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

[Tim Shephard]

ok, you're right, Linden Lab is going to have a billion gazillion
pentabyte harddrives to manage the entire world's inventory.   That
scales so well - I mean really, it's worked out great so far.

On 9/7/07, Dale Glass <dale at daleglass.net> wrote:
> 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.
>
>