, and so on.  And of course they aren't gonna open source the entire
   server source (the physics engine they are using will never be open
   source, they didn't write it), but enough of a chunk of it will be so
   that people can start their own.
   However, with all of this my boss asked me "should we be in
   SecondLife" and my answer was a flat "no".  While all these companies
   are excited about jumping in, I still consider it more of a social
   environment than anything.  I am gladly looking forward to all the
   stuff that the guy in that 2hr video was talking about, about distance
   collaboration and sharing (I'm getting rather tired of GoToMeeting
   about this point).  I've twice downloaded the client and twice tried
   to dive into it (after reading and understanding the majority of the
   wiki i think) and have gotten rather frustrated after restoring to
   backup image half a dozen times.  After I saw the RoadMap page go up,
   I cheered as it contained most of what I was looking for and getting
   frustrated about not seeing.
   I'm not entirely certain what I'm trying to say here, other than the
   fact that I see Croquet growing to be able to do things that
   SecondLife's architectural group will not get around to working on for
   years in the future.  At this point most of what I'm doing is lurking
   until Jabberwocky comes out and I try and see if i can get into this
   thing again :-P

   On 10/8/07, Andreas Raab <[1]andreas.raab at gmx.de> wrote:

     Lawson English wrote:
     > Please let me know how I can connect to even one other Mac user
     over the
     > internet with Croquet save by using the KAT world or moral
     equivalent.
     You're missing an important distinction here. Croquet is an SDK,
     not a
     product. So, no the SDK *doesn't* tell you how exactly one
     participant
     finds one another - this is part of the application (like KAT or
     Qwaq
     Forums). That part of the structuring is deliberate since while
     some
     applications prefer centralized discovery services, others may do
     have
     completely different ways of doing the same (some of the UMN demos
     used
     XML postcards obtained from Jabber services for example).
     > While the SL server source is not open yet, the Lindens are very
     > seriously committed to the open source nature of the platform.
     I think I'll believe that when I see the source code. It's easy to
     support open source as long as it doesn't affect the bottom line
     but
     open sourcing the server could have a dramatic impact on their
     business
     model. In more than one respect btw: For example, even a small
     exploit
     in their financial transactions could make the whole ecosystem
     implode.
     And since there is real money to be made in SL you bet that some
     people
     will look very closely at the server code for exploits. So there
     are
     some definitive risks associated with open sourcing their server
     and
     it's difficult to say what they'll really gain from it.
     > How many in-world open meetings with Croquet or Qwaq people are
     hosted
     > on a regular basis?
     I'm somewhat surprised you don't know that. We have been holding
     biweekly technical meetings in Qwaq Forums for several months now.
     With
     usually 6-10 people participating amongst which usually 2-3 Qwaq
     employees (that's roughly 50% of our engineering team at this
     point).
     Mark has been posting the chat logs of those meetings, here are the
     latest two:
     [2]https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/arc/croquet-dev/2007-09/msg00075.ht
     ml 
     [3]https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/arc/croquet-dev/2007-10/msg00022.ht
     ml
     > The lindens host about 2 dozen  regular meetings in-world
     > every week,  including several each week with open source
     programmers to
     > discuss open source issues and bug-fixes:
     And your point is?
     > How many croquet users interested in expanding croquet meet once
     or
     > twice a week in a croquet world to discuss where Croquet is
     heading and
     > how it should get there? HOw many choat in IRC on a daily basis
     for this
     > purpose?
     And again your point is? I rather fail to see much of a
     constructive
     attitude in the above.
     Cheers,
        - Andreas

References

   1. mailto:andreas.raab at gmx.de
   2. https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/arc/croquet-dev/2007-09/msg00075.html
   3. https://lists.duke.edu/sympa/arc/croquet-dev/2007-10/msg00022.html

----- End forwarded message -----
-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
______________________________________________________________
ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org
8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A  7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE