Good grief, I hope you’re not referring to the abysmal Viewer 2 !

o Refusal to embrace intellectual property and commerce — brow-beating people into creating content for Creative Commons — which doesn’t pay people for their work

o insularity, finding the big wide metaverse “antithetical” to your educational mission. Imagine that! The world is in the way. Maybe because if more of us came to see what you were doing, we’d never send our kids to be brainwashed by your sects.

Most edu campuses as a result are dull, stultifying experiences with predictable Soviet-style stadiums and boxy modern architecture from free prefabs — and if there is a sandbox, it’s on auto return. You don’t have to be a skilled 3-d content creator to create in SL — the existence of prefabs and modules everywhere, often for free or very low cost, means anyone can enjoy the thrill of modifying their space and expressing themselves. Most educators haven’t tapped into 1/100th of the capacity of SL — they haven’t innovated or contributed by making compelling locations or inventions. Instead, they greedily suck down all the freebies they can hoard on their sims — freebies that were intended as loss leaders for commerce, not intended to wind up in the edu cul-de-sac.Open Sim isn’t a place that has a wide variety of people from all walks of life doing all kinds of creative things. It’s a sterile zones of ideologues trying to keep each other company while the sims crash. There isn’t the serendipity and wealth of content that you have in the more real-life like SL. That’s because utopian ideology reigns in Open Sim, and one that isn’t conducive to life — for long.Scene-by-scene tutorials and guids are all over the place. Not only are there the tutorials like Oxbridge and many other similar newbie stations, there are builds such as I’ve commissioned in Ross and Iris where people can learn second-tier skills in an immersive interactive environment. I have no particular technical skills and again, use the work of others I pay for because I respect their IP and their need to make a living, in order to make a creative space.As for Rezzable, Greenies and the Black Swan — ugh! This cynical exploiter RightAsRain Rimbaud invented a device to easily copy everything on a sim, regardless of whether he had permissions for it, and cynically copied to other grids with it. Why would you celebrate such outright cynical theft? Only after a huge outcry including from some of his underpaid contract builders did he revise his device ostensibly to copy only items for which one had permissions in the system. But the damage was done. Rezzable sims, like other such ideologically-based “Free” projects in SL are a testimonial to just how failed Chris Anderson’s ideology in fact is when really tested and monitored. These people didn’t sell content or admission or rent to vendors. Instead, they thought that by making everything free, paying a few high end builders to create content, that they’d get old companies like perfume manufacturers to pay them huge amounts to advertise. It’s really a cynical idea, because it treats people like mere cannon fodder to advertising schemes. And it failed. Educators got a whopping FIFTY PERCENT discount off sims and maintenance fees. Those who could settle for only 4096 meters of land got land FOR FREE. And the output from this pampered and insular bunch as been very little. Linden Lab did the right thing reversing the grand giveaway to this unproductive and whining bunch.

SL is a paid service, they will grow if they are serving customer needs. we aren’t talking about some charity here, why do they “deserve” to grow?

lol, i don’t know why this time that got to me!

as i commented earlier, it has been a joy to be in OpenSim and greater creativity has resulted from the freedom inherent with having your own grid =)

Suzanne Aurilio,
San Diego State University

We don’t need a big metaverse to accomplish what we wish with classes. In fact, it’s antithetical in some ways. For this build, we want isolation from other users except those who are invited to create accounts or who use premade ones.

That is sad in a sense, because our 2D Web content has always been issued under Creative Commons licensing and we want others to stop by, casually, to use it.

i moved away from SL (19 sims) and have been in OpenSim for 10 months or so and love it. educationally speaking, there is nothing that i need from Second Life. yes, that means i have to create most of the things i need, but then i love to learn =)