Here's the neatened version of my 5 minutes at the podium of the Metaversed geek meetup (also translated into Dutch):
Hi, as Nick wrote I'm Trevor F. Smith. I work on the Ogoglio project which has the primary goal of creating an online city for creative work with the population and density of NYC. I also run a space hosting and services company, Transmutable.In five minutes I'm going to make three quick points about open source and the future of web based online spaces.
Point One: The web is open.
Open source software from the apache project hosts a huge percentage of the web. Open source operating systems run most of the core application level infrastructure like the Google borg and DNS.
When facing such cultural, technical, and legal momentum it seems foolish to glom closed spaces onto the side of this huge open web.
Point Two: Basic 3D technologies are no longer black magic.
When a layer of technology has matured to the point where it is commonly understood the open source community can step in and replace proprietary systems with open ones. This is not a particularly glamorous function, but it does have the huge benefit of enabling people to try new ideas without reinventing the wheel or taking on funding.
For example, the Ogoglio platform is a web server for shared persistent spaces. You can host spaces on your laptop, on an inexpensive web account, or scale it up on the Amazon elastic compute cloud.
Creative groups can experiment with new ideas without spending a year of development (or sacks of cash) on the basic platform.
Point Three: Open source is painfully honest.
When your checkin comments are in the public record and anyone can fact-check your press release by browsing your code, it takes much less time to determine fact from fiction.
If I step up and announce that Ogoglio will have Havok++, HTML on a prim, Mono scripting, and puppet animation Real Soon Now it would take all of 10 minutes to prove that I am full of crap.
It's time to be painfully honest about online communities and persistent spaces.
And then there was some heated booing and I got the hook.
Comments