Oh sure, *obviously* you'll never prevent copying completely. But that's a straw man - the difference here is between making life difficult for the thieves (as Apple does - sufficiently so that the jailbreak/piratebay applet market is no threat to iPhone developers) and leaving the doors and windows open and unlocked as the Lindens are at the moment with their current Open Source model.
OK, we can argue about this philosophically backwards and forwards all you want. The big difference is that whilst you may contribute the odd patch, I, and other content creators like me pay the Lindens salary. As I say I have three sims - a couple of homesteads supported by content sales and a full sim which has on it one of the more popular spots in SL - again supported by content sales there. So approximately USD$600 per month to the lab in total via myself, plus all the marginal payments from people being in world because I'm providing entertainment. Realistically say USD$10,000+ per annum to the lab? Now I don't have great margins on this - sims are expensive - but it's relaxing and fun to build, and I have a sufficiently positive cash-flow that I continue. I've no great attachment to SL either though - bottom line is if I start losing money I'm out. Every other mid-range content provider (i.e. of sufficient turnover to own or rent a whole sim) I know of operates similarly, and whilst to be sure I'm nothing special and if I left SL now others would take my place, the circumstances we're considering here whereby widespread content theft would make my holdings unprofitable would impact my peers similarly. If I'm forced out of SL because my business model fails then a vast swath of SL will be disappearing at the same time. I'm aware this could sound a bit like "It's my ball and I'll take it home if you don't play the game I want". It's not intended to - philosophically I'm all for Open Source myself. I simply wish to emphasise my particular economics - which I'm certain are extremely common across the grid - and that the Lab *has* to get the balance between Open Source and content protection correct. Previously I thought it had - but from what I see on this list over the last few days have revised my opinion. Kevin -----Original Message----- From: Anders Arnholm [mailto:and...@arnholm.se] Sent: 16 March 2010 09:06 To: Kevin Woolley Cc: opensource-dev@lists.secondlife.com Subject: Re: [opensource-dev] oh give me a break Kevin Woolley wrote: > c. Create an 'iPhone' like walled garden. There are numerous ways you could > do this, for example required all connection to the grid to operate via a > licensed closed-source version of libsl which uses some form of > public/private key to identify itself. Or why not strip back the viewer so > it's analogous to the iPhone hardware and licence 'applet' development for > it? > > For sure iPhone aint jail-breaked and there are no iPhone apps on the piratebay.... some think the rates of copied content in iPhone is higher that any other phone. Sure looks like a bright future. -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean. _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/OpenSource-Dev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
