How Linden Lab Sees Itself

No, opensimulator is not an alternative, unless you want to deal with buggy software that can break at any time (and does so frequently).  That, and the developers refuse to fix a lot of the issues that prevent opensimulator from being commercially viable (permissions, economy, etc), forcing those who wish to use it for such to fix or add them on their own.

Eighteen million people or eighteen million accounts?

As for "And bigger than Houston, Texas." well, them's fighting words.

-ls/cm

OpenSim is not just one piece of software. There are versions that are EXTREMELY buggy and unstable -- these are typically either early releases, or the latest brand-new untested release.

Business users tend to pick one of the (slightly older), tested, and debugged versions. My personal preference is to follow ReactionGrid's lead -- which is used almost exclusively for business and education, and is extremely stable.

By comparison, if you go over to the OSGrid, lots of instability there -- but that's because they're a testing platform. They're always rolling out new versions and features, and TRYING to get them to break, so they can fix them. Don't judge OpenSim as an enterprise platform based on OSGrid problems or the latest cutting-edge software releases.

In more familiar terms, go with Windows XP Service Pack 3 instead of the first release of Windows Vista.

So are real companies using this yet? Well, IBM just released the OpenSim-based Lotus Sametime 3D product. It's a little pricy -- $50,000 for four regions -- but you get full integration with corporate directories, collaboration tools, and other business goodies.

More info here: http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2009/07/ibm-offers-four-opensim-regions...

The've got a collection of beta users on this platform already, and told me that they created this offering in the first place because of demand from their customers.

They told me that they reason they went with OpenSim rather than the Second Life enterprise product is that OpenSim offers functionality that SecondLife doesn't have. (Such as the WriteonPrim function.)

I'm sure that the price didn't hurt, either, or that OpenSim allows server-side programming -- always a plus for enterprise deployments.

-- Maria

I agree, Profoky, that Second Life has a large userbase. For businesses looking to sell or market to Second Life's community, this is a great thing.

If I wanted to start a small business making virtual fashions, or role playing weapons, I'd definitely be in Second Life.

For businesses looking to do anything else, though, the user base is completely irrelevant. If I'm looking for a platform on which I can hold meetings with my employees, I want a platform that I can run on my own server, that allows me to bring in all of my interns (some of whom are underage), and that allows me to make easy backups of my corporate campus. It is these small meetings and virtual conferences that are the main applications of virtual worlds today for business.

And, frankly, Second Life isn't big enough for real commerce or marketing efforts to work. There plenty of small mom-and-pop businesses in Second Life, but not too many large retail companies. A few tried, during the big Second Life hype explosion a couple of years back. It didn't go well.

All, in all, I'd say that Second Life is competing on an even basis with OpenSim right now  when it comes to corporate deployments. SL has better brand recognition, and is more stable. OpenSim has more features -- features useful for business that is -- hypergrid, real names, server-side programming, easy backups, enterprise application integration. Even mesh graphics, if you're an architect and using realXtend. And Second Life's enterprise server platform still isn't out and - from what I hear -- will cost even more than IBM's product, without the enterprise integration features, and without teleports to other grids.

Second Life has a community of designers and developers -- but I'm sure that most would be equally happy to work on the same project in OpenSim as in Second Life. The tools, after all, are pretty much the same.

The IBM Lotus Sametime 3D product is big news because it integrates virtual worlds deep into a very popular suite of business applications.

I've been working with opensim for a bit over two years. I assure you that the software is not all that others make it out to be in terms of being unacceptble. Early adopters will have a huge advantage when the software gets there.  The problem is everyone wants to compare OpenSim and Secondlife and in my view of it, there is no way to compare the two softare platforms. But if one wants to speak about the issues with opensim alpha software, well then I think we should be talking about a half sim of build that that my SL sims ate on occassion. Whole builds ending up at 0,0,0.  That was some number of years ago, it was a known issue at the time amoungst all the others, but lets not speak of how poor opensim currently is when anyone who has had any time at all in second life knows how poor service can actually be.

As far as TCO, I would think there is a very good argument in favor of opensim for business use. It just takes a few willing to do something with it. It will happen.

-Tracy

@RaR,

Yes, I've logged into your server. Very nice work you are doing with Heritage. I like your open ideas when it concerns a different approach. SL has a "way" of doing things on their platform. A business model. I agree, and nod that indeed OpenSimulator gives a complete open approach to creativity. Allowing you to create whatever world you desire. It is quite possible and most likely will happen that many will change the way the opensim platform works in its' entirety to suit various world building ideas. 

The interesting thing about OpenSim isn't how big any individual grid is. If you remember, when AOL was the big fish, the stuff available on the web was wimpy by comparison. AOL had email, IM, forums, news -- everything you could possibly want. The World Wide Web had a few university sites with their class schedules, some personal sites... you couldn't find anything, there was nothing to do. But there were SO MANY of those little sites, and they were so easy to put up that it didn't matter. And what AOL had all in one place, you could find piecemeal out on the Web -- one side had free emails. Another site had news. There were little bulletin boards popping up, replacing the old BBSs.

We're seeing the same now with the Opensims. College and schools are putting up their own grids (some for just internal consumption, some public). Some non-profits are using them to educate the public. Some businesses have little grids of their own, for their employees.

And there are a LOT of people using OpenSim for self-expression -- just the same way they do with websites. It costs very little to put up an OpenSim world -- free,if you've got a spare computer sitting around and a high-speed Internet connection. And you can create a brand-new world, and invite your friends and family in to see it, and maybe a few strangers find their way over, and you're satisfied.

According to Adam Frisby, one of OpenSim's core developers, the software has been downloaded more than 100,000 times. That doesn't mean that there are 100,000 grids out there -- many people were downloading upgrades, or tried to get a world going and gave up. But everytime someone is able to do it, and gets a world working, a handful of other people are going to look at it and say, "I can do that." And a couple of them will succeed.

And it will grow, bottom-up, organically, like the Web did. And if will be full of stupid stuff, and dirty stuff, and quite probably illegal stuff, and people will complain about it.

And then at some point, the closed worlds like Second Life and Blue Mars will either say "we give up", pull down their walls and join in (possibly abandoning their own platforms, like AOL did), or they will remain self-contained game universes, like Ultima Online or World of Warcraft.

But what happens to them will become irrelevant. If AOL were to go down -- in the early days - it would have been a disaster. Today, how many people would notice? Similarly, Second Life today is the center of the virtual immersive universe (not counting the pure gaming platforms) and if it goes down, it would be a disaster. Five years from now, the 3D Web will probably have long taken it over. OpenSim looks right now to be the best bet for eventually evolving into that 3D Web, because of the ease (well, ease compared to other options) and price and flexibility, and because of its existing install base. But something new might well come along -- but chances are, it will look more like OpenSim than like Second Life or Blue Mars.

- Maria

"If you go by the numbers over at http://opensimulator.org/wiki/Grid_List OSGRID is head and sholders over all the other open sim deployments. According to their own stats http://osgrid.org/stats/ the numbers are miniscule. 20K total accounts, 500 active, with concurrent users ranging between 40-80 users online only breaking 100 once in the past month. Please correct me if another grid has published more impressive numbers."

First off, you are comparing opensimulator to sl. Secondly, OSgrid is a self hosted grid for the most part. In other words, people connect their machines to the OSgrid servers. This is not a "hosted" platform and membership is not an accurate way of making any comparisons. Certainly in terms of SL.

Most public OpenSim grids publish membership numbers -- probably more to demonstrate how fast they're growing, or to compare to other OpenSim grids.

However, the OSGrid membership numbers actually UNDERCOUNT the people who visit the grid, since hypergrid teleports allow users from other grids -- even people who just have a little standalone grid running off an old family computer -- to come and visit.

If you hang out at social gathering areas on OSGrid such as LBSA plaza, you'll often see people with avatar names like Paul.Smith@mytinylittlegrid.com:8002 or Mary.Avatar@123.34.456.67:9000

It's a little like having your own name in your email address -- Paul@Smith.com instead of Paul.Smith@hotmail.com.

Eventually, companies will probably have their grids hosted on the same server farms as their websites, so people's work avatar names can be the same as their work email address.