Millions For Them, Not for Us

Millions for defense, and not one cent for tribute...

Did you realize Lordfly had become Minionized? They let him keep his trademark derby and bank robber's five o'clock shadow.

Remember those folks that got the inside tip-off about the private islands? In a scoop for the Herald, I outed the sordid little practice and the Lindens sheepishly admitted that they shouldn't do stuff like that -- it's bad for PR.

But the special little list of developers didn't go away, and LL chugs along giving its inside news to its special friends -- the big-D Developers, who aren't to be confused with the small-D developers in the official developers' directory (they overlap).

Remember a few weeks ago a story about the obscene amounts these Metaversal Myrmidons were pulling down from their new-found Big-Business (read: aging dinosaur old media) friends? To roll out a PR campaign in SL can set you back anywhere from 10 to 30 grand or more. If you itched to know the hard statistics, now you can look over the shoulders of this select little group and read a letter from Glen Linden that is going out to all of them today...under the fold.

Gophers at the Herald might wish to ring up ESC, AWS, ACS, RRR, IM, etc to find out what their real salaries, commissions, expenses, etc. are -- or how they tell the story.

And they can also try hunting for that story -- was it in Business Week? -- there's one of them with charts about how the Metaversal Minions and Myrmidons coin money. Amazing how all of the MMMs ponied up the info for the mainstream media that they were always reluctant to tell inworld or around world.

Lots of analysis could go into these numbers supplied -- I'm thinking in fact that there's a story here that goes like this: those with the largest amounts coming in from big RL clients probably have the least amount of customers and builds inworld. Still, the largest inworld developer -- Anshe Chung Studios is actually at this point likely to still have the largest percent of revenue from their work -- which they get in the hardest possible way, through micropayments and slogging with avatars. I'm not sure what they pay their staff in China per months; I'm betting it's not the kind of money that Forseti Svarog sees even on one afternoon tooling around in SL; in fact if it is more than $150 US, I'd be surprised.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Glenn Fisher
Date: 22.11.2006 01:22
Subject: Results of Developer Program member survey
To: undisclosed-recipients

Dear Developers,

Thanks to the 31 of you who responded and took your time to fill out our recent survey. As promised, we are sharing the results with you. We will distribute the critical issues summary next week once we've completed the analysis. Here's the information about the size of the developer community. This email also went to everyone at Linden Lab.

Results of Developer Program member survey, November 2006

The survey was sent to 103 people representing 46 external developers (individuals or companies) who are currently in the Developer Program. There were 31 responses, representing 28 companies - more than half of LL's external developers. We believe this is a representative sample.

How many employees do you have?

Average 8
Median 5
Maximum 32
Total 224

The developers have grown enormously in the last few months, mirroring the growth in development in Second Life and press attention. The identified external development community is now somewhere between 2 and 3.5x the size of Linden Lab. They are a great resource promoting Second Life.

The size distribution of responding external developers is a few (about 5) large developers (>20 employees), a lot of small developers (3-5 employees), and some individuals and mid-sized companies.

How many Second Life Projects do you have in the pipeline right now?

Average 5.3
Median 4
Maximum 23
Total 148
The external developers are bringing significant new business into Second Life, with about 1.5 people per project.

What is your estimated revenue from Second Life projects for Q4 of 2006?

Average $80K
Median $18K
Total $2,236K
The external developer community has a significant economy, exceeding $10M/year. This works out to about $700K a month from the respondents, and potentially as much as $1.2M/month for all developers.

***

Ok, that was fun, but I do want to remind our loyal readers here of another figure that is close to -- and in fact is going to supercede soon -- the figure of $10 million/year.

That $10 million brought to LL by its "external developers" (good name, they don't do hardly anything for the world) is not getting to Linden Lab's own pockets per se -- only indirectly.

And what I mean by "other to supercede" at least for now is that figure of $8.19 million *today* in tier that the unheralded "internal developers" pay out through the sweat of their brow to Linden Lab. But with the 30 percent increase in square meters of land coming in the next 6 weeks, that figure will go way up -- and I am not sure by how much, until I can see just how much land will lie fallow on all the pancake islands.

To be sure, our tier goes to pay for the Lindens' server farms, but still, they get a lot left over, especially when you recall that they *get paid back* the price of that server when they sell the island or auction the mainland sim.

Our millions go to Linden Lab; a trickle comes back to us and those of us who make profit in SL often plunge it right back into development -- buying more land, subsidizing newbies, funding the arts, or commissioning builds. The thousands of mainland sims and islands with communities on them are proof of that.

This "internal development" that is what lured the "external developers" in the first place doesn't count, though, for Glenn Linden; he wants to show a sector emerging for the Metaverse that can create the illusion of huge bucks to be wrung out of the gullibility of the big companies. They haven't bought huge amounts of islands yet; we have.

But our era is passing. By this time next year, we'll likely be in a decided and dwindling minority, with pats on our heads for our "grandfather" status and a stampede past us to fill the server farms with more and more RL stuff -- some of which we fled First Life for in our dream of making a Second.

Comments

[Khamon]

"They are a great resource promoting Second Life." - Glenn

This is true to some extent. Press is press after all and will attract the odd account.

"The external developers are bringing significant new business into Second Life, with about 1.5 people per project." - Glenn

This is a total crock. Projects in the pipeline include vapors and press ops that do nothing to bring significant new business into Second Life. What do empty estates of car dealerships, clothing stores, hotels et al do to bring *significant* new business into Second Life?

I don't know if it shocks me that such stupid people are employeed by Linden Lab or that such avid liers are employeed by Linden Lab *and* expect us to fall for these off-the-wall comments.

Well then again, I don't really care where people choose to invest their money. Fate Gardens' profits are pumped back into the project and will be for as long as it lasts. I don't even consider it *my* money; it really is just a game.

The era is passing. By this time next year we'll be reading about people who've mortgaged and lost their houses trying to conduct business in Second Life. It's the new BINGO! Who needs food anyway?

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

What shocks me, Khamon, is that the problem-solution paradigm in Second Life seems to be: Second Life's broken, so let's use Second Life. Everybody complains about the weather, but no one buys an unbrealla.

[Khamon]

Jarod, it's more that people aren't constructing buildings but rather insisting that everyone be in the contiguous rain environment seeing and experiencing the same exact weather patterns.

The Lindens and their developers insist that everyone stay wet to garner fame and fortune. Others are worried that buildings can be locked and they'll not be allowed into any given one or even entire settlements.

[Yumi Murakami]

I've half started to think that all of this is at a common theme: bring Second Life into a third generation, where the previous ones will be barely recognisable. That sounds bizarre until you remember that it's in its second generation right now (the first generation was the L$-only prim-tax claim-your-land generation), and thus this has happened before. Even the second generation didn't fully take effect until the removal of Basic stipends, and the penalisation of new Premium ones, a few months back.

Second Life at the moment has a very bad user retention rate. One possible reason for that is that it's not enough like a game for many people. People don't like the association with real-life money, and they also don't like feeling "inferior" to other users who create the content. I know you've alluded to this here before, Prok.

The third generation will be identified by several factors: first, content creation, already over the heads of 75% of users, will be pulled up into the stratosphere in order to save the affect it would otherwise have on their perception of the world. If you have a boxy house you had to pay for while your neighbour has a far more beautiful house that they built themselves on their own, it's easy to feel like a loser, and who wants to stay in a world that makes them feel like a loser? On the other hand, if you have a boxy house you had to pay for while your neighbour has a beautiful house that they built themselves but that's because your neighbour is a professional art corporation with 30 staff then that effect doesn't occur. You can complain about creative freedom here but, really, if you don't have the skill to build at a level that fits with the rest of the world in terms of quality then the freedom doesn't exist and you can't stop the quality bar rising without hideous Harrison Bergeron-style social engineering that would come down to nobody having that saught-after freedom after all. So the alternative is to kick the quality bar up so high that the freedom ceases to be meaningful, or to be an expectation, for 95% of people. After all, as you've previously mentioned, people can hardly complain about being discriminated against because they are not skilled.

Second, the L$ will be reverted to a "play" currency to provide an advancement scheme for people who want Second Life to be a "game". Possibly stipends will return. The exchangability of L$ will be removed. LL will be making their money from the high tier fees paid by the corporate publicists, the Premium fees of the typical 512sqm householder, and the occasional bit of private tier from someone who wants to show off in the hope of getting noticed for a job.

How will this happen? The first step is increasing tier fees. The idea of this will be to make it harder for existing businesses to make their tier, so that when the other economic changes make their business models unviable, LL have the excuse that "well, they weren't making tier anyway". Next, stipends will come back, and tougher restrictions will start being placed on LindeX (eg, having to show that you're a business, having to show that you've declared the income for tax, having to show that it's not invalidating any student support or welfare, etc..) The corporations will be encouraged to offer jobs to the better content creators displaced by these changes, and anyone else can be told "the good creators got offered jobs, and you didn't, so..." At the same time, the existing corporate creators will begin to flood SL with cheap or free quality items.

What's the result? For the top 10% of content creators, they got RL jobs doing something they love, and probably make more money now than they did before. For the 75% of non-creating users, they now get to fly into Second Life and wear sexy clothes and drive quality cars and live in beautiful houses for free, or after playing free money casino games for 10 minutes - only the clothes are Prada, the car is a Nissan and the house is Barratt, but they don't mind. In fact, it's better for them, because they don't have to live with the knowledge that no matter how much they spend they can't get the freedom Aimee or Simone or Nephilaine have. Now, the only problem is that they can't get the freedom Prada and NEXT have but who really cares about that? What do they expect?

With this new-found freedom, and perception of freedom, the retention rate skyrockets, and with it the usefulness of Second Life for publicity, creating a positive feedback loop. The remaining 15% of the mid-range content creators are displaced, but the argument will be that a) they can still build for fun if they want, and b) in the capitalist market, they would have been driven out eventually anyway, because they weren't the top 10%.

I'm in that 15%, and so this isn't something I want to see happen, but it seems all too really possible to me.

[Andrew Burton, aka Jarod Godel]

Why do you say you're in the 15%?

[Khamon]

I'm in the 15% because this is a hobby that supports my desire to build shared 3D environments.

It will never be my job or career even if an offer comes down the pike.

Yeah yeah never say never but...

[Yumi Murakami]

I believe I'm in the 15% range because I only have a relatively small range of products and, although they have some popularity, the income from them is relatively low. Others with similar skills have been far more successful. Additionally, a lot of the things I create purely because I think I could create them, make them work well, and they would be useful - not because I have a particular passion for creating them. The things I did have a passion to create have been proven impossible because they do not fit my skills.

It could be, of course, that I'm not even in that 15% range :)

[Prokofy Neva]

Wow, Yumi, that's quite the scary and awful scenario there. I think probably some bits are likely to come true.

The Linden as a currency probably has to collapse at some point, or get sort of "dollarized" -- the rate of pay of metaversal consultants will establish the value of labour.

I'm not sure that all those restrictions you discuss would unfold because it might not be in LL's interest.

Most of the world hasn't grasped that there is a 3-d Internet coming; they haven't grasped yet that the awful feature of this 3-d world is that it reduces land/real estate and commodities/crafted/manufactured objects to nil value, and substitutes them with streaming, copyable, malleable experience.

There are actually tekkies going around now -- mainly the smug and arrogant scripters whose product is NOT copyable because of the way the servers work -- that are counseling content creators to make more, harder, faster, quicker before it is copied -- stolen. To change their business model and offer services.

I wish this CopyBot would come and bite THEM on the ass HARD. I've honestly never wished anything so fervently because they are deprived of empathy and don't realize the harm they've caused others and need to feel the same thing themselves to get it.

My hair stands on end at the fascism of creator-zealotry and social Darwinism I'm hearing from this bunch. They love it that they have ripped apart the moorings of other people's world, and until they too, feel that hot breath of change on their own necks, they won't be motivated to fix code so it can't be copied. Yes, I heard all the lectures about how this is not possible. I just think it's more than curious and even hilarious that the one thing that tekkies make sure never gets copied is THEIR product, while they hasten the demise of everybody else's.

[Yumi Murakami]

Actually, Prok, it's the other way round.

Scripts can't be copied by CopyBot, or by GLintercept, or similar. But on the other hand, if someone copies a dress or house design or similar, even if they didn't use CopyBot or anything but just redrew the design themselves, there's a huge furore and threats of boycotts. If you make a scripted object and then someone else makes their own version of exactly the same script and sells it for less money then there's no such thing. It's just tough. Should have innovated more.

Didn't you see on the forums where someone actually posted that, while the technical restrictions on copying might be strongest for scripts, the SOCIAL restrictions came down to "if it's scripted, it's fair game?"

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, I know that feels like the truth to you, but I've never heard of that concept as some kind of prevailing social force, and I've been here 2 years. That is, I've heard of the social pressure of the furore that happens when somebody copies a handbag or a skin and resells it but in fact there's a completely different culture around scripts.

The scripterati often put their scripts out for free deliberately. They pride themselves on being selfless and altruistic in that fashion. Ever since beta, there's been a culture of putting scripts up in the script library on the forums and getting comments, and having people re-do them. It's part of that whole ethic of open-sourcing.

Those who have scripts they don't want copied make damn sure nobody can copy them -- and they can't. You get a grey blank "you are not authorized" when you try to open the script and that's it.

To be sure, within a very narrow circle of tekkies, perhaps it is possible to watch a thing and figure out which LSL commands to give it, but I'd challenge you to come up with a single example of some copying scandal in the scripting world that is anything like the hysteria in the skin/handbags/shoes world.

If there are less social restrictions -- and I'm not sure that is a tested hypothesis yet -- the tekkies themselves are to blame for creating a culture of open-sourcery everywhere and being the biggest proponents of "information wants to be free".

[Yumi Murakami]

There aren't "copying scandals in the scripting world" - that was exactly my point. People get undercut and duplicated every day. And it isn't true that only "a narrow circle of tekkies" can watch a thing and work out the commands - many of the most popular scripted items are actually quite simple and even newbies who've just learned LSL in-world can work out how they work. Then they make their own and sell them, and undercut the existing price to get attention. Which sounds great, as a way of getting new folks involved - until 10 generations of newbies down the road, when the market price of the script has hit L$1 and there's no space for the current round. Or, as with some items now, a single vendor with network effect dominates the entire market and there's no chance for anyone else to break in because people aren't searching anymore.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, the scripterati have inculcated a culture of freebies and sharing and open-sourcing with their scripts, and it's only a few of the FIC like Timeless Prototype who sell their scripted gadgets and become worried about copyright.

Show me an example of a script copied by a clueless newbie please? I don't see this as something as easy as you claim. An actual product that was undercut.

I see the opposite happening. CrystalShard Foo deliberately created the FreeView copyable TV script to deliberately undercut the making and sale of videos. She thought it was morally wrong or had some utopian ideal about television scripts that merely put URLs in the ground on media parcels, something that people could paste in themselves. She thought it was a crime that people charged $1500 to make a pretty cabinet and plunk what should have been, in her view, a free functional script, into the prim.

But thank God nobody listened to her or we would all be stuck with her endlessly badly-working free TV and nothing else.

People *did* charge $1000 and $1500 and kept innovating, adding content, making a better package, adding DVDs, etc. etc. and made the sector a valuable money-making one that also pleased consumers.

This would be fodder for Eric Rice's theory that you can both make something free and distribute free AND make something -- even almost the same thing -- and sell it, too.

The problem with Eric's theory when applied to commodities in SL is that all the making of the freebie did was delay and dissipate progress. Thousands of people were snarled up with a free, clunky, wonky TV that often didn't work. The person who made the commercial for-pay TV spent months being vilified and harassed by InfoNet's infamous "Tourbus to Hell" column distributed in every infohub.

It took real persistence on my part to expose how badly Freeview worked and get my many customers to stop attempting to adapt to it and to uphold the reputation of the person the tekkies at InfoNet were trying to run into the ground through moral brow-beating and smearing. In fact, I had my own consumer campaign for a while just to get that commercial TV maker (and the freebie distributors) to become more responsible with customer service.

This was an immensely torturous and unnecessary process. If the ethic had been from the start to charge and have the market motive drive innovation, instead of distribute bad free stuff and have fake altruism and socialistic egotism drive non-development but conformity, we'd have a faster, better TV sector.

Everybody imagines there are all these tekkies "learning" from turning over scripts that are free and copying them. OK, sure, they do learn. But there are not only tekkies and creators in the world. There are consumers. The consumers are benefited by having those driven by commercial advantage innovate and get paid to be innovating and distributing.

[Yumi Murakami]

But what's been the consequence of that, though? Now the only person who can innovate TV's is JZ. When was the last time you saw a HUD animation tool other than Huddles? Do you know how many innovative designs for networked vendors were thrown out when the JEVN critical security hole was revealed and all the customers.. just went on using JEVN? I remember you posted a huge upset thread when you thought that places like SLEx had "taken over" parts of SL by filling their niches forever. That happens to scripters all the time.

Even innovation has a limit. Haven't you seen the latest round of adverts for Microsoft Office? Microsoft and all the other RL software firms are in crisis because there just aren't any more features to add that anyone would care about enough to pay for. In SL, where people tend to like nice simple scripted objects, that margin hits much quicker.

I would not call the typical newbie who learns to script "clueless" at all. All I can say is that several newbies who I have helped learn to script then went and copied known in-world objects and undercut their sellers. Why do you think scripted items are so cheap? Timeless's Multi Gadget sells for L$250! L$250 for something that's taken over a year's work?

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, I'm sorry, but you're out of touch, and out of date.

JZ is far from the only TV manufacturer. Nightlife Overlord's HDTV is probably a bigger seller now. There are at least a half dozen different brands competing, with different features.

Now that nightlife's TV is out there with lots more content like MTV videos and pron, few bother with Freeview at all anymore -- only the most geeky. And there's also even InfoNet's computer thing that offers content and movies, and people use that. Sorry, but you're concept that capitalism creates monopolies and harms creativity is silly -- it's just not true in SL and certainly not in RL.

What you don't like is that many people want Fox TV, and don't want to sit and watch educational uplifting TV on Channel 13.

It's also not true that JEVN is the only vendor, either. There are competitors, I've seen them and listed them at the Ross infohub. JVN still continues to monopolize, but it isn't because they charge for their vendor, and even a faulty vendor, it's precisely because they DO charge and provide CS which all these high and mighty tekkies refuse to do because their thing is FREE.

(Did you ever try to repair your Splashable Water? I recently spent an hour reading the fearsome messages on Jillian Callahan's profile warning me under pain of death never to IM her; I went searching for her new v. whatever at her hard-to-figure-out wierd parking lot place; I got the new version and installed it; and the damn thing still keeps sending error messages. But...I dare not IM for service, it is strictly forbidden because it's FREE!

As for Timeless, you know how much use I have for him and his posturing? $250 *is* way, way too cheap for that product and he should charge twice that and if he won't do CS himself, use the extra income to hire staff. Given his model of having other people distribute it, let them do the CS -- and in fact I'm not sure, he may in fact have a model where you can distribute it for any price you can get, which would be reasonable given advertising and distributing problems in SL.

No one can bitch about their year's work anymore. If they don't want to work scripting for the little world, they can go work for a big company.

Microsoft is up against a wall, is it? So? Something leaner and nimbler will come along, maybe the era of all those Linux geeks is coming.

In short, I've completely poked holes in all your theories that only socialism and altruism creaets innovation -- you have no RL or SL examples. That's not true at all. It's good that tekkie wiki geeks fool around and give stuff for free but they also make a little internal elitist clan where their own arrogant attitude hobbles innovation.

The market and those motivated by the profit drive to distribute and advertise also creates great innovations in SL.

I've been amazed to see the development of rental boxes, for example. Moonshine Herbst kept an ungodly monopoly on this, as you may not recall at all. There, your theory might seem to play out but it was only because of LL's sponsored Sl oligarchy. With this script, that never refunded but grabbed 4 weeks, Anshe could make her first millions in telehub malls. Anyone who wanted to compete had to pay a stiff commission of some 2.9 percent I believe it was per transaction.

Hank Ramos' script, which was copyable if you gave him a commission of 1 percent, and either not for sale or hugely pricey if you didn't, was the other alternative -- the two kept a hammerlock on rentals more than a year.

I broke this by commissioning another script that did more and also refunded, which was the first innovation in this rapacious world where everybody grabbed 4 weeks up front and refused to return no matter what.

Then after that, Hank tried to undercut the market for this other scripter by suddenly releasing his script open-source. That's one of the things I learned about open-source -- it's about keeping scripterati in power with their elitist hammerlock on people and markets, and about their power to undercut people who innovate and then CHARGE for it. It was a stellar example that really opened my eyes to the true evil nature of Second Life's dark side.

But I stuck it out, using both scripts in fact, and finally, others came along and innovated even further, like LeStat's adding many more attractive features. There are now at least 4 if not more of these types of scripts to chose from, all with far better customer service than the original monopolists.

[Yumi Murakami]

Prok, I'm not in particular defending open sourcing. I'm only saying that the system of innovating and charging for it has the same effect in the end.

I know there are vendors other than JEVN, but they don't have much in the way of market penetration. And as I mentioned, several scripters threw out their ideas for developing networked vendors - which they would have charged for - after the JEVN security breach because if people are just going to carry on using it even though it was shown to be fatally flawed then what new feature can possibly attract them?

Microsoft isn't "up against a wall", it's just hit the margin of useful features. It's unlikely to be replaced by other companies because the same margin applies to them too. After all if people don't care about a particular feature, they won't start caring about it just because it is made by someone other than Microsoft!

Open Source was *not* designed to stop people innovating by making it impossible to charge for things. I'll admit that does happen (as with Microsoft giving away IE, for example - although that wasn't open source) but it was by no means the original intent. It was first designed as a way of sharing innovation, and it later became the only possible way of achieving innovation in a market where the chargable side is dominated by an unbeatable competitor.

You talk about the development of rental boxes, but the majority of the ones you see are one of the two same brands. Innovation stops when people stop searching. I know, because I know how many products I've had to abandon because of lack of interest.

[Prokofy Neva]

The market share problem is merely caused by the socialist hammerlock on advertising normally and by the atomized world with no TV, etc. That will change. I disagree with most of what you said, open source is basically a leftist movement that is destructive in the forms we see it in SL. "All property is theft, so let me steal it," is their motto.

[Yumi Murakami]

I can understand some of that, but, um.. TV? How would TV help? If there's TV, all that happens is that the market leader is the one who's always on TV.

[Hiro Pendragon]

You realize bad publicity is good publicity, right?

[Prokofy Neva]

Yumi, wby TV? Because when you can have a capacity where people can BUY advertising if they want and not wait for Linden suffrance or signing NDAs or whatever, then you have a freer marketplace. To be sure, those with more wealth will be getting more eyeballs, just like RL, but so? In principle you can buy the time, and like the classifieds for now, they aren't THAT hugely expensive for what you get: sales.

Hiro, where's the bad publicity? If reporting and commenting critically on SL is only going to be seen as "bad publicity" by you people in these advertising agencies, you'll be sure to invite more criticism : )

And...where did YOUR company and YOU fit on this spectrum?

[Hiro Pendragon]

Prok:

"Hiro, where's the bad publicity?"

>> How about starting with the negatively-tuned title? *grin*

"If reporting and commenting critically on SL is only going to be seen as 'bad publicity'"

Negative commentary is generally considered "bad" publicity, yes, by just about anyone. I suppose that's debateable, but on a linguistic level at most.

"by you people in these advertising agencies,"

I object to that statement; my company does a heck of a lot more than advertising.

"you'll be sure to invite more criticism : )"

Which again, I retort: "Bad publicity is good publicity." Circular.

[Prokofy Neva]

The title, while you may find it tendentiously, does accurately reflect the gross disparity of wealth: millions for a few people, and not a cent of it going to the world itself, to the community broadly speaking.

I think it's a very important discussion to have, the huge tilt that has occurred with the ability of the tiny FIC elite catapaulted to fame and fortune through shepherding in big business and making huge windfalls of cash for just doing basic building and scripting that many people do who aren't in their connected little Linden pipeline.

And the huge population, including many very proficient programmers and builders who aren't in this feted developers' list that YOU are on.

When you look at the entire purpose of Second Life as making a buck for your company, sure, anything that is critical because "negative publicity" because you see the entire world in terms of "publicity" which you either get, and pay for to be positive, or don't get.

Hiro, if you once built a park bench for the Queen park prototype, that's great, but the bulk of the Metaversal Minions' work is about ad campaigns, and everyone sees that, and they don't have the trouble you have admitting it -- they merely profit from it.

I think the lengths to which you go to silence critics and even thugglishly threaten them, Hiro, let's me know just how much criticism is really "any publicity is good publicity" in your book.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Come off it, open source as a collaboration mechanism is clearly not a position relating to "stealing" anything; the fact that some people are keen on it because it corresponds with a more general idea that everything should be open is neither here nor there. Many successful companies take open source underpinnings and use them in closed products; this is standard practice, unless of course the licence is the GPL.

I tend not to release finished products with open scripts because

(a) if I'm going to participate in the capitalist economy on the Grid, it would be rude to do so, and it's discouraging to scripters for whom the incentive of a bit of spare cash gets them started making things if anyone can just pick up a freebie which does the same;
(b) releasing full product scripts encourages people to just copy them, stick them into prims, use the results, and not develop their own scripting skills;
(c) I am greedy and I want to pay my tier without having to shell out RL money;
(d) most importantly, I am vain and I want to make sure that things I spend time and effort on and which I think are good make have my name attached to them.

I put out open scripts which illustrate various basic principles; if someone wants to resell them, fine, that's part of the deal, it doesn't make any difference to the goal.

The issue for me regarding freebification of more developed products, though, is that there is no time limit on copyright in SL, and innovations move much faster here than in the real world. It's so *wasteful* having every new gun designer, say, work out the way to beat the llRezObject lag by using multiple scripts. That is countless hours of time spent duplicating other people's efforts which could be saved by proper education - which basically means full-permission scripts, classes are great but distance learning is much more useful in SL. Every one of those hours is time that could have been spent developing *new* things, or improving old things, or otherwise making a difference to the world beyond the brain of the creator. Thus as far as I'm concerned, the more of these things released openly, the better. Open source is the education that we have in SL.

As for established developers releasing products for free but not with open scripts - well hell yes, if I was going to try to dominate a market I would do exactly that. Kill off the competition as soon as they begin by undercutting them, then make money on premium products and commissions, but not let anyone resell what I'd done or learn from it. That's the free market for you.

I don't like that behaviour specifically because of its social implications, but then, I'm a dirty communist.

[Prokofy Neva]

Dear Ordinal,

Yes, I've heard many, many times about the benefits of open source, and how I am supposed to be grateful to open source, like General Motors, because it Brings Good Things to Life. I'm supposed to understand how the whole Internet and Second Life in particular "wouldn't be possible" without open source. Yeah, I got it, this has been rammed down my throat many, many times.

I don't accept either the socialistic or hypocritical premises at the extreme fringes of this movement, however, whatever its values and uses by the mainstream.

I'm glad you don't release open-source scripts and you've cited all the excellent reasons why this is not a good idea for you. Capitalism is of course made up of many such self-interested actions that as an aggregate create a free market.

There's another reason which you don't mention -- the cluttering up of the landscape of an early attempt at solving a problem which then replicates for ever more, and nobody realizes that the problem is solved better later, in even another free script, or one that is for pay.

For example, there are various editions of the script that gives notecards in different ways. Some have ceased working, thought they still get copied, because I think Lindens have done something to some facet of "given inventory" in their battle with grey goo.

I remember once being at a meeting and in a hurry to put out a box with a notecard giver at a meeting, and reached for the top of my inventory which had a prefab box in it with the script containing the maker's instructions -- I put it out and endured the sneers of tekkies who screamed that this wasn't the most efficient version of this script. Oh? Well...how was this prefab maker, a newer resident without access to the Tekkie Grapevine to know this? He just put it in his prim, and sold it with his product.

And that's just the problem all over SL -- there is no efficient way to spread the news, especially now that SL is so large, and you can't expect people to read even the forums library. I constantly point people to the forums and the script library, because I notice that there is a corrective process that occurs -- somebody puts up something for free, and others spot it's laggyness or problems and correct it. You have to stick through several rounds before copying the better version of a script.

When you have a lot of kids fooling around with scripts you get a lot of dirty, laggy scripts because they don't care about sim performance, they only care about their endless fuck-you hedonism and sense of entitlement.

Therefore the problem of the wastefulness is inevitable given lack of a standards committee and a vetting committee of Lindens -- which you'd never want, in the name of freedom.

But wait a second...you can't have it both ways when you talk about "waste". On the one hand, you want "learning" to take place. We are to always and everywhere deify "learning" of course. (I'm remembering that sarcastic OH NOES LEARNING) in the infamous CopyBot maker transcript).

So, which is it? If all these kiddies what to "learn," then of course they will re-discover the wheel and make their gun scripts. How else can they learn? By doing. If they just copy, they don't learn. That is, what guarantee do you have that people open up copies just to learn -- they may merely copy.

I remember one of my earlier, profound epiphanies about scripters and their utter cold and callous lack of concern for people, society, results of their handiwork, etc. They actually believe they are in a vacuum in which the only value is the absolutely maximum freedom and wide parameters for them to do what the fuck they want.

I remember when somebody asked on the forums for a notecard TAKER instead of the ubiquitous notecard GIVER. How could you have nearly 3 years of SL, and nobody made a TAKER -- they were all just hectoring each other with GIVER with instructions. None of them took suggestions?

This person innocently asked for this, and someone then made the script off-handedly and commented indifferently that they only made it because they were asked. They didn't ask themselves, now why didn't we, as a society make that before? What, we needed no way of leaving suggestions? In a box that would store in a situation where messages are always capped when offline, etc.? When people people need help organizing inventory?

The person who requested notecard giver wanted it for some club function or whatever; I took it and pasted the words "suggestion box" on it and began spreading it around. The Lindens began using it after I left it at Pathfinders (incurring hate mail for allegedly being FIC blah blah). Now it's pretty standard. And a later version of notecard giver I think Pathfinder made even tells you how many cards have been taken, or perhaps even by who (it's typical of SL that I've never been able to find out where to get a copy of that, which would be useful, despite messaging Pathfinder.)

I chuckle when I see these "educators" bundling up these free scripts out there like notecard giver and taker and calling it their "educational tools" and then getting proprietary over the concept ROFL.

As for dominating the market, then releasing customized versions -- I wish! That's not at all what CrystalShard Foo did with Freeview. She released FreeView, end of story -- no for-pay customized versions. She, Pol Tabla, and FlipperPA, clogged up SL with their distribution of this clunky script for months. Hundreds of people were inconvenienced of it. Only after I ran a huge campaign against it did she finally try to make it more coherent -- but not really fixed.

Dozens of other scripts, as I pointed out, do the same thing far better, and hide the clunkiness for users behind one-step motions.

Yet while she continues to distribute this cludgy awkward thing (I always tell people, "You get what you pay for: 0") she wouldn't dream of releasing Rez-Foo for free, eh?

Now with THAT she has people pay a license to use it. You could argue that if she is in the business of being "socially useful" she could release Rez-Foo to help the numerous prefab makers.

But instead, for ideological reasons I have trouble fathoming, she undercuts TV business, which she is fastidious about allowing to succeed and wishes to undercut (perhaps mass entertainment bothers her ideologically), but with the lucrative pre-fab market, she drops all her socialist instincts and makes pref-fab makers pay a handsome fee for licensing her script to include in their own package of prefab parts. It's amazing, really -- and that's what I mean by hypocrisy -- open-source something when I hate the people trying to make commercial use of it; close-source it when I wish to make a buck off a lucrative industry. Very self-serving.

One of the myths of open source is that there are these legions of scripters and programmers out there dying to learn. But...there aren't. It's a tiny community of people who all know each other. Even very knew people go find the other tekkie wikinistas pretty quickly. So we're merely enabling a handful of people to look at a script which 9 out of 10 times they look at merely to improve or re-do on their own from scratch. What, they couldn't pay even $10 o $50 Linden for this privilege?

Example: remember I asked you about making the random landmark generator? I asked Yumi at the same time. You both made the same thing, only I think yours was slightly different or perhaps less laggy? or? I forget the details (and they could be subjective).

I then gave both these scripts to Torley. She ignored them, they were copyable. Instead, when she had a new random generator put at Orientation Island, she had yet another person make the script all over again. That person may or may not have known about your scripts, may or may not have copied and adjusted them and released them under their own name, who knows (I'm not sure of the netiquette involved when they do that).

Today, we have a random landmark generator that I constantly complain is broken. That is, I wonder if the whole reason they had someone else script it is so that they can control it and tweak it on OK.

I constantly protest about the load balance problem, over and over again. I see on alts that the random generator, being random and therefore able to generate the same thing 100 times in a row, too, will do just that -- randomly supposedly generating 100 landmarks to the same place -- so consistently that I wonder if in fact the thing has been tweaked to favour one location.

I watch the traffic on the newbie landing areas and I recall for awhile, I saw the traffic all balance out for 2 days, as if they were finally changing it from random to sequential, loading a list of landmarks one after another. But...it then went back to skewing the results again, with windfalls for some infohubs and others being deprived of newbie traffic. This is one of those mysteries of Second Life.

I just don't buy your contradiction, in the end, Ordinal. You claim that instead of spending hours re-doing old things, people could be innovating. Yet just like in ceramics, where everybody has to start by making the same clumsy finger pot, so I imagine in scripting that everybody has to walk through the steps of making a gun shoot when they start. If they are to learn building blocks, they have to replicate them. In fact, the hours spent re-creating the wheel is exactly the building block they need to master wheel-making, that they need before moving on to vehicle making.

There's another argumentation to be had for open-sourcing you don't cite, which would be from the users' end. Users like me benefit from being able to copy and use the basic things like "notecard giver". They are like building blocks of the world. But would REALLY be so horrible to sell them for some nominal price? perhaps that would motivate the makers to police them more and add innovations when they appear to prevent lagging, or to overcome Linden patches that break them.

[Cocoanut]

In an attempt to understand more about open source, I looked it up on Wikipedia, and found the following (caps my emphasis):

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The idea of open source is then to eliminate the access costs of the consumer and the creator by reducing the restrictions of copyright. This will lead to creation of additional works, which build upon previous work AND ADD TO GREATER SOCIAL BENEFIT. . .

Others argue that society loses through open sourced goods. Because there is a loss in monetary incentive to the creation of new goods, some argue that new products will not be created. This argument seems to apply particularly to the business model where extensive research and development is done, e.g. pharmaceuticals. HOWEVER, OTHERS ARGUE THAT VISUAL ART AND OTHER WORKS OF AUTHORSHIP SHOULD BE FREE. These proponents of extensive open source ideals argue that there should be no monetary incentive for artists.

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That explains for me the shrugged-shoulders attitude of people in LibSL and others, who consider it no big deal for works of art and other authorship to be taken by, say, Copybot.

And it explains the little bromides they keep offering like, "Well, just make more stuff faster, and put your old stuff at $1 as soon as it's stolen."

I daresay any society which fails to provide renumeration to its artists and creators of other authored goods will soon find itself lacking in quality of such goods, as the creators go off to do something that will actually put food on their table.

The same is true in SL.

coco

coco

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Sure, there is certainly an issue with the "learning by in-world distributed script" model, in that nobody ever knows whether they're looking at something which was passé three years ago or is simple crap. I prefer to keep scripting examples online where they can be updated when I learn something new or someone points out a flaw. The scripting wiki is good for that - it should ideally include more examples rather than just documentation, but it's excellent up-to-date reference material.

The thing is that the problems with that model, that "postable" scripts rely on the priorities of scripters and wiki owners rather than users and that people really do prefer to have a script in-world and tinker with it to get it to do what they want, rather than read up outside the world, mean that it's neither practical nor desirable to have it as the only mechanism. Off-world sources are the best reference material, but in-world scripts are the best for getting people to learn, and in the environment that we live in where there aren't any comprehensive educational programs for LSL, and no economic imperative that would result in them coming into existence (where's the motivation? make other people waste their time reinventing the wheel, why not, if you're a professional scripter it restricts your competition) one has to look at the best avenues for spreading knowledge if one is interested in that at all.

Actually, I have to say as somebody to whom people do come to for scripting advice, there are a surprising number of people who are interested in learning more - they may not have any ambition to become some great scripting legend, but they'd like to know how to have things make noises when touched, or give out notecards when you say a name, or spin around... and not quite in the way that the freebie scripts that they have will do. Maybe they want to have something spinning around the X-axis rather than the Z-axis. Maybe they want to have it only give out a notecard on the second touch rather than the first.

I don't subscribe to the idea that there's some need for apprenticeship, that people new to scripting have to spend their time working out how to do basic things which other people have already solved as part of some learning process. I know that I can learn basic principles just as quickly from good, complete examples as from bad ones, in fact quicker. What is needed is scripts which do simple, useful things, but which can also be opened up for modification and consequent learning about how this stuff works at all.