On 01/09/10 14:56, Mike Dickson wrote:
More on OGP below.
Like Diva, I also think that good standards very often only come out
of working implementations. Hence, though I've
been following the VWRAP lists (and OGP before that) I haven't been
participating since there's been a lot of
hard-to-follow discussion without much real-world consequence. And as
a working developer I don't have the luxury of
sitting on my tush and contemplating the Platonic world of future
standards all day ;) (joking).
This is really the issue that has always bothered me. There's been an
assertion that working code was more important than "standards". Truth
is, standards are hard work, its more fun to hack code. And there *was*
an existing implementation. LL and IBM demonstrated some limited cross
grid functionality (hence the OGP work). And asserting politics was an
issue is just lame. Linden Labs put forward a *working* system as a
starting point along with some jointly developed code demonstrating
limited interoperability. The code was even available to the OpenSim
team. So if there was a "political agenda" it was on both sides. LL
wanting to preserve some compatibility with their existing system (but
willing to consider changes) and on the HyperGrid side a desire to
explore and research ideas.
What still remains is the hard work of creating a standard that defines
interoperability. It would be great to see that progress, along with the
code.
I certainly agree that standards are hard work, which is why creating them without reference to any working examples
seems an almost impossible task to me. But that's just my own opinion which is not burdened by decades of experience :)
I also have to echo what Dahlia said earlier. OGP was extremely limited, afaik being nothing beyond transporting an
avatar name to a 'default' avatar on another grid. There was no other identity or appearance preservation, let alone
access to inventory - all extremely tough problems to address in any scalable or secure manner.
Dahlia's phrase "OpenSim community" rather than "OpenSim team" illuminates very well the structures in play here. In
terms of the core group, I wouldn't say that we were a team as such but more a community of people with a reasonably
common set of interests who agree to abide by certain norms and a few rules. There was never really an "OpenSim team"
to respond to OGP proposals. Rather, some people were interested in it and implemented the required bits and pieces and
other people were ambivalent or more interested in alternative architectures.
--
Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
http://justincc.org
http://twitter.com/justincc
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