> But he fears that most of the companies working on such a project have missed one essential component of lasting success: the fact that people are as much creators as they are consumers. “There isn’t as yet any evidence that people want to have a purely consumptive entertainment experience in social virtual worlds,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any evidence in human history that you can get a billion people to just kind of sit there and veg out, watch stuff. You can’t get to the kind of usage levels that metaverse brands want to get to with a consumer non-participatory experience.”
I think this is the money quote. Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves just to consume content and engage with brands.
Yeah. I spent quite a lot of time in SL - I had an art gallery where I showcased my RL photography and interacted with the visitors when online. My avatar was a sort of steampunk soviet artist manic pixie dream girl, just for the Lulz originally but eventually I really liked it.
I had zero interest in interacting with brands. It was much more fun to go to a public space and sit there coding using the in-world dev tools - making something like a radar that sent alerts when people visited your parcel of a land, or a comedy UAV, and then explaining what you were doing to a journalist or psychology student or vampiress or predator or similar.
[Edit] added details as they came back to me, many years later
I spent just a bit of time. I remember building a jetpack suit and learning just enough of the scripting language the I could make flames come out when I flew around. I worked on it on some kind of free-build island. There was a machine in the background that looked like it took in a constant stream of cows at one end and spat out meat at the other end.
And it was always a toss-up what you'd find in people's little plots of land. Beautiful Japanese garden? Beautiful sex dungeon? Who knows!
It appears that modern internet companies fail to understand that a "brand megaphone" is not a desirable product for anyone, except brands of course. The internet is sick now.
Do any real end users really care about "interacting with brands?" If I stack-ranked all the reasons I enjoy the Internet, "Interacting with brands" won't even make the list. What does that even mean? Do people really go online so they can "interact" with Mountain Dew? What would that even look like?
After I wrote that last sentence I checked and indeed the "Mountain Dew" twitter account has 777.2K followers. W--T--F--? Am I the lone crazy person?
Doritos has 870K followers. McDonalds has 4.7M followers. Are these all bots? What real live human being actually wants a twitter feed from Doritos?
> What real live human being actually wants a twitter feed from Doritos?
Somebody who really likes Doritos and wants to know about new flavors, get discounts, et cetera. I'm sure there are plenty of people who fall into that category. Maybe not 870k, but definitely not zero.
Having tested Meta Horizon (which I think is supposed to be current Meta's metaverse? But I could be wrong), It's completely user-generated content, there is very little company-generated content.(there is very little content altogether but that's another joke) So I have a hard time understanding that comment...?
This is true and its so painful reading these armchair comments. Meta is focused on games and UGC but you'd never know if you read the median comment here.
I would then argue that there was (still is?) a massive marketing failure, probably because there was a greater focus on marketing to companies than users.
My perspective is that I was pretty into VRChat at the time and found no compelling reason to even try the early Metaverse.
Meta's virtual world projects always give me the sense that they're aimed at set of personas/demographics that has almost zero overlap with the people actually running or building those projects.
That's why they fail. Virtual worlds - almost like real ones - are super-platforms, not applications. The interactions are too varied and complex to reduce to a set of simple primary use cases or personas.
So, if you're building a virtual world that you yourself wouldn't want to use, you're almost certainly going to fail.
maybe the metaverse isn't for you. just because you don't want to do a thing doesn't mean there aren't others out there that do.
maybe all that blather about "the long tail" in the late 90s was halfway correct. the intarwebs allow relatively small communities of people who are interested in a particular thing to do that particular thing. But a small percentage of a very large number can still be large.
if 99.9% of people don't want the hassle of maintaining an alternative identity online, that's fine. but that still means that 0.1% of people do.
if your critique is "the metaverse is laughable because the majority of people don't participate in it" you may be missing the point. if your critique is "it's entirely possible meta over-estimated interest in the metaverse," then i heartily agree.
i think second-life-like online experiences are useful, but they seem to have been over-hyped (to say the least.)
The problem is that Facebook appealed to basically everyone. You had young and old alike from various social circles all using the platform.
If Metaverse only appeals to a small group of people, it’s a failure. Because it’s supposed to push Facebook forward, and it’s hard for a company to limit its own market. It could be done successfully by spinning the company off, but for whatever reason they just do not want to do that.
And I think fundamentally VR and virtual worlds is just not going to appeal to a mass market of people. There are so many people who are just not interested in spending time in ‘Techno-world’. These people liked Facebook because (a) they talked to their real friends and (b) it was unobtrusive enough to not bother them. A lot of people quit Facebook as soon as they felt it was encroaching their lives too much.
I’m confused about what you’re saying here. GP doesn’t imply no one could possibly enjoy metaverse; when they are talking about “what people want,” I think this should be taken as “what [the vast majority of] people want.” This is in line with your .01% business.
no - Meta wants to be the front-face of a system of Digital Twins, where only official records are legally valid, and access to those records is monitored, and changing those records involves opaque backrooms. Many Fortune 500 have already committed, and multiple small implementations are being used now.
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Step 1. Build at least 1 decent mmo. Have an off-game hub where people can interact and show off stuff they collected in said mmo.
Step 2. Keep adding more games and activities, boom! Metaverse.
Facebook went all in with VR and social interactions but who cares about any of that when you give users no reason to use it. You need the GAMES first otherwise why would people want to be in a glorified version of a zoom meeting?. This stuff is obvious and yet they keep wasting billions on this cart with no horse in sight.
I always think about Fortnite, witch besides the game has concerts and film festivals. Fortnite creative I think is about building things on your island. You can make and share your own games and Now they have "unreal engine light" (Unreal Engine for Fortnite) so making custom games/experiences is becoming a thing.
Tim Sweeny talked about building the Metaverse from a game at the last Game Development Conference.
He talked about it not being linked to one company, but I'm not sure where it was going.[1] (8 minutes)
I disagree. If porn gets to be too big of a use-case too early it'll drive away other use cases. OnlyFans was not originally for porn, but if you hear someone has an OF, you assume it's to consume or publish porn. That's mainly because an early investment came from the owner of a porn site.
Porn definitely helps a platform's adoption and growth, but it needs to be an "oh by the way", and not the feature.
Meta has the same problem Nintendo has, only they really know how to develop for their platform properly. But UNLIKE Nintendo they don't have a massive hoard of IP and seasoned game design experience to draw from.
Also just in general game developers have yet to fully exploit VR. Most VR games are either one off experiences or 2D games projected to a headset.
Don't get me wrong some creative stuff has been done. Stuff like beat saber, superhot and even VR Chat make use of the VR space, but most VR games just feel very clunky and don't have much replay value.
It's a very once and a while it's fun arcade experience packed into a console price tag.
It's also the described metaverse evolution in Ready Player One, which is six years older than Fornite. It felt like an obvious and pre-existing idea when Ready Player One was published, so I wouldn't be surprised to hear about older incarnations.
Tron? Not quite the same, in that Flynn didn't enter voluntarily and it's explicitly unexpected for a human to enter, but the merger of games with a virtual world is there.
I saw a Second Life demonstration at the Sun Microsystems booth at the 2007 ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in Reno, NV. As I recall, I was in a sort of virtual conference room. I was amazed and blown away and thought to myself, this is obviously going to be the Next Big Thing. I'm glad to see Second Life is still active. Also the Guardian article is a bit long, but really quite good if you have time to read it.
- At its height in the early 2000s, Second Life attracted only around a million monthly users, a fraction of the number enjoyed by some online video games (the makers of Fortnite claim a consistent 80 million)
- The population skews middle-aged and around 20% of users have a disability that makes real-world interaction difficult.
If you mean it's sad that their real world interactions are difficult, then yes. But it's great that these people have a virtual world they can go to where they can have social contact and express themselves without as many of those limits.
Thank you for so concisely explaining Second Life's most positive and important impact that is, due to its nature, also one of the hardest to demonstrate.
I worked for Linden Lab for over five years and yet I didn't fully appreciate this until after I left.
The things that make Second Life interesting to me - such its programmability, economy, wildness, diversity along more axes than you can easily imagine, and sheer unpredictability - make it, in my eyes, the most interesting thing on the internet. But those attributes only discuss its value by talking in technical or monetary terms.
The most important question is: why does Second Life matter to people? The most important answer comes via the massive number of people who can enjoy a Second Life in ways that their First Life, for whatever reason, doesn't allow.
Rosedale suggests that one reason virtual worlds are not as popular as they have been hyped is that people have difficulty "embodying" a virtual avatar, projecting themselves into it. I have no problem with doing that, but I'm a Second Life user. It does seem somewhat plausible. First-person video games avoid that requirement. But there are also plenty of third person games too.
Another thing he says is that pure consumerism fails on virtual worlds because people want to create. I actually think this might be part of what has made SL a niche interest. At the very minimum, an SL user must "create" their avatar through combining a plethora of commercially available avatar components. A typical avatar consists of 10 to 40+ different pieces bought separately from different creators, a long with customizing the 50 or so shape sliders. Avatars aren't a single fixed mesh like in other worlds. This makes people watching super interesting because every avatar is unique and indivudialized. But you can't just grab a pre-made avatar and call it done without looking like a "noob", and I think this is actually a hurdle to wide adoption.
To be clear, few people in SL are building worlds because its too expensive. Most people spend on avatar clothing and such, and that's what they do most of the time
Second Life is a bizarre, organic creation that nobody wants to repeat in the shape it exists. It has lots of porn. It has furries. It has goreans. It's almost entirely built by a dedicated and very fickle community. It has a marketplace on which you can buy hundreds of varieties of a penis.
Pretty much nobody besides Philip Rosedale wants to repeat that (and he tried with High Fidelity, which now still lives on as open source forks, including the one I'm part of). That's because no sane company wants that tricky mess on their hands. They want something nice and fluffy that won't scandalize grandma, not SL, where people made a special client that restrains the user, for BDSM applications.
Pretty much every sanitized clone of SL flopped because all that weirdness is what gives it its charm.
Yes. That the society works, and has worked for two decades, is fascinating.
A few things help with stability. There's a fully open source clone, Open Simulator, and sizable grids which use it. The number of users is not huge, but it's large enough to offer an alternative. This keeps Linden Lab management from getting too uppity.
Landowners have considerable power over what people can do on their land, but no power outside it. This distributes authority. It removes the need for the armies of minimum-wage goons armed with ban hammers that Facebook and Roblox employ. Second Life has a "governance" department. It's tiny and rarely seen.
Space is what keeps everything from being in the same place. The annoyance radius of a jerk is about 100 meters, in a world the size of Los Angeles. Somewhere in Second Life, a few people are probably being jerks right now. They're mostly being ignored and will probably give up. There's no way to spam to the whole world. Nor is there any way to advertise to the whole world.
Yes, I think the grid model and charging for land was a very good choice for SL in hindsight.
Charging for virtual land sounds stupid to a lot of people, but the tradeoff is that everyone has neighbors. As you do something on your chunk of land random passers by see stuff happening, you start talking to nearby people, and a community forms.
Over time it makes for organic development.
High Fidelity and the like are much trickier socially -- you're always either on your own turf with barely anybody choosing to visit your place specifically out of a big list, or on somebody else's domain. Visiting places can feel less like wandering around and more like randomly teleporting into somebody's house.
One thing High Fidelity seemed to be considering is domain nesting -- something like you go into a building and the inside is another server. This might be a good enough hybrid of both models. You can't have an infinite mainland, but you can have hub worlds of sorts. It could be interesting to try.
People tried, including both Linden Lab (Second Life company), and Philip Rosedale on his own.
The official follow-up to SL from Linden Lab was Sansar. Built from the ground up to be much prettier and faster than SL. But it kinda sucked all the charm from it. Sansar is a very static environment where you build the world in an editor, then people walk around in it. Meanwhile, SL has a full blown in-world content creation and script editor.
Philip Rosedale left LL, and made a new company which got very confusingly named "High Fidelity". This was a SL 2.0 of sorts, much more in the spiritual vein of Second Life. Also better engine than SL, better performance, and better scripting. Unlike SL it's a distributed architecture. High Fidelity was... weird. The architecture was like the most hardcore people from some deeply political place like the GNU project (it's Apache licensed, I mean more in terms of ethos) got together to make the least monetizable architecture they could. Content is hosted on any HTTP server, servers are run by anybody who wants, and there's no lock-in whatsoever. It horrified content creators. And so it didn't make any money.
High Fidelity still survives as Open Source projects, I'm part of one: https://overte.org/
>The architecture was like the most hardcore people from some deeply political place like the GNU project (it's Apache licensed, I mean more in terms of ethos) got together to make the least monetizable architecture they could. Content is hosted on any HTTP server, servers are run by anybody who wants, and there's no lock-in whatsoever. It horrified content creators.
So I thought! But within an hour there I was completely baffled as to how it was going to ever make any money. The overall architecture seems a better fit for a deeply ideological small group of people trying to live on donations, than a commercial company.
So eventually it died, we picked it up, and now have a non-profit.
Come on this is literally the only scenario where NFTs make sense. Cross game support of NFTs make no sense because the developers see zero incentives to allow competing content but if it is the same game hosted by a variety of people then on hundreds of servers then interoperability has the benefit that your content will be available on other servers and therefore you also have incentives to accept other people's content. The only problem is that Blockchain is too expensive. Who wants to pay excessive fees for inconsequential in-game items? Who wants to host a full Ethereum node?
Hardly anyone.
The code isn't a good fit for supporting any sort of ownership, including NFTs. They would be trivial to rip and anyone could use your expensive junk without paying for it.
There's not a good system of ownership and asset control either.
And as a project we're ideologically opposed to cryptocurrency and NFTs and just finished ripping out the remains of the Blockchain code from the original project.
It sounds like you may not have used SL in a while. The current graphics are at least as good as a triple-A game, if you visit locations that are up-to-date and choose quality avatar components. Of course, rendering it may crush your computer (although I am satisfied with the performance of my 1080). All assets are user-created and most are not professionals who understand game asset optimization.
To your other points though, SL is quirky and has an incredibly steep learning curve. It has a lot of technical debt, as it remains compatible with content created 20 years ago.
Rosedale has a startup called High Fidelity, and they were creating basically what you suggest, a new SL without the technical debt. It was also distributed instead of centralized. Unfortunately that world has shut down because it wasn't commercially successful. (I expect largely because the people who would have been their early adopters were in SL, and didn't want to move until there was enough content available, and not enough users meant nobody was creating content.) I wish they had been successful, the platform architecture was really good.
As someone who's writing a viewer (client) for Second Life/Open Simulator, I can comment on that.
The big problems reported by new users are:
- "What do I do now"?
- "How do I fix this &#@#* clothing problem"?
- "Why is this thing so slow"? (usually from experienced gamers)
Entering Second Life is not like entering a game world. It's like being arriving in a new big city.
The world is completely indifferent to you. It won't make you do anything. You can stand in one place
forever. Some new users never get beyond the entry Social Islands. (Social Island 10 is the Port Authority Bus Terminal of Second Life, inhabited by the same kinds of losers found in real world bus terminals, from panhandlers to idiots with large boom boxes.)
Once new users get past that, they're in a world the size of Los Angeles with about 35,000 to 55,000 logged in users. The population density is very low. Users who just start walking down a road can walk for many hours without finding much of interest. They'll pass stores, houses, gas stations, warehouses (driving around and making deliveries is a game within Second Life), motels, truck stops, airports, and marinas.
Many of these are beautifully detailed, but deserted. This is what happens when you have a user-created world where people can rent land and build. They rent land and build, but aren't there much. Second Life is fun for people who can create things and make their own fun. There's not a huge amount of compelling passive entertainment. Roblox and Fortnite have built in casual games with a metaverse tacked on. Second Life has a metaverse with a few casual games. That's the "what do I do now" problem.
Clothing is created by users from mesh primitives, and so, there are a large number of incompatible avatars and clothing systems. Getting mesh clothing from different sellers to layer properly is a huge headache. Making it work is dumped on the user, with a large number of tuning parameters. This is the single biggest technical headache for new users. This whole area needs to be automated. Roblox has done that, with their new automatic mesh adjustment system. So it's possible to solve that, but it's not being worked on much. That's the clothing problem.
The graphics can be good, although since all content is user-generated, the quality varies. Frame rates can vary from 10 FPS to 150 FPS depending on the content in the area. It's that awful because Second Life was designed to run on the hardware of 20 years ago. The clients are mostly single thread and not GPU-oriented. That's fixable for gamer computers. I get a consistent 60 FPS with my own client on a system sized for a modern AAA title. The existing clients will run on low-end computers, although badly, which mine will not.
The overall architecture of the system isn't bad. It's quite distributed. Each region (256x256m in Second Life, can be larger in Open Simulator, a C# re-implementation of the servers) is run by a separate server process, and those run at many different server locations. Second Life currently has all their servers in one location on AWS, but the system does not require that. At times in the past, it's been split between data centers.
It looks like a huge seamless world, and crossing between regions works. Mostly. Region crossing failures are still frequent. The current dev team doesn't understand the problem and avoids working on it.
The biggest problem with the user created content is that lower levels of detail tend to be badly constructed. Second Life was designed before automated level of detail creation worked well, and the
built-in mesh reduction algorithm was terrible. It's recently been upgraded from terrible to mediocre. The good algorithms are either brittle academic code or expensive (Simplygon or Unreal Engine.)
> Rosedale has a startup called High Fidelity, and they were creating basically what you suggest, a new SL without the technical debt. It was also distributed instead of centralized. Unfortunately that world has shut down because it wasn't commercially successful. (I expect largely because the people who would have been their early adopters were in SL, and didn't want to move until there was enough content available, and not enough users meant nobo dy was creating content.)
HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP. There's no grid. There's no central asset server. There are no mandatory user accounts. So anything you sell can be quickly copied, hosted wherever, and duplicated with complete impunity. SL will kick you off the grid if you misbehave, but HiFi was made in such a way there was no grid to ban people from.
Besides that it was nigh impossible to give them money if you wanted to. You could buy domain names (as in pay for an internal analog of DNS) that was something like $15/year. And that was completely optional. It wouldn't have paid for their coffee budget.
As far as I can tell there was no coherent plan to make money at all, other than "let's tax the economy" in a system that not only was utterly hated by content creators, but where anybody could set up a competing shop any time they wanted.
> I wish they had been successful, the platform architecture was really good.
The code still lives on! Feel free to join our Discord or meetings: https://overte.org/
I saw your other comment after I posted that. I didn't realize the content was so easily copied. Makes sense that creators would be reluctant to adopt it. The less commercially motivated creators were likely affected by the chicken-and-egg problem.
I have much respect for Rosedale for working to create a virtual world based on free software principles. He has said he was expecting the VR headset market to grow sooner. Perhaps he was waiting for that before putting effort into offering commercial services. (Poor timing... if I recall correctly, Quest 2 launched and/or got popular soon after HF closed?)
High Fidelity announced they were changing tracks to a corporate targeted product in May 2019, and entirely shut down in Jan 2020.
The Quest 2 came out in May 2019, and Covid19 became a big problem just a bit after HiFi shut down! Talk about some bad timing.
But anyway, in my opinion HiFi's problem wasn't so much that as bad management. To me it seems like they tried to combine an architecture and a business model that didn't make any sense. The way I see it, there were roughly 3 meaningful business plans, none of which they used:
1. Imitate SL. This would have meant having a grid, a mandatory login screen, and probably a closed server codebase. Keep people inside the walled garden and milk them.
2. Run an open source consulting company. Basically they make this software for custom events, like virtual conventions, concerts, meetings, maybe even a game engine. They'll customize whatever needs be for you. And then there's the source on Github under some commercially unpalatable license like the AGPL, for whoever wants to play with it, to advertise the tech and get contributions.
3. Embrace the community. Run a kickstarter/patreon, talk constantly to the community, sell swag, and basically act like a big youtuber that takes donations from their fanbase. I think they were probably way too big for that to work.
I think #2 had the most potential, especially once Covid19 started. #1 would have required deep architectural changes and would have greatly angered the existing users.
I'm part of a non-profit that develops the code so we're doing #3.
>HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP. There's no grid. There's no central asset server. There are no mandatory user accounts. So anything you sell can be quickly copied, hosted wherever, and duplicated with complete impunity. SL will kick you off the grid if you misbehave, but HiFi was made in such a way there was no grid to ban people from.
That sounds amazing. I had no idea something like this existed. I never encountered anyone mentioning it on HN, reddit, discord, etc. Maybe marketing was also an issue for them?
> HiFi horrified Second Life content creators. It downloads assets from HTTP.
So does Second Life. It's just that the asset formats are unusual.
You can't really prevent people from downloading game assets. You may be able to prevent them from reselling them as their own, by recognizing duplicates. The Open Simulator people are working on change-tolerant hashing algorithms for this.
All true, but there's a vast difference is in the degree of control.
So say a SL avatar maker spends 40 hours making an avatar. At say $10/hour they'd like to make at least $400 to make it worthwhile. So if we sell at $5/each that's 80 copies to be sold. (just making up some plausible numbers here)
Here's how things square up:
SL: Buying stuff is the normal, encouraged mechanism with a well integrated marketplace and currency system.
Ripping an avatar requires additional tools. Ripping an avatar may be fairly difficult due to baked textures.
If found, you may be banned and lose everything on your account. Some things you own may not be replaceable. If you distribute your ripped avatar, LL could conceivably trace its movements and remove it from the inventories of anyone you gave a copy to. All in all, a considerable amount of pain you can get into for saving yourself $5. Most people wouldn't use a ripped avatar out of fear of endangering their account.
So, it's certainly not perfect, but on SL things are very manageable. If LL cares, misbehavior can be punished to the point it's not worth the risk to anyone who actually has anything invested into SL.
HiFi: There is a marketplace, but obtaining the HFC currency is bizarrely painful, requiring obtaining Ethereum, setting up an in-world meeting with a company representative, and exchanging ETH for HFC. Seriously, that's how it worked.
Ripping an avatar is trivial with basic knowledge of the scripting system. The actual avatar is stored on a completely normal HTTP server you can get it from with wget or a web browser. It's in GLTF or FBX.
If found, sure, HiFi can ban your account, but you don't need one. You don't really have an inventory or anything to lose. There's no grid, you're able to visit every part of the universe you're not specifically banned from. You can trivially host your copy of the avatar on any hosting service. You can share it with anyone and the system can't prevent it in any way.
It's possible the avatar maker couldn't even sue you easily if they wanted, because you can just keep using non-official servers hosted in some place that doesn't care about US law like Russia.
It's very much possible for a ripped avatar to spread far and wide with it being nigh impossible to stop. There's no real central authority, so it's pretty much your word against theirs.
> High Fidelity, a new SL without the technical debt.
Not really. Both Sansar and High Fidelity were "game level loaders". You go to an area, you wait a minute or two while the map and content downloads, and you're now running a world locally. Neither of those is a big seamless world loaded through which you can move freely, like Second Life. That's a much easier problem technically. But you hit the edge of the world pretty fast.
Sinespace is a good example of that genre. It has a user count in 2 digits. There's a version of it for business, Breakroom, which is simply Sinespace with pre-built office buildings, better customer support, and higher prices. It was used more during the pandemic.
There are many such systems. They're usually built using Unity, which seems to be good for this.
> It sounds like you may not have used SL in a while. The The current graphics are at least as good as a triple-A game, if you visit locations that are up-to-date and choose quality avatar components
I'm comparing to the graphics of games such as God of War, Outer Worlds, Death Stranding, Cyberpunk 2077. Maybe not the latest or the best graphics but what I'm familiar with. I don't think people complain that those graphics are horrible.
The SL server has an OKish open source version, opensimulator. Unfortunately nobody wants to work on the viewer because it is old , has tons of legacy stuff that has been patched up a gazillion times (e.g. classic/mesh avatars, "bakes-on-mesh" etc). The interface is full of stupid defaults (pie menus) and for today's standards it s extremely hard to use. The crowd that uses it is thus self-selected geeks or 3d artists
Huh? The Linden Lab client is LGPL-licensed.[1] Source is here.[2]
The Firestorm viewer, which is a derivative of the Linden Lab viewer, is also LGPL-licensed.[3]
Okay. fine. It's Lgpl. But the prohibitions are the same. If you, as a corporate entity, want to make and distribute changes to the viewer AND NOT BE REQUIRED TO PUBLISH THE CHANGES, then you have to purchase a commercial license.
The deal with (L)GPL is if you make and distribute software based on (L)GPL licensed source code with changes you have made, you are required by the terms of the license to publicly release those changes you have made.
And now lets say you work for a very large corporation, let's call it VOZ. And let's say you have some super-secret things you want to embed in the viewer, including names and ip addresses of custom grids and a few secret keys because your SSO is based on a prototype of DES-ticket Kerberos from the 1960s. Or maybe much of VOZ's business is based on software patents, and you want to use code based on these patents in the changes you make.
If you accept the license and download the viewer code and make the changes, compile it and distribute it to other VOZ, Inc. employees and partners you have changed the original code with respect to the (L)GPL license. You are obligated to publicly release those changes. And releasing the derivative work under the (L)GPL may invalidate some software patent protections you think you have. So you have a choice between a) not distributing the modified viewer and b) distributing it in violation of the terms of the license. (see terms 4 and 10 of the LGPL license referenced above.)
But there's a third option. You can purchase a commercial license to the code. Even though the code is also licensed under the GPL, the owner of the copyright is free to license the code using whichever license they see fit. The copyright holder can make the code generally available under a (L)GPL license, but also make it available it to other parties under a less restrictive commercial license where using the code does not obligate you to publish your changes or imply you are abandoning interest in your software patents.
And this is why I largely use a BSD license. Generally speaking, I'm not looking to force people who use my code to make a statement about software patents, either pro or con. If the code is useful to them, great! I don't want to force them to release their changes if they don't want to. If they want to maintain a separate fork, even a private fork, more power to them.
Not a problem in practice. If you have a proprietary task, put it in a subprocess. That's how the voice system, which is from Vivox and not very good, works. If you have proprietary data, put it in a file read at startup.
It is exactly a problem in practice because Linden was using the GPL for exactly that purpose.
Go back and reread my response above. And then reread the (L)GPL. If you modify (L)GPL'd code, co pile it and distribute the executables you produced, you are REQUIRED by the terms of the license to release the source.
It's honestly incredible how meta didn't pick this route.
With all the money poured in they could have just copied SL with a fresh coat of paint. They could have poached all their devs or even just buy the whole company.
At least we got some good laughs watching it fall apart. The eifell tower selfie still cracks me up.
The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain. It's about buying into the metaverse, buy your plot of land, buy your sneakers, buy your new hairstyle, buy your emote laugh animation. Every possible interaction is monetized. It's baffling, like why would anyone want to spend time in a dystopian capitalism simulator.
VRChat seems to embrace the pure spirit of the thing, from what I can tell as an outsider. People are free to express themselves and be creative, making their own avatars and worlds from scratch if they want. It seems like a wacky hangout space, the whole point is to not have constraints. Trying to turn it into anything beyond that seems like it would fail.
But then again, I also don't understand why people drop thousands of dollars on Fortnite skins. I don't feel out of touch with tech, but this I simply do not get, at all.
> The latest crop of "metaverses" are almost all intertwined with blockchain.
Most of the hyped "blockchain" metaverses never went live. All hype and NFT sales, no 3D metaverse at all. Of the few that did go live, Decentraland has 111 users in world right now,[1], Somnium Space has about 1 (yes, one)[2]. Sandbox doesn't have a public counter, but one source says 616 users in Q4 2022.[3] There are people just selling parcels on maps, such as Upland.
Otherside, the world from Bored Ape Yacht Club, has run two live demos for a few hours each, but they're just demos of Improbable's technology with some of their game art.
There was supposed to be a third demo in Q2 2023. We're coming up on the end of Q2 2023.
They raised US$400 million selling land, and the SEC is investigating.
Reality: blockchain based metaverses did not happen.
One point the author could have mentioned, which provides some context is Linden's original CTO, Cory Ondrejka wound up as Facebook's CTO way back in the 2010 time frame. When a number of us were laid off from Linden Lab in 2010, quite a few landed at Facebook. During the 2010's Facebook was positively lousy with former Lindens.
I think this is the money quote. Meta seemed to be under the impression that people want to invent digital versions of themselves just to consume content and engage with brands.