I had an online account back in the late 80s because I was studying computers and engineering at Cornell. Yes, it was a lot of students and academics back then — at least, I, myself, as a student, tended to connect to other students. And, from what I recall, it totally sucked. And I don’t know about all the great non-trolling people you were connected to, but everyone I knew spent their time downloading ASCII porn. Okay, not everyone. And, okay, not all their time. They had to save some time for the alt.sex newsgroup!

Fortunately, whatever it is that you’re nostalgic for, it’s still out there on the Web somewhere. There are discussion forums that are a lot like alt.sex, and a million Tumbler blogs, and anarchist enclaves, and whatever it is that you’re missing.

Unless it’s the spirit of exploration and excitement that is what you’re really missing. Or your youth, or enthusiasm, or something like that. Those things are hard to find. A few years ago, I found that kind of feeling in OpenSim, and then in VR, mostly by luck. I don’t know where the frontier in computer software and communication platforms is right now. If I did, I’d be there already. The thing about frontiers is that you don’t recognize them until after the fact.

And the length of time a frontier stays a frontier is shrinking rapidly. So by the time you discover it, it might no longer be a frontier anymore but a mature industry.

Outside software and communications, I think there are interesting things happening now in genetic research, AI, quantum computing, and space exploration. You can go back to school and get in on that, but you don’t have to have multiple PhDs to join in — the communities are broader than just the researchers themselves, and include all kinds of support personnel, evangelists, volunteers, and so on and so forth.

I agree. Also many people don’t seem to realize that the internet STARTED as open source for the intellectuals of the world. It was never meant as a commercial environment. (note don’t believe the US military story about the internet’s origins either. I was there and there was never any openly military individuals on it. It was a place for smart people to talk to other smart people. There was little to no “trolling” either as this was a practice brought in after the http and the “web” was introduced to the internet. Then commercial entities invaded and the intelligent open source communities had to go to the “dark web” to get away from the sickness of commercialism.

I wish the old days would come back, but this would mean that the connection to the internet would not just be given out to any troglodyte with a keyboard.

I do still have my free terrains and will eventually, I hope to, move all the for sale ones there.

We do have “business” right in the title of this website, so that should kind of give you a hint that this isn’t really the venue to discuss the merits of capitalism…. however, as someone who’s lived in and reported from a lot of places with different economic systems (I was born in the USSR, reported from Afghanistan, ran a business news bureau in China for five years, and so on) I do have to say that while capitalism does have a lot of problems, the other systems that have been tried so far are significantly worse.

In addition, capitalism — while allowing for people to profit from their creations — does also allow for plenty of opportunities for cooperative, non-commercial efforts as well. The open source movement is thriving and growing dramatically around the world and particularly in the U.S. The amount of charitable and non-profit work happening is also substantial, in addition to fundamental research and infrastructure projects that are funded by the government. I’m not a libertarian. I do love my roads and my public schools and my parks and police departments, and our current system allows for the investment in a great deal of similar infrastructure that benefits the public good. Could we use more parks and better schools? Sure. But that’s a matter of degree, not a matter of kind.

In OpenSim today we see a similar kind of mixture. There are folks who donate stuff — such as Linda Kellie — and folks who sell stuff on the Kitely Market. Some people do both. (Including me.) One doesn’t exclude the other. There are many non-profit grids, cooperative grids, and free-to-connect grids. There are also commercial grids, and grids everywhere else on that spectrum.

I believe that business flourishes best in a rich environment. An environment with widely-available basic infrastructure. In OpenSim, that means that code base itself, which is open source, as well as a variety of free starting content (like Linda Kellie’s). An environment with a wide choice of commercial content and service providers, so that we’re not locked into any one vendor. An environment with a variety of educational opportunities, so that people can learn to do things themselves, either to share with others, or to build careers or businesses — or a combination of those things.

This is why I love OpenSim, and spend a great deal of time here, instead of in one of the closed commercial platforms.

It’s the rich ecosystem, the diversity, the freedom of choice that appeals to me, and, I believe, that is the core strength and unique value of OpenSim.

An old comment you are answering but still valid of course. And of course it is a much more complex things than I can speak to anymore, or want to.

I would suggest that the “wannabe virtual capitalists” are mostly, but of course not all, just plain people who have no real clue about business or marketing.

This space is a equalizer of sorts…allowing otherwise plain people to teach themselves to create things who otherwise are mostly just cubicle workers.

Which is another reason I prefer the non capitalistic, non commercial spaces and places in OpenSim….we share and so therefore we are not forced by any conventions of virtual capitalism to conform.

Great to hear that you find OpenSim conducive to your creativity… Regions ‘casually littered’ with creations sounds so vaguely familiar! (That’s my non HG standalones that run locally, I try to keep my HG regions a little tidier, as O don’t want to be sued by visiting avies because they’ve fallen over carelessly placed objects!)

It always amuses me when wannabe virtual capitalists start screaming about theft etc when the whole basis of capitalism itself is theft, usually in the form of the wealth created by workers, who are exploited further by having to use the residual wealth they created, (i.e. wages) in order to purchase back what is rightfully theirs in the first place – thus doubly enriching the capitalist, ably aided and abetted by a compliant state that property rights of the capitalist when the workers, or anyone else tries to deny them their ill-gotten gains.

I wish I had a way of knowing where the oars, in particular, are going…but in any case I do wonder what is happening that has increased the visits so much.

Much of what you say is quite true. After losing out on somewhere between 1000-2000 L$ on failed mesh uploads, I decided it was no longer worth the trying. However, before giving up completely I tried doing some Google search (which I now forget what I was even looking for, except that it had something to do with “mesh”), I discovered that mesh and mesh viewers were available and working with OpenSim, which I had ran in standalone before. So I re-downloaded and configured OpenSim once more, and now (mainly because uploads are free), find myself spending much more time there and making far greater progress in advancing the quality of my creations. In retrospect (more precisely, thinking about all those wasted $Linden$ and failed attempts), I suspect that the mesh uploads to SL may be purposely over-doing the LOD conversions just to make more money from those who have not yet perfected tweaking the uploads. Now for the big fat price of “0.00” (sarcastic irony, of course), I have four regions casually littered with ever-improving quality meshes and related Blender creations.

ADL 3DR (3dr.adlnet.gov) A 3D repository from the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative. Includes 3D models optimized for many file types including .fbx, .dae, .obj, .skp, and .3ds along with textures.
Government Grid (govgrid.org) – Site offering information and resources to government agencies interested in working within a virtual environment with virtual assets and textures.

http://minethere.blogspot.com/2014/02/free-opensim-terrains.html

And he did, and does-)) As well as Torben Asp…

http://minethere.blogspot.com/2013/04/free-terrains-and-oars.html

as with “History repeating itself”-))

I have been seeing, lately, something I admire and like seeing, more and more.

Entertainers [other than djs] who are willing to come into the free metaverse, most without economies, to share themselves freely.

I find this extremely heartening as this is one area where opensim is mostly without so far. I do not have any issue with djs at all, of course, but Live Singers are wonderful.

I just got Russell Eponym, a wonderful folk music Singer, and a friend, to join Metropolis and he will be performing. I just love this, quite a lot-))

I expect that, also, he will find opensim to be quite to his liking-))

Sure, and the minute you start attaching an economy to something, things begin going downhill as every focus becomes one of extracting as much money out of the thing as possible, not the social, sharing, or community aspects.

You go to a party or event in SL and you’ll invariably see the “tip jars” all over, and the DJ’s constant badgering of the crowd for Linden dollar “love” be spread upon them, the badgering that goes on reminds me of going to an auction and hearing the constant badgering of the crowd to bid higher.
With the scripts, there’s only so many ways with the limited and built-in functions that are part of LSL to make a prim glow like a light, loop sounds, or animate textures, there’s very little innovation and the odds of more than one script writer coming up with the exact same end use/function independently as someone else is very high.
If someone invented something once, others can come up with the same ideas independently too without copying.

Good reality check here. This is why I love that so many are willing to offer their content freely in opensim. It removes all of this copybot issues stuff and ppl dissecting pieces of builds and saying, “hey, that’s mine!!”

It is one of the things I love about opensim since one hears of this in closed grids so much due to it’s inherent competitive systems.

Yes, ppl will always say this and that is stolen, or whatever, in opensim, but we all know this is also the case in closed grids…sometimes it is true, often it is not. But the removal of the competitive nature is very nice, to me.

“I for one refused to distribute anything i created there because i knew
after watching chat how easy God Mode can strip permissions and leave my
content free to steal and distribute where ever the thief wants.”

That’s not an OSgrid specific issue, being able to change permissions is true of how opensim works, anyone who downloads the opensim software and fires it up on their computer can access the database it runs on. Once you access the mysql database you can change anything in it just like you can on any mysql database, there’s nothing special or unique about it but it’s the way the software IS.

If you rent or rez land on someone elses’ sims they run, they can easily copy your items there since by rezzing the items you are putting them in their database to begin with. This forum runs on a mysql database, the owner- Maria can go into that database and edit or change anything she likes, that’s how the whole system works.

Anyone can copy prims easily enough, all prims except sculpties are made from the very same very limited set of building tools every avatar has- box, sphere, semi sphere,cone, cylinder etc.I would also guess a high percentage of the textures are simply taken off the web, either entire pictures or small blocks copied from larger ones.
Of the billions of photos on the web out there, it’s highly unlikely anyone would recognize that tiny square of leather texture being used on a wall in an SL build as having come from a tiny cropped corner of someone’s 8×10 photo of a saddle hanging on the wall in the barn they photographed five years ago.
You just know all those huge texture pack dealers didn’t just fan out all over the country snapping tens of thousands of pictures of windows, roofs, doorways, rocks, pavement, trees, metal grates, bricks, stones, lumber etc etc just to sell for 15 cents on SL in a texture pack.
More likely they just copied those off other people’s photos on google, flickr and elsewhere, and just cropped out a tiny 512px square spot, uploaded it and had it for sale. Builders come along and buy the textures full perm and use them in their builds set to no copy no transfer and act like they own the whole thing, when in fact the testure that makes it what it is was almost certainly stolen off the web originally.
So they don’t really have much cause to gripe about their already half stolen stuff being stolen by others.

Sadly the myth that OS Grid is a haven for copybotters is still being peddled by SL malcontents. To be sure, there is content of dubious origins there, but on nothing like the scale there is in SL.

Sadly, people being people, they are all too often prepared to swallow stupid lame brained rumours rather than ascertaining the facts. Sadly this blog of Maria’s is the kind of news site that no-one really wants, but everyone needs. Journalistically it’s about on a par with the RL tabloids in it’s scandal mongering and peddling of half-truths.

@ross – contrary to what you say, it is OpenSim that is pulling away from SL, and not the other way around. None of the closed grids have a future simply because they are closed grids. SL is haemorraging residents at a phenomenal rate, and the amount of abandoned and empty land there must surely be of some concern to LL. Some residents will change to the other ‘walled gardens’ of Avination and InWorldz, only to be ripped off yet again by greedy content creators trying to make a killing. Many are starting to put their toe in the water and try out OS Grid, and are finding it much to their liking…

@gaga – OS Grid could be shut down, but that wouldn’t stop a more distributed form of OpenSim based grid from emerging, and that’s probably where the technology is heading anyway – it is after all a server technology to support the 3D web, so completely unlike SL. It is so much more than SL. OS Grid is just a convenient testing ground/starting point, a half-way house between an SL type virtual world environment and a truly distributed metaverse. SL, Avination, Inworldz are not part of the Metaverse by definition. as they have decided, like North Korea, to isolate themselves in their own little conclaves. To be part of the Metaverse a grid, a standalone region or a mini grid needs to be connected and interconnected, open and with fairly free movement. But like the North Koreans in RL, those who can’t emotionally or intellectually cope with the existence of an open society feel threatened that their little bit of control is being taken away from them, and threaten to nuke the ‘opposition’ whom it blames for all their woes.

Nothing will stop people copying merchandise, I don’t condone that, it’s just a fact of life. No amount of DRM will prevent that, and indeed, DRM as we know was an ‘own goal’ in that less content gets sold that way, not more. If I pay good money for music want to be able to put it on every device I own so that I can enjoy that music – I don’t want to have to pay for a copy to put on every different device I own. Subseqently I do not buy from companies that use DRM. Likewise, I’d like to be able to buy items in the virtual worlds and be able to transfer them with my avatar. I certainly don’t want to rip anyone off, but neither do I wish to be ripped-off myself.

Quite simply, if creators wake up and smell the coffee, and start, as many already have done, and realise that charging a reasonable amount for virtual merchandise is the best guarantee that you have against illegal copying, and it’s also a good way of ensuring repeat purchases.

So, stop all the sour grapes about OS Grid, get a life, and an RL job. Sure it’s nice if you can make a llittle selling virtual goods, but at this stage, you ain’t going to make a living, and I personally doubt that anyone will make more than a small amount – maybe enough to run their region. or a little more. No one is making any money from content in OS Grid, as there is no money economy. However, I suggest that if some enterprising creator of decent, well priced content was to open up in OS Grid and OpenSim generally using the Virwox system I think they’d be pleasantly surprised. Only the greedy have anything to fear IMO.

OS Grid, or it’s successor will still be with us when SL is nothing other than an embarassing memory. It’s been a long time since SL was the place to be. SL may have quite a bit of life in it yet, but people are starting to realise the potential offered by the freedom of OS Grid and OpenSim. And whilst OpenSim grids don’t typically offer the social oppotunities of SL, that is starting to change. Already increasing numbers of RPers and educational groups are adopting the technology as not only is it more cost effective than SL it is also much more configurable, customisable than SL is. To top it all, OpenSim, and by default OS Grid isn’t even up to production grid standards yet, the server software isn’t even at version 1 yet, and already there are the SL fanbois who fear it.

I have seen AviWorlds @AlexRFerraris pushing this same argument on Twitter recently so perhaps OSgrid should be shut down pending a purge of their database. I’m sure AviWorlds would welcome the refugees from OSgrid with free land plots. Anyway, there is enough stolen content on Second Life to sink Linden Labs I’m sure if anyone could prove it was stolen which is really not that easy to do since nearly everything can be re-engineered without changing perms on a single stolen prim. Everything has a look and feel so everything can be remade pretty much the same with perhaps a few difference and texture changes. Who owns the copyright on the first pair of knickers ever made or a dress style, a building structure or what a particular script does? There have been many similar products that became subject of dispute in Second Life with one creator swearing their product was copied. I was once set on by a store owner as I was browsing demanding to know where I got my outfit as the sculpted scarf was a copy of one she made, so she claimed. I learned later from the seller of my outfit the sculpt came from a box of designer’s sculpts and no case against her was brought or proved.

The latter is a Google Custom Search Engine.

Bear in mind also that certain viewers support mesh and, while the internal format may change, you can import free content from sites such as Google 3D Warehouse, TurboSquid and Renderosity subject to the terms of service and individual licences..

The creator name can now be preserved during import if the profile switch is used during creation of the OAR or IAR.