[sldev] Opening the server source?

[Tateru Nino]

Jason Giglio wrote:
> Mike Monkowski wrote:
>> LL gets a benefit because it gets subscribers without having to host
>> the whole thing.  Private hosts get the benefit of minimal lag,
>> privacy for confidential information, and the ability to customize
>> the behavior of their worlds.
>>
>> It's really a question of what business LL wants to engage in.  I
>> don't think their goal is to manage more and more server farms,
>> because their 
>
> Not to mention, sims probably couldn't handle assets directly like
> they do now, since that would give sim owners super-copybot-powers,
> the ability to grab perfect copies, including script binaries.  That
> would put even more load on the centralized resources, since the sims
> can't be trusted anymore.

That's not really preventable, that I can see, and is something we sort
of assumed would be the case from the announcement in 2005 that the sim
software would be open sourced sometime in the future.

Whoever owns the hardware owns whatever's going on on that hardware.
Your rezzed objects and scripts, your textures. They can read your IMs
and your chat. Just as you trust the girls and guys who run your ISP,
even though they have as much acccess to your web-browsing habits, email
and suchlike as they care to (probably, along with your CC details,
depending on how you pay).

Yet.... we trust people. Mostly, we trust them to not be interested
enough in us to do us harm.

If I ran a sim on my own hardware, would you trust me to behave? What
about xXxXxblackdeathcyberbotXxXxXxXx Hax and his server?
Which would you feel more comfortable visiting?

-- 
Tateru Nino
http://dwellonit.blogspot.com/