[sldev] Opening the server source?

[Dzonatas]

Tao Takashi wrote:
> Isn't there a difference between web sites and a virtual world?
...
As much as there is a different between the Apache webserver and Second 
Life's sim server. =)


> As for the idea of opening up itself I think that backend database 
> solutions will be around quite quickly and thus I really wonder what a 
> business model for LL could be. Moreover I think that a true virtual 
> world standard is hard to achieve. If a business is doing it they need 
> to make sure it makes sense for their business model and they need to 
> find partners. Now the term "virtual world" is sort of a big term and 
> it has many incarnations and it might be hard to get all these 
> incarnations into one standard.. So first it needs to get broken up 
> anyway and then maybe somebody can start on a standard for e.g. 
> exchanging objects (which already depends very much on the internal 
> representation of objects like prim based or polygon based).

For businesses besides LL's internal motives, this can be narrowed down 
to a secure transactional asset server and script/program platform. To 
touch on the briefly, let's say you have a ATM machine in-world and the 
sim crashes in the midst of a transaction. Simple transactions may be 
easily to recover, but more complex ones really need to allow the 
scripts to detect crashes, failed transactions, perform recovery, etc. 
Right now, a lot of extra code has to be added to accomplish all that 
for even the softest crashes or failures. You can't guarantee that all 
script writers will include all that extra code in their script. 
Therefore, there is a need to create a solid framework to handle serious 
business in virtual worlds.

The immediate answer is to move the business into a hybrid mode and use 
something like XML-RPC, so that it is part in-world and part website.  
It is not the best answer, but it works. The website can add the higher 
degree of transactional software. (if they do...)

Considering how GPLv3 (just released) now works with Apache, we may see 
more bits of hybrid Second-Life-on-a-Apache mod(s). This is no longer a 
blocker issue.


-- 
Power to Change the Void