I have been reading a recent article from Deva Canto, an Opensim dev, on her blog in which she makes a plea to developers who build on top of the Opensim platform not to patent their code or it will hinder the continued development of Opensim. She gives a warning too to those who take the open source code which a dedicated core of developers have been working on for a long time and use it for their own business ends and, while contributing nothing back, actually threaten the prospect of a free Metaverse.

She goes on to say,

one of two things will happen: either (1) what you patent is so important that it will be critically missing from the common infrastructure because of your patent, therefore the infrastructure will never happen; or (2) what you patent can be done in a different way, in which case that other way will make it to the common infrastructure, and your patent-based business will miss the point.

We are seeing a growing number of grids based on Opensim who's developers take full advantage of the freely available source code. The core developers of Opensim have from the beginning had the goal of building the infrastructure of a free Metaverse for the benefit of private, educational and business interests alike. Everyone owns it. It is the virtual air we breath and just like polluters, there are people that would strangle the baby at birth for the sake of personal gain.

The dream is very clear; a Metaverse of immersive interconnected virtual worlds. Not walled-up monopolies like Second Life or the twenty or so other contenders for the virtual market. The aim is to have lots of small and large grids sharing a common resource on which to build a rich and diverse virtual super grid. Users will be able to grid-hop as easy as teleporting from one sim to another. The hope is for Common standards and methods to arise for names registering, search, money and copyright protection. The users will be able to hold their own property and wear it and use it where ever they go. All this is threatened by those who are effectively stealing and damaging what belongs to everyone.

Deva warns,

you won't gain any friends among some of us core developers (me, at least). You're putting the whole effort in jeopardy. I can guarantee you that if something you patent is critical, I won't stop until I find another way of doing it that doesn't step over your patent.

Not withstanding all this however, Opensim enjoys substantial, and growing support, and there are many new grids emerging built by people that heard the message given long ago by Linden Labs; A virtual world built by the residents and for the residents. OpenSim is not a walled garden. It is open and free and it will cost the individual a lot less to build and express their creativity. Those wannabe Grid Barons will only ever make it more restrictive and expensive for everyone and that's the author's opinion.

Gaga Gracious

After meeting Rock in Blue Mars he invited me to write something for his blog so I chose something that has been capturing my interest of late. Radegast.

Radegast is a light weight text client that can connect to Second Life and Opensim grids. I have tried out a number of these clients but this one grabbed my attention because it is rock solid stable, packed with features quite apart from chat handling, and something extra which has proved to be a very useful tool. It has a plugin for the A.L.I.C.E. bot.

I was able to turn an avatar into an AI bot very easily which I thought might be useful on my Second Life sim as a greeter. More especially I wanted to program my bot to help and inform new arrivals. To this end I have to find the AIML files in the Radegast directory on my hard drive and edit them with what I want my bot to say. AIML script is actually a derivative of XML and is not hard to learn. Basically, I need to edit the definitions in the file's paterns (what the user might say) and templates (how the bot might respond). For example:

{category}
{pattern}TELL ME ABOUT YOURSELF{/pattern}
{template}{/template}
{/category}

I have read elsewhere that people have actually used the bot for other purposes and scripted LSL attachments to control the avatar which will be my next task. I would say the bot could do a lot more and certainly I would use it in my Opensim grid when I eventually set one up (maybe). In practice I found the bot can only respond to a visitor if they use the bot's name but if they IM the bot then it will engage in conversation without the name.

Given that Radegast is a light weight with no view of the 3D world, it certainly has more features than any others of this type I have seen. Here is a list:

• Chat (local, IM, group, friends conference and voice in version 1.12)
• Inventory (allows manipulation, deletion of the items, moving them around, sending to other people by dropping item on their profile)
• Ability to wear/take off clothes and attachments from the inventory
• Backup of all scripts and notecards from the inventory
• World map (very fast implementation using Google maps)
• Object finder - list objects nearby, sort them by distance, name, see details
• List of all avatars in a region (radar), and those within 300m in nearby regions
• Movement controls via arrow keys
• Support for activating gestures from the inventory
• Avatar appearance - others using 3D client will see you appear correctly, and will not be able to tell that you're using a text client
• Streaming music

The fact it has a plugins button opens it up to more tools and features. One I suggested on the forums could be an AIML editor so the bot definitions could be worked on directly in the client and tested but I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. I did actually speak to Grant, the creator of MakeAiml, via his forum and he said he was interested in making a plugin and will look into it. MakeAiml can be downloaded from http://makeaiml.aihub.org/tutorials.php.  Radegast can also run the Looking Glass viewer from the tools menu if you download it. The client actually provides the chat and all the other features while Looking Glass renders the 3D world using Orge (see review of Orge elsewhere in this blog). Looking Glass is in alpha state and personally I see no use for it. For me Radegast's strong point is the bot which really doesn't need a full view of the world but it is interesting and yet another example of open source creativity in the free Metaverse community.

Gaga Gracious