Baba Sucks

So lots of people seem to think IRC is the place to find true character. Let’s talk about what I knew about CopyBot, Second Life, and you.

People seem to think CopyBot was developed to cause the destruction of Second Life. That’s simply not true. Am I saying it wasn’t going to cause a lot of discussion and worry? I knew it would, because it’s something that’s important.

The issue isn’t CopyBot. The issue is what real protections you can expect in Second Life.

Nothing will prevent copying. You can only react to it after the fact. Trying to stop it will only lead to failure, and it will have the effect of limiting fair use.

We’ve seen the same words from Linden Lab, from Robin and Cory. We’ve all been saying the same thing. I’ve been saying it for months, others have been saying it for just as long if not longer. A lot of people are aware, and it still seems that those who would be effected by it, the content creators, do not hear us.

CopyBot isn’t a very good copier. It’s inefficient and buggy. One good thing about CopyBot, and also mirrored in my comments taken from IRC, if it can copy an avatar down to the last prim and with the same appearance it will have HUGE visual impact. That’s the kind of thing you don’t shrug off. It almost instantly connected all those disparate dots for anyone that watched it do its thing. What is yours is now suddenly somebody else’s.

I didn’t develop CopyBot, but I was aware that it would cause a controversy. I was glad for that because now almost nobody is not aware of the limitation in the protocol. Happier? Probably not… Do you want to be happy, or rather oblivious of libsecondlife and angry at Linden Lab for something else?

THis is from a blog comment I made to Robin Linden’s blog post on Copyrights and Content Creation in Second Life(still in moderation 11:30 pst)
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CopyBot is not a product that we sell or distribute. It’s a debugging tool and silly demo with a [now] obviously bad choice of name. Hopefully you won’t be seeing copy bot on SLex any time soon..

The issue at hand with copy bot seems HUGE!

“Oh my god why would they do something like that?!”

But our reason for showing this application around was partly we were proud of or achievement, and then on the other hand, if it’s this easy, we should tell people that relying on the Second Life systems to protect content is not feasible any longer.

For a while now we’ve had this project on the back burner that has been asked for so many times by content developers, an ability to back up content to your hard drive and restore it in Second Life. Basically import and export functions.

That’s the basis of CopyBot as well excepting the permission check. The problem is the difference between CopyBot and and import export tool is little more than 1 line of code that is easily commented out by even novice programmers.

What you see in CopyBot is the same capabilities that any import/export tool would have.

It’s not something easy to deal with, and we’re struggling ourselves with the issues that CopyBot has brought. It’s caused many personal conflicts as well between developers and their friends who do not see the merit in what we do.

sceneviewer created by John Hurliman. This video shows IBM’s Almaden island. He just implemented a nice new camera that allowed me to zip around the sim for this video ;0  You will have to pardon the somewhat choppy framerate. John’s video came out a bit smoother.

I was fiddling with the libsecondlife sources earlier today and got sceneviwer all nice and workie workie. Check out this comparison shot of Second Life from both clients.

Yeah I know it’s Super teh hotness! The 3D engine is written using Microsoft XNA, which sadly means it’s not cross platform ;0 OH NOES!

But wait! Here is the good news,

Mono.Xna

Description

An open-source implementation of XNA using The Tao Framework for cross-platform rendering through OpenGL and Mono. The Mono.Xna discussion forum is available here.

Status
Mono.Xna is in early stages right now, but the end goal is to allow XNA projects to be compiled and run on platforms other then Windows, without having to change any code.

Mono.Xna, was initiated by libsecondlife’s very own “That guy who does stuff on the mono project,” and aims to make all your cross platform 3D rendering woes a thing of the past.

^{GhettoTags: CLI, XNA, Mono, .Net, sexy, open-standards, open-source, your-mom}

The 3pointD meetup is planned for today at 5PM PST(SL Time). The idea is to get a buch of people who are interested in the metaverse and virtual worlds together all at once and share their thoughts on metaverse sustainability, mash it all up and come up with some good ideas for the future of this emerging medium.

If you plan to attend, be sure to RSVP with Walker Spaight in-world or leave a comment on the 3pointD post about the meetup.

Read on for the tenative schedual from 3pointD

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John Hurliman just posted a great writeup on the recent changes to libsecondlife this past month. Those changes include moving C# 2.0, a new NAnt Build System, super fancy pre-generated code, our new continuous integration server, our plans for NUnit unit tests and more!

Read Big changes in libsecondlife over at libsecondlife.org

It works, but now I need a custom mini editor.

Great work from Tao Takashi for getting this set up.

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PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

October 19, 2006

Plone Foundation Announces Broadcasting of the Plone Conference into Second Life

Seattle, WA - The Plone Foundation announced today the broadcasting of the Plone Conference 2006into the virtual world Second Life. It is the first big open source conference being colocated inside a virtual world. The event will be held from Oct 25-27

"We'll broadcast selected talks and tutorials each day into a virtual conference building inside Second Life. Residents who could not make it to the by-now sold-out conference can participate in virtual form. A back channel for their questions to the actual speaker will be provided, too"

The location within Second Life is Theta(154,194) and video from the conference will be streamed via Quicktime software to this location.

"We are very excited to bring Plone Conference to Second Life, and we believe we are the first open-source community to broadcast a conference here."

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