randomhumanity

Fröl and I were recently given a condo in Riverchapel, SL for free. It’s a small space, and we’re only allowed rez 50 prims, but hey, how much can you really expect for nothing, right? I have yet to meet our landlord Stoner, but apparently his reason for offering these spaces gratis is to generate traffic for the region. Presumably this is the same reason for the idling avatars that are frequently loitering around the region’s more central attractions, the rows and rows of random and questionably valuable stuff for sale. It’s a bit like living above a seedy street market, but I suppose Stoner has to pay his tier somehow…

Stoner's Condos. The land in Riverchapel was actually sold since I wrote this, and the towers were rebuilt in Putnam.

Wait, what’s this tier thing, exactly? It’s not rent since you supposedly own the land. An appropriate metaphor might be a council tax, except of course that there are no roads to be maintained, or grass to be cut. There is, in fact, no land at all. A tier, when you look behind the virtual curtain, is a hosting fee. The US$1,675 that a private island will set you back actually reserves for you a single core of a server, on which you can only run LL’s region software. The US$295 you pay a month is a hosting fee to continue sharing that server, as you would pay for web hosting or other application hosting.

You’d really have to go out of your way to find a deal as bad as that elsewhere. In fact, I couldn’t. Any hosting deal that approached that monthly price offered significantly more server power (4x at least), total control of the server’s configuration, and no setup fee. If all you really want is a patch of virtual land, $15 will get you a virtual server capable of hosting a single OpenSim region, 65,536m2 for the price of 2,048m2 in an SL mainland region. LL have been able to maintain this illusion of scarcity and charge these outrageous prices until now because they ran the only show in town, a walled garden where they could do as they pleased.

That, however, is changing. OpenSim is an open source virtual world server which allows anybody to set up their own grid which the SL viewer and others can connect to, or to run a single region server which can be attached to other grids. These independent grids can even be linked together to create a web of virtual worlds which an avatar can potentially navigate at will with an account on a single grid. LL aren’t oblivious to this change, and actually helped bring it about when they released the source of their viewer a couple of years ago, but they have been slow to fulfil their promise to release the code of their server software. In the meantime OpenSim has been catching up rapidly in terms of stability and features, even implementing features that are missing from LL’s software.

It’s far from perfect; most days I log into OSG I encounter a variety of weird and annoying bugs. Other grids are more stable because they follow SL’s model of centralised server control and don’t update to new versions of the software by the hour. The grids are also sparesly populated in comparison to SL, and don’t have the same variety of objects. But imperfections aside, what OpenSim offers that SL can’t is control and choice: the freedom to choose the hardware you require, modify the software to do what you need, or just to move easily between grids to find one with the theme, organisational structure, pricing or people you feel comfortable with.

We were also given some free land in OSG recently. It’s an 3952m2 space in a scenic atoll region surrounded by mountains, and we can rez 2714 prims where ever we want  rather than being confined to a tiny little box. There’s a bunch of other islands around, the residents of which spend a lot of their time building cool things and giving them away as presents, or thinking of ways to help newbies find their way around. Further afield there are freebie shops, test regions for a new jointed physics engine, and somebody has set up a link to a small grid they’re working on. It’s an exciting place to be. When I asked our landlord Snoopy why she offers free parcels, she said it was to allow people to get a first impression, so they can get to know each other and a community can develop. And that’s a reason that needs no excusing.

Our island in Heaven

Down and Out in SecondLife

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