Subject: Re: [mmox] CICP - relevant work?

From: Marshall Eubanks <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Mar 2009 14:20:09 -0400

to return to this issue -

I would urge that CICP be considered by MMOX.

Here is the spec, such as it is

http://greenphosphor.com:8080/CICP_v1_spec.pdf

this

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/finally_a_practical_use_for_second_life.php

says

CICP, or Content Injection and Control Protocol, was developed in- 
house by Green Phosphor CEO Ben Linquist and released to the public  
domain. The standard, cross-platform protocol essentially serves as  
HTTP for virtual worlds where it works as a communication mechanism  
that the Glasshouse gateway can use to generate temporary artifacts in  
the worlds. Already it has been added to Sun Wonderland and released  
under the GPL license there. It has also been implemented in Second  
Life with the help of a Java servlet and released it under a BSD  
license. The company is currently working to add it to other virtual  
worlds, too.

It certainly seems to be open enough to be considered by the IETF.

Regards
Marshall

On Feb 6, 2009, at 12:03 AM, Morgaine Dinova wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 2:51 AM, Rodney Thayer <[email-masked]>  
> wrote:
> Is this relevant to the proposed charter of this WG?  It seems to me  
> it
> would be.
>
> http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/04/1934229
>
> (CICP is "a protocol for interacting with virtual worlds", according  
> to
> this.)
>
> It would certainly seem to be relevant, Rodney.
>
> Even though we don't yet have an official charter in MMOX, we all  
> know that we're here to lay the ground for interoperation of virtual  
> worlds beyond just Second Life and its clones.  Indeed, that's why  
> this work has been placed under the aegis of the IETF, to provide a  
> vendor-neutral and flexible, extensible protocol for interop so that  
> it applies to the needs of others as well.  Defining an SL-specific  
> protocol would be quite out of order here.
>
> We will benefit hugely from collaboration with and input from the  
> developers of other virtual worlds and world systems.  Judging from  
> the Project Darkstar materials, their infrastructure will be  
> underpinning many a virtual world (Wonderland is just one), as they  
> seem to have targetted problem areas that Second Life currently  
> addresses poorly, such as certain areas of scalability.
>
> I hope that we can gain buy-in from the CICP and MXP people, as well  
> as from Wonderland developers and from the core Darkstar project as  
> well, and others.  The usual recommendation of "two reference  
> implementations" will be more meaningful in the context of a  
> protocol for world interop when the worlds in question are not  
> clones. :-)
>
> Morgaine.
>
> _______________________________________________
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> [email-masked]
> https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/mmox

---

From: Jason Giglio <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:24:50 -0400

This work appears to be a wholesale duplication of the Chisel work done
by Vyrnox Ming (Andy Duncan) in 2006.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/chisel/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wfEpaaD3EQ

Even worse, he took Andy's work and filed a provisional patent on it on
March 20 2008, just 1 month after he joined SL.

This patent would be invalid due to the obvious prior art of Chisel, but
I question why he would file a patent on technology he didn't create and
release his source code only in PDF form, if he were really that
committed to openness.

-Jason

---

From: Jon Watte <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:46:58 -0700

Note that the provisional patent has expired, and the provisional filing 
now serves as well documented prior art for the USPTO. A lot of the 
software patent problems come from prior art not being easily researched 
in regular document channels (research journals, trade magazines and the 
like).
The outcome of the process is then that there is solid, referencable 
prior art dated 2008, which is a good outcome IMO.

Sincerely,

jw