Subject: [vwrap] Hello world

From: Cristina Videira Lopes <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 12:50:32 -0700

Thanks, Josh! I'm signing in to this ML with my other identity, Crista  
Lopes @ UCI. So don't be confused, I'm the same person behind [email-masked] 
, and 'diva' is my pseudonym for all things open source. Here's my  
introductory message.

I'm a core developer of OpenSimulator, and the main architect of the  
Hypergrid -- but by no means the only one. As you may have heard,  
OpenSim reached its 0.7 version a couple of months ago; it was a hard,  
painful labour with foundation work taking priority over feature work.  
But it's here, and it uber-rocks!

I can't stress enough the social impacts of the rewrite of the  
framework. What we had before was a straight jacket for innovation,  
and would have led to horrible clashes of the titans (read forks), as  
people have very different ideas about what to do with virtual worlds.

One of those contention points was interoperability between virtual  
worlds. All that is now free of contention! The OpenSim framework  
doesn't impose anything at all, and these virtual worlds can load any  
network connectors and security checks that people plug into them.

Now that the code is out of the way, the only agreements are those  
that groups of people *voluntarily* decide to agree upon. With the  
comfort of knowing that, if agreements are not reached, we don't need  
to fork the core code that does simulation, we just need to provide  
different plugins for people to use. (Not that I'm advocating  
disagreement, but it's always good to have a solid Plan B)

Having that as stepping stone, we continued to work on the Hypergrid  
architecture, which is now in its 1.5 version, and has a decent trust/ 
security model -- as opposed to 1.0 which had a deficient trust/ 
security model. I'll be happy to explain how it works, as I'm working  
on a paper that does that.

I know some of you here in this group felt insulted that I didn't join  
VWRAP when it was created. I stated my reasons at the time, which  
boiled down to three points: (1) lack of time -- it was either working  
on code or working on standards, but not both; (2) my impression that  
the effort of defining standards for VWs was premature, because there  
were no concrete solutions for interoperability, not even HG1.0 much  
less OGP, and people would better invest their time in implementation  
efforts; and (3) my impression that Linden Lab was using this group as  
a marketing tool.

Things have changed (except for (1) lack of time... :-). So here I am.

Best,
Crista

-----------------
• From: Joshua Bell <josh at lindenlab.com>
• To: diva at metaverseink.com, "vwrap at ietf.org" <vwrap at ietf.org>
• Date: Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:28:37 -0700

(Dropping opensim-dev from the distribution list - cross-posting  
between moderated lists is not ideal, and the conversation tends to be  
quite hard to follow. My apologies if this makes it worse.)

Thanks for dropping in, Diva!

This discussion is completely within the bounds of the VWRAP charter,  
so it's perfectly welcome on the vwrap at ietf.org list, if it's being  
done with an eye towards encouraging independent implementations.  
Don't feel that you're intruding at all - quite the opposite!

This would be a great place to hash out details of security/trust  
models and protocols for data transport between virtual world  
instances, with the benefit of input from other list contributors who  
have experience in related areas. That's what this working group is  
chartered with, after all.

As an example, over on the opensim-dev list branch of this thread, I  
noticed some conversation about the global identifiers that implied  
parsing URLs to extract data, rather than treating them as opaque  
references to resources. That's generally considered a big "no-no" and  
runs contrary to the collected wisdom of the IETF for several reasons  
(that I'm sure folks will be glad to enumerate), and there are  
alternate patterns that should be followed. Hopefully, input on that  
level would be appreciated - if so, please do take advantage of this  
forum.