Christmas wishes
I would like to wish everyone happy holidays! It is Christmas eve and no doubt Santa has been forced to rent a second sleigh in order to bring me all my gifts.
I have a few Christmas wishes for the new year. The first wish is that Linden Lab will stop pretending their lawyers are looking at new wording for the TOS which many of the creative residents found so appalling. A few months back they said their Lawyers were looking into adjusting the wording in response to actions from numerous community groups like the United Content Creators of Second Life group. So with all this time passing, and our IP lawyers suggesting they need only change a few words to satisfy the community, it would appear the situation is either they wish to let so much time pass that the burning anger that the community was running on slowly dissipated to quiet grumbling. They can live with quiet grumbling.. I mean their whole history is about quiet grumbling. If that is not their strategy then my wish would be that they fire their Lawyers who are supposed to be working on it. They are clearly being taken advantage of if the Layers are suggesting they need more time than two months to change a few words.
Another wish would be for the current Second Life viewer to be scrapped with the Firestorm team being hired to create their default viewers. Either that or start adding windlights or functionality similar to phototools etc. They can have all the windlights I have made for free they merely have to ask. Actually they don't have to ask, they already own them, so please just include them.. it will take two seconds. Their viewer is improved graphically, but they really need to unify the experience. For example, my new build relies specifically on a Firestorm windlight/sky which the Second Life viewer doesn't possess. You can set the sim to force a windlight which would be great .. if it worked regularly. Essentially what this means is that when my new build opens only Firestorm viewers will see it properly, unless the forced windlight works which it may not. I have never relied on a windlight before like I will for this new build, so if it doesn't work for half the visitors then the experience will be vastly reduced and very discouraging.
Another wish would be for tier to go down some. It is getting harder and harder to justify spending $300 a month on a virtual space. As I said I am working on a new story for Immersiva and by the time it comes out next month it will have cost me $900 to build due to tier. They need to make it easier for people who devellop content that directly improves their product and peoples enjoyment of it, to be able to continue to work there. What about having tier drop yearly the longer you have owned a sim? So dropping $50 a year provided you have maintained payment. For example, if you have owned a sim for three years you would be instead be paying $150 a month. It would encourage retention of regions and make people happy!
It is not all bad though, Linden Lab have made some wonderful improvements to Second Life this year ranging from improved rez time to overall stability. When I first came to Second Life it would often be down for half the day on Wednesdays as they tried to implement new things. They have really improved the product over time and their programmers certainly deserve credit for that. It is true that I am annoyed with you right now Linden Lab, I find there are too many apologists defending your actions, the most disturbing being those few artists with no sense of self worth. It was nice to see many in the community, both bloggers and residents, stand up and challenge Linden Lab on their TOS, hopefully that will continue and Linden Lab realizes they can not just avoid the topic.
Really though my main wish is that by this time next year my growing disenchantment with Linden Lab will have dissipated with me realizing that it was all a misunderstanding. Hopefully they have a grand plan which will make everyone happy, but have been forced to keep it secret, which is quite plausible. That would be great don't you think?
Anyway, Merry Christmas!
I have a few Christmas wishes for the new year. The first wish is that Linden Lab will stop pretending their lawyers are looking at new wording for the TOS which many of the creative residents found so appalling. A few months back they said their Lawyers were looking into adjusting the wording in response to actions from numerous community groups like the United Content Creators of Second Life group. So with all this time passing, and our IP lawyers suggesting they need only change a few words to satisfy the community, it would appear the situation is either they wish to let so much time pass that the burning anger that the community was running on slowly dissipated to quiet grumbling. They can live with quiet grumbling.. I mean their whole history is about quiet grumbling. If that is not their strategy then my wish would be that they fire their Lawyers who are supposed to be working on it. They are clearly being taken advantage of if the Layers are suggesting they need more time than two months to change a few words.
Another wish would be for the current Second Life viewer to be scrapped with the Firestorm team being hired to create their default viewers. Either that or start adding windlights or functionality similar to phototools etc. They can have all the windlights I have made for free they merely have to ask. Actually they don't have to ask, they already own them, so please just include them.. it will take two seconds. Their viewer is improved graphically, but they really need to unify the experience. For example, my new build relies specifically on a Firestorm windlight/sky which the Second Life viewer doesn't possess. You can set the sim to force a windlight which would be great .. if it worked regularly. Essentially what this means is that when my new build opens only Firestorm viewers will see it properly, unless the forced windlight works which it may not. I have never relied on a windlight before like I will for this new build, so if it doesn't work for half the visitors then the experience will be vastly reduced and very discouraging.
Another wish would be for tier to go down some. It is getting harder and harder to justify spending $300 a month on a virtual space. As I said I am working on a new story for Immersiva and by the time it comes out next month it will have cost me $900 to build due to tier. They need to make it easier for people who devellop content that directly improves their product and peoples enjoyment of it, to be able to continue to work there. What about having tier drop yearly the longer you have owned a sim? So dropping $50 a year provided you have maintained payment. For example, if you have owned a sim for three years you would be instead be paying $150 a month. It would encourage retention of regions and make people happy!
It is not all bad though, Linden Lab have made some wonderful improvements to Second Life this year ranging from improved rez time to overall stability. When I first came to Second Life it would often be down for half the day on Wednesdays as they tried to implement new things. They have really improved the product over time and their programmers certainly deserve credit for that. It is true that I am annoyed with you right now Linden Lab, I find there are too many apologists defending your actions, the most disturbing being those few artists with no sense of self worth. It was nice to see many in the community, both bloggers and residents, stand up and challenge Linden Lab on their TOS, hopefully that will continue and Linden Lab realizes they can not just avoid the topic.
Really though my main wish is that by this time next year my growing disenchantment with Linden Lab will have dissipated with me realizing that it was all a misunderstanding. Hopefully they have a grand plan which will make everyone happy, but have been forced to keep it secret, which is quite plausible. That would be great don't you think?
Anyway, Merry Christmas!
Comments
see you soon!
Mexi Lane
I run regions in OpenSim, both on OS Grid and also on my own private mini-grid. I run them on my home server,as I have a good fibre-optic connection, and lag is rarely an issue, even for friends visiting from all around the world, (my server is located in Wales, Europe.
In all I run 22 regions, and I recently worked out that to host all those regions on SL for a month would cost the same as I will pay for my phone and internet connection for over 13 years - that's how expensive SL really is.
In the past I can understand that OpenSim was an umknown quantity, it was really experimental, but now it has matured nicely and provides an ideal platform where anyone creative can really indulge those urges without worrying about the petty restrictions imposed by LL. Oh, and it's an easy process to back up and save one's created regions for posterity, so no loss of all that work when the region is deleted.