[sldev] Re: Exciting reuter's post about OpenSim - project to create open source version of SL Servers

[Dale Glass]

On Saturday 08 September 2007 04:22:20 Tim Shephard wrote:
> Well, if OpenSim moves to a model where all inventory is open, like
> images on a web page,  but not transferable (enforced by DMCA), then
> this whole concept of central inventory servers becomes irrelevant.
Heh. Enforced by DMCA. What about countries without it, and how would the 
DMCA apply anyway in a system with no effective protection? I doubt very 
much it applies to something like downloading a picture from a website.

> Inventory can be free .. in order to get it, you need to visit Coke
> Island or IBMLand or
> whatever.
Hm? Don't we have this already? Lots of free stuff in SL


> People will write plugins for the client and server, but everything
> else, like images, will be basically free.  And maybe we'll have some
> bytecode that will phone home to check if it is registered, 
Heh, and how are you going to enforce that? 


> but this 
> concept of a centrally managed inventory server?   I think it was an
> error  in judgement..
Well, how are you going to do it otherwise?

An alternative seems to simply copy everything about an object to the new 
region. When you cross a region in a car, all its prims, textures, 
scripts, sounds, etc get uploaded to the new sim. That sounds like some 
major border crossing problems to me.

It also makes a lot of caching impossible as with no central server there's 
no universal ID for an object (probably fixable by using content based 
hashes)

Inventory becomes complicated, if there's no central server, where is it? 
On the user's computer? And what if they log in from another box, or lose 
their local copy?

Then add lots and lots of possibilities for griefing to this system. Sims 
which change every texture on you to something disgusting, except to 
yourself. Sims that corrupt data slightly as it passes through them. Sims 
that monitor chat on all channels and actions of all scripts.


Now don't get me wrong, this is very cool, but by removing a central server 
you'll remove one set of problems, but also put a lot of new annoying ones 
in their place.
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