Lindens Allowing Your Own Server to Grid?
According to an article in The Daily Galaxy News from Planet Earth & Beyond Linden Lab has been allowing people to put up their own servers and attach them to the main grid. This is the first I have heard of such, but I am not on the list of those that must know!
The Daily Galaxy, published by a crew of Ivy League grads and dropouts, is led by Casey Kazan, editor and co-founder. “Our goal,” says Kazan, “is to be the world’s daily destination for surprising, entertaining and original posts on science, technology, and popular culture. We are your eye on the universe for out-of-the-ordinary, exceptional content.”
The post “Why ‘Virtual Worlds’ May Become the New Realty” has several quotes by Mitch Kapor which sound familiar but are supposed to have come from last Friday’s Virtual Worlds conference sponsored by IBM and MIT.
Quotes Rebecca Sato of The Daily Galaxy accredits to Kapor:
A huge number of passionate early adopters had some kind of mystical experience,
What’s driving virtual worlds is a shared sense, by a few hundred thousand crazy people, that this is important, and they’re going to drop everything and go after this.
They’ll need the equivalent of the Web application server. They need improved user interfacing, and they need to be decentralized, to permit creation of private space–the equivalent of intranets and extranets.
Those which is followed by this paragraph which leads one to imagine it also came from Mitch Kapor during that conference.
Linden Lab is currently moving towards decentralization. Since January, they have allowed people to put up their own servers and attach them to the main Second Life grid. They also want to eliminate proprietary protocols. Their reasons for taking these steps lies in the conviction that its biggest threat is not an existing company, but rather a future virtual world that will emerge already running on those principles. Basically, if they don’t do it, someone else will beat them to the punch.
Have I missed something? Do any of you know anything about personal servers attached to the Grid?
June 20th, 2007 • 
Weirdharold • 
Blogs, Business, News, Second Life, VR, Virtual Life, Virtual Realms • 
8 Comments »
comment | June 20, 2007 at 12:18 | individual comment-link
Interesting development. This could be just what they need… decentralization is the key to the future of the platform.
comment | June 20, 2007 at 12:46 | individual comment-link
First I’ve heard of it. Interesting though not surprising.
comment | June 20, 2007 at 12:52 | individual comment-link
The link at the bottom of the Daily Galaxy post goes back to InfoWeek which doesn’t say that. I think Daily Galaxy is confusing the client with the server.
comment | June 20, 2007 at 13:44 | individual comment-link
Actually, the InfoWeek article does include the paragraph at the end of the article.
comment | June 20, 2007 at 13:55 | individual comment-link
I’ve heard before that it can be something to expect in the future… where 3rd parties can host sims, entire virtual spaces and communities and parties like LL distribute the DNS (and gets paid for this). Makes sense to me. But never heard of 3rd party servers that are already attached to the SL Grid.
comment | June 20, 2007 at 14:09 | individual comment-link
I was at the conference. This came up during the Q&A. My conference notes read:
Talks about future developments for LL. Mitch cites people being able to write their own TOS and using their own servers — “A lot of issues” about accordance start to go away
Alludes to forces of open source … “If the company doesn’t do it, it will wind up being crushed.”
“We have to get there at the same time or sooner than everyone else in this.”
Joey Seilor wrote up a more complete transcript of Kapor’s speech, which is available here:
http://www.virtualworldsnews.com/2007/06/liveblogging_mi_1.html
I’ve also commented on Kapor’s speech as it relates to press criticism and his comparisons of virtual worlds and early PC technolgy adoption:
http://www.computerworld.com/blogs/node/5716
comment | June 20, 2007 at 14:35 | individual comment-link
comment | June 20, 2007 at 15:29 | individual comment-link
I am just wondering if other VWs really will go that way with decentralized servers.. We all know it’s the way to got but right now it seems to me that most companies are more good in creating new barriers than opening something up.. with having that sort of infrastructure the question for revenue is also an important one.
And regarding web servers this more came from a non business area so they could be more open than businesses can be I’d think.
But we will see…
As for hosting your own sim I’d say that this involves some IP rights issues with scripts coming to that sim depending on the setup. So I wonder if that really can be true (of course if it is true then it’s probably done with some bigger companies and hopefully with contracts which don’t allow them to access content coming to “their” sims (something in which such companies are probably not interested in anyway)). For opening it up for a broader mass it might be more problematic.
But it’s all rumours now anyway.