Justin recently wrote an article about the likelihood of the concept of a “Grid” to vanish fairly completely. I think he’s bang on there and I expect to see things play out fairly similar to how he describes. The reason for this is that the concept of a “Grid” is completely and utterly irrelevant in the long term.

What?

I suspect in the long term, some of the models presented by alternate virtual worlds (Croquet in particular) are largely correct. While the ability to “load balance” a larger 3D space across multiple servers by partitioning the geometry accordingly is a very valid feature - it restricts you to creating giant contiguous landmasses.

And I dont think this is something either users nor companies want.

The analogue with the traditional web is the concept of somewhere like Geocities - under the contiguous space model, every user from geocities has their webspace crammed right next to someone elses, and you can see it whether you like it or not.

If someone makes any parallels here with the Second Life™ Mainland, you are probably right on target - it’s probably one of the reasons that Private Islands in Second Life eclipse the number of mainland regions. Now that’s not to say that users wont want to congregate together on occasion - consider the Steampunk themed Caledon sims - but in that occasion it is strictly by choice, and not representative of the majority of users.

Supporting both is of course a priority - but I suspect in the long term that the abitrary collections of regions wont be crammed together. Most will be linked by the same technologies that link the internet today - IP and DNS, and any organisation will be built ontop of that rather than the concept of the grid itself.

So what about users?

Right now - the single most inconvenient factor to visiting the OpenSim grids today is the requirement that you create a user account before visiting. Unlike email where you can login with a single username and send a message anywhere - you need a seperate account for each server you want to visit.

If we seperate these out (as the AWG OGP spec does) we get to the point where your username comes from someone like an email provider (ISP, Free Hosting site, etc), and the regions are seperate things that you can connect to like visiting a webpage.

In this case, grids become groups of commonly themed regions that are visitable with either commonly themed URLs (ogp://grid.com/regionname/x/y/z/) or contiguous landmasses and not much more.

One of the beauties of the internet’s design is that you only need a single number to represent every server connected (an IP address), there’s millions of servers connected each with their own address - if you tried to organize those millions of servers into a set of finite artificial constructs, you would probably fail - the operators of those servers tend to like to run their own environments and not be reliant on other people for stability and uptime (there’s a bit of a commercial incentive there).

Why proposing things that rely on grids is probably a bad idea

There’s been a lot of suggestions lately about things like content enforcement being locked to a specific grid for example. The catch here is that there’s potentially one “grid” for every independent region online under the AWG spec. Only places such as the Caledon-equivilents are forming grids with multiple servers in them.

In this case the question becomes - if grids are not a good analogue for the operator group, what is? The answer here is probably the hosting companies. While I don’t have a firm number here - I’d say that probably 50-80% of the web hosting on the internet today is done by a small group of companies and their resellers (1and1, GoDaddy, etc) - and those are the groups you will want to get contracts for enforcement with.

The remainder may sign onto the contracts, but you can easily get the large groups with a smaller amount of effort just by hitting the hosting companies.

As a contributor and member of the body which is developing the Open Grid Protocol, I’m expected to keep up to date, read chat logs, mailing lists, attend meetings and otherwise spend a lot of my day looking at information, ideas and opinions coming from the various bodies surrounding the AWG.

You’d be surprised how much there is. There’s six reasonably important meetings a week I try read or attend, each produces potentially a 10,000 word transcript. Ignoring mailing lists, and other forms of discussion, that alone is a good healthy paperback each and every week, of course there’s at least now three active mailing lists on top of that and discussions on IRC, Group Chats and elsewhere.

It’s absolutely no suprise then when people get daunted when approaching this, there’s simply too much to keep track of without turning it into a fulltime job.

Signal to Noise Ratio

That is why I’d like to ask everyone who’s contributing, not to stop - but to try help keep the discussions focused. Most of these meetings have a defined spectrum of what is and isnt the topic of the day, and some forums are better than others for specific discussions. (No, I’m not just talking about Permissions here)

That’s not to say what’s being said isnt important - just that when the topic is the value of one specific serialisation format over another please only comment if you have something to say relating to serialisation formats, as mixing and matching topics all over the place is partly one of the reasons that keeping track of comments is so difficult - they are imbued everywhere.

So, here’s a bit of an overview of whats generally discussed where

The Weekly Meetings

• Mark (”Zero Linden”) office hours - The Tuesday office hours tend to be a fairly wide-topic discussion, with the agenda announced at least the week beforehand. You can see what’s going to be discussed on his wiki profile page. The Thursday morning ones tend to be very specific to individual technical items on the specifications themselves.
• OpenSim Office Hours (Tuesday, 1900 UTC, Wright Plaza on OSGrid) - These don’t concern the OGP protocols directly, however the topic of how to add OGP support is often championed here, and Linden Lab maintains a small but regular presence. This is more applicable if you are interested in the OpenSim side of OGP affairs.
• Which Linden office hours - These have recently shifted to people involved in the early beta of the OGP prototyping, SysAdmins and other individuals who will be directly running regions compatible with the OGP spec. If you are interested in being involved in this, this is the meeting to read and attend.
• AWGroupies - If it’s not in the above, the AWGroupies tend to be the best forum. Policy, direction and others are the kinds of discussions most appropriate here. While the other meetings tend to have a very strong technical influence (given it’s related to designing the languages that computers speak to each other with), the AWGroupies has a more social issues and ethics bias.

There’s also several others which are often worth reading and attending.

The Mailing Lists

• SLDev - This is generally focused towards the viewer itself and the features it supports, initially it started as a technical list, but over the course of the last year it has become a more broad spectrum forum open to a larger number of discussions on everything from intellectual property rights (something I have posted about with a suprising degree of frequency lately) to how to compile the viewer on Dead Badger Linux.

• OpenSim-Dev - This is geared towards the OpenSim developers, although topics do spring up here as to the best policies towards default systems, best practices on being a flexible framework that anyone can use. If you are interested in the nitty gritty behind OpenSim there’s a lot of good solid discussion going on here.

• Gridnauts - This is a new mailing list which complements Which’s office hours (listed above) for people who are in the beta and testing the initial region-crossing support on the Linden Beta grid.

At the moment there’s no policies mailing list - which might be something that someone should consider setting up as a legitimate forum for these discussions is clearly needed.

A plea to those involved

Please be relatively concise where possible - brevity always makes it easier to read your (and everyone elses) opinions.

Post your opinions in the right forum at the right time - suddenly changing the topic away while issues are still outstanding on the current topic is somewhat poor form.

Condensed transcripts and summaries help a lot - I personally would appreciate if someone would take up the mantle of providing a summary of each of the meetings above (and possibly mailing lists too) with links into the chat transcripts where appropriate.