OpenSim Regions Predicted to Overtake Second Life in 2011

OpenSim growth rates shame Linden Lab

by Pixeleen Mistral, National Affairs desk

Citing an annualized OpenSim growth rate of 177%, Maria Korolov predicts the OpenSim grids will overtake Second Life in early 2011 in an article in Hypergrid Business. Ms. Korolov made her prediction after comparing the 29% increase in OpenSim regions between September and December 2009 with an anemic 6% growth in Second Life resident-owned land in 2009. Are the projections sustainable - and believable?

The OpenSim grids claimed 7,246 regions in December 2009, up from 5,613 regions in September. In contrast, Second Life's 6% annual growth resulted in 23,900 regions at the end of 2009. Korolov's crystal ball tells her that if it might even be possible for OpenSim to overtake Second Life in 2010 if current trends accelerate - driven by low costs starting with free and very inexpensive.

Korolov points out that more control and backups are also appealing to land owners, noting that "OpenSim region owners can save backups of their entire region on their local hard drive. If they want to shut down a region — or keep a historical record of how a region evolves — they can do this, and restore the region later". But this sort of backup-on-demand function will be difficult for Linden Lab to match without nerfing the DRM system on which the in-world economy is based.

Linden Lab may find it difficult to mimic OpenSim's backup features because on-demand region backups and rollbacks create significant problems for enforcing "no-copy" DRM on content that can reside in either an avatar's inventory or in-world. This issue was seen in the Eros vs. John Doe copyright complaint where  unauthorized copies of Second Life sexbeds were created by using region rolbacks as a copying mechanism to defeat Second Life's "no-copy" DRM content flags. Backups to users' local hard disks are also problematic for an economy dependent on DRM enforcement.

While content creators are understandably concerned at weakening copy controls, virtual land owners have a conflicting desire to save multiple versions of their land - and retain the option to move their worlds to a different metaverse service provider should there be sudden pricing or policy changes.

Is the growth of OpenSim partially to blame for the loss of traction Second Life has been experiencing over the last year? In a down real life economy, less expensive virtual land is certain to have appeal, but will  Linden Lab's cost structure and DRM-dependence will allow it to respond in-kind and in time to the OpenSim threat?

Comments

[Zauber Exonar]

The grid SpotOn3D seems to actually care more about content protection that Linden Lab does, with some automated measures they have against content theft.

[Kate M.]

Exponential trends rarely continue forever, because there are environmental limitations. I will be surprised if OSgrid overtakes SL so quickly, but the writing is kind of on the wall - eventually it will happen. Maybe not OSgrid, maybe not next year or in 5 years... But eventually SL will go the way of AOL unless they drastically change what they do.

[Kate M.]

ETA: the trend shown may be linear instead of exponential, it's hard to tell without more data points.

[GEORGE ZIMMER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF MEN'S WAREHOUSE]

OpenSim is pretty much a big joke. We tried to set up our own a while back and all it ever did was crash and have trouble doing the most basic of things. As incompetent and pathetic as Linden Lab really is, the people working on OpenSim have proven themselves to be ten times as such. Moreover, one of our own was able to take down an entire grid comprised of OpenSim sims just by himself. For a month. Add that to the fact that these servers the opensims are hosted on are probably worse than anything LL has, and you've got a wonderful recipe for fail casserole.

[Lalo Telling]

On the other hand... a standalone OpenSim on your desk and/or laptop is the perfect sandbox. No IM interruptions, no jerks, no lag, and you can export copies of your creations for importation to SL.

[Jumpman Lane]

yeah and how many of those thousands of grids are online at once. prok says 40 lol
PROK IS RIGHT! except when it is wrong!

[Darien Caldwell]

Actually Prok said there were only 40 *people* online at once in OpenSim. Which is a sobering statistic in itself.

But comparing the number of sims in Opensim to the number of sims in SL, is like saying the number of Tricycles will soon overtake the number of BMW roadsters. Nowhere close to an apples-to-apples comparison.

[James]

The client/server architecture is an outmoded organization derived from human hierarchical social patterns (in fact, client/server is called master/slave in several areas of computing still.)

The future is peer-to-peer, free from the chains. One of the leading peer-to-peer virtual world platforms is Cobalt http://www.duke.edu/~julian/Cobalt/Home.html

[P Charisma]

It doesn't matter how many Sims it has if it doesn't have people and legal content on them.

That's the catch-22 though. To get content developers you need traffic in users. To get those users, you need content from content developers.

You could do what a lot of Open Sims did early on, and steal a lot of content. But then you'll be locked somewhat in how much content you get as developers will see you as a sort of online plague, and that will scare off any traffic your stolen content at first generated.

[GEORGE ZIMMER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF MEN'S WAREHOUSE]

@James

Speaking as a Computer Science and Networking major, P2P seems like a really great idea until it is actually applied. The main problem with this setup is going to be how you communicate information about the entire simulator with all peers without using too much bandwidth and bogging down your own system. Peer-to-Peer systems always require significantly more bandwidth than the standard Client/Server distribution network. Compare a standard FTP download versus BitTorrent and you'll see what I mean. The second problem is also comparable to a torrent. Imagine there is a file with only one seed on a poor connection. It takes significantly longer to download than a file with several seeds on better connections. Thus, the reliability of the connection is very low and completely unpredictable. It's just not efficient to use a P2P model for something like a virtual world.

[Tengu Yamabushi]

Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/605

[Ranma Tardis]

not everyone is looking to be a content provider. Linden Labs charges too much, I would rather have a large space to develop than a small overpriced spot in sl!

[OtakuMegane]

Keep in mind, the statistics for OSGrid as an example are based on what is registered currently. At any given time roughly 20%-30% of the region count may actually dead regions that simply haven't been purged yet. The numbers of active regions for OSGrid At least will eventually overtake SL though, most likely in another year or two, depending partly on SL's growth. Add in other opensim grids and it will likely be sooner.

Also because it often gets confused, OSGrid is *not* opensim, it's just the largest grid at present and often used as testing ground. Opensim itself is just software.

@GEORGE ZIMMER

How long ago was that? I only started playing with Opensim less than a year ago but the difficulty and problems at that time were vastly greater than they are now. Things are changing rapidly with opensim since it's a much less mature platform than SL. Even 2-3 months can be a large difference.

As to hardware, it varies widely. Some people do host them on unstable home connections alongside their porn and MMOs. Others rent VPS services. Some like me have a dedicated quad- or oct-core server with RAID, several GB of RAM and 100mb+ pipe at their disposal. Remember LL only allots 1-2 GB of RAM and a single core to an entire sim. A mid-range VPS can supply that much or more in resources and at about 1/4 the cost of what LL charges in tier for a sim.

I am also not subject to a bunch of arbitrary content rules or shifts in policy because some newspaper in another country doesn't like something that's present in-world. For OSGrid, if it doesn't break local laws where the server is hosted or disrupt the grid, nobody cares what's there. And the latter is not even a factor if you are running a standalone. So how much is real freedom of expression and creation worth?

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

So... OpenSim has more empty regions than SL? SL already has a glut of empty regions and that's often pointed out as one of the failures of the grid. If OpenSim does eventually overtake SL in region count, continuing applied logic would dictate that they've simply failed on a much larger scale. (^_^)y

[A Furry]

Don't die Second Life,Opensim doesn't have a furry community. );

[At0m0 Beerbaum]

region count != popularity.

[Wordfromthe Wise]

@GEORGE ZIMMER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF blub blub°°

Your comment is "pretty much a big choke". You have absolutely no idea what your talking about.

"... one of our own was able to take down an entire grid .."
Entire Grid ? i think he just crashed your/his own regions .. his fault

"Add that to the fact that these servers the opensims are hosted on are probably worse than anything LL has,..."

lets see .. my 12 islands are hosted on an Intel 8 Core with 4GB RAM ..
for just 35 Euros a month ..

.. and i will not digg deeper into your P2P comments

best regards
Wordfromthe Wise

and .. it i so easy to download the Software, unzip it on your PC , RTFM, and fire up your sims connected to the e.g OSGRID ..

[Ari Blackthorne]

Nice regurgitation of someone else's bogus and agenda-based so-called reporting.

Here are the flaws: that so-called 177% "growth" is among all the OS grids combined. SL grid is ONE grid. So it's like saying the number of Windows machines across the internet is huge, compared to the average household number of Linux and Macintosh machines!

I still find it funny every time people try hard to make it sound like OS is better than SL.

[GEORGE ZIMMER, FOUNDER AND CEO OF MEN'S WAREHOUSE]

I'll ignore the poor grammar, spelling errors and blatant stumping for OSGrid and respond to what I can actually decipher.

OmegaX held down all of OSGrid by himself for a good month. As far as servers, I'm still willing to bet LL's are better as they still have plenty of morons dumping cash into their ponzi scheme. You can spout "PEER TO PEER EQUALS FREEDOM" all you want, but a client/server model is still the best for efficiency and reliability, which is why it is still used today.

[Orion Pseudo]

@At0m0 - "region count != popularity."

Yeah, you're right on that one. But there are many factors involved. For instance during Linden's OpenSpace Massacre OSGrid and many other grids were swamped with people looking to relocate and rebuild. For many of those, one or more sims would comprise of a personal home. In contrast on my grid we commonly use between two and six sims per OpenSim instance for an environment in order to provide enough usable land mass to build to scale. Also, it needs to be taken into account that some people are also running what are called "Megaregions" which are a group of two or more regions configured to operate as one single sim without border crossings. While those are counted from the grid end as one sim per 65535 sqm, in reality they're a single sim.

By this point I think its safe to say that OpenSim ain't Second Life therefore to compare the two is pretty much pointless. OpenSim may be compatible with Second Life, but by all means Second Life is quickly becoming more of a distant relative as OpenSim and its derivatives evolve and extend the technology from where Linden left off. Eventually, as OpenSim matures as will its user base.

[markbyrn]

This sham chart brings to mind the Mark Twain quote; "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." You can run a openlife type server on your PC and have your own grid with hundreds of "regions". That doesn't make it Second Life or even comparable to the Second Life experience.

[At0m0 Beerbaum]

@ Orion

You do realize you basically said nothing, right?