E-Mail 'Kitely was OpenSim's most valuable grid in 2017' To A Friend

13 Comments

1. 

   Great summary Maria

2. 

   To me the new users data is biased towards kitely – especially considering that you need an account on kitely to sell on the market

   1. 

      Bias implies deliberate (unfair) favoritism.

      Kitely offers a service where merchants can sell across multiple grids, Inworldz does not.

      Therefore
      Kitely attracts a higher number of users. Even if a merchant is only
      around long enough to list items, they still used the service, so its hard to argue that they are not a user. Frequency of use is a different discussion.

      I fail to find a bias anywhere here.

      1. 

         I would agree with Vinzenz in that for Kitely, the new user data includes new users of its marketplace service, not of Opensim itself. There is an inherent bias there which I would assume not to have been deliberate but is nonetheless a contributing factor to the stats.

   2. 

      Shoot — I was going to include the Kitely Market, and forgot. Thanks for reminding me! Yes, absolutely, the Kitely Market is HUGE and provides an enormous benefit to the broader OpenSim community. I’ll go and add that in.

      1. 

         I updated the story …and just noticed that the charts don’t match. Arrgh. I feel my OCD kicking in… should I spend the next two hours redoing the charts, or go back to working on the communities story…. oh, the horror! the horror!

3. 

   I still can’t figure out why Inworldz is even included in a discussion of open sim. Inworldz is sort of the opposite of open. I have no problem with Inworldz being what it is, but it is not an opensim grid and never has been. I am afraid we equate NOT being a product of Linden labs with being open source and open to the community of opensim.

   1. 

      InWorldz runs on a version of Halcyon, which is itself a version of OpenSim. InWorldz didn’t create this from scratch. In fact, there are many versions of OpenSim — the Diva Distro, AuroraSim, WhiteCore Sim, etc… etc… and many other commercial grids also customize the OpenSim that they use to fit their requirements. Kitely, for example, has extensive customizations so that their grid can run in the cloud.

      The fact that InWorldz sometimes claims it is not OpenSim is like a burger joint claiming that they’re not serving burgers because they’re serving “ground steak patties” or something like that. It’s just a marketing thing.

      InWorldz is also part of the open source community. They donate code — both patches to OpenSim and, most recently, the whole Halcyon code base. Here are some examples of their contributions: https://daviddaeschler.com/2015/05/11/inworldz-and-contributions-to-the-metaverse/

      Finally, one criticism of InWorldz is that they are not hypergrid-enabled. This is true, and they may well have forked too far off from mainline OpenSim to turn on hypergrid if they wish to, and would have to export their database and rebuild the grid from scratch using standard OpenSim and then pull in their custom modules — either way, a humongous amount of work.

      But other grids also have hypergrid turned off, or have hypergrid partially enabled on some of their grid. There are many good reasons to have hypergrid turned off — to protect school children from strangers, to protect proprietary content in role playing games, to protect vulnerable communities such as sexual minorities in repressive regimes, to protect patient identities, and so on and so forth.

      For end users, logging into InWorldz is identical to logging into any other OpenSim grid — they create an account on the website, load up Firestorm, select the grid, and log in. There are differences in in-world physics and scripting, but there are also differences on other OpenSim grids.

      Meanwhile, InWorldz has been hugely successful in bringing in new users, especially in previous years.

      In almost every year for which I have data, InWorldz has been the top grid when it comes to registering new users. In fact, in 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015, InWorldz was single-handedly responsible for about a third of all new registrations of all the public OpenSim grids.

      I wrote about this last year: https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2016/11/kitely-inworldz-opensims-most-valuable-grids/

      I have a chart in that article, showing InWorldz’s relative registrations compared to Kitely’s. Here’s an updated version:

      https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/478eeed0f3caa96d2280c93001377dbf93f24f1486ad73b6a66a105d7ef59759.jpg

      1. 

         Agreed. While I am a huge fan of the hypergrid, most people who meet me in various grids meet my Kitely avatar and not a local account, OpenSim was OpenSim before the hypergrid existed. That said, definitions may change. Since we all use the same viewer to access the Big Grid as well as our OS grids, one can argue the same thing about SL, that since it chose ultimately to not become Open, despite all the work done back in the day by the Architecture Working Group which both LL and IBM participated in on developing the standards that went into making hypergridding possible (and btw Halcyon is hypergriddable, but Inworldz contract with the Armys MOSES project specified that they had to improve security before enabling hypergridding).

         1. 

            mikelorrey said: (and btw Halcyon is hypergriddable, but Inworldz contract with the Armys MOSES project specified that they had to improve security before enabling hypergridding).

            First I have heard of that and am in fact surprised that opensource code could have stipulations restricting the use of features already built in. Do you have a link to any documentation that HG capability already exists in Halcyon?

            1. 

               The original Hypergrid code was implemented in 2008-2009, well before Inworldz was a thing. Unless they intentionally removed the code, it should still be there in Halcyon, but not enabled.

            2. 

               Arielle, it was only a few months ago that we all had a bit of a snit over my complaints how some opensim region operators have castrated their ini files to disable many standard lsl functions like http-request. Of course you can restrict the use of features already built in, despite how much such customization may fragment the very idea of an open metaverse.

            3. 

               Different thing imo as this would be beyond a mere config disablement. If that would be the case I am sure we would be seeing a lot more Halcyon/Moses regions and Grids out there as it wouldn’t take much to re-enable it and bring it up to date depending when they actually forked.

               Depending on whose word you take, the fork happened either in early 2009 (Jim Tarber) or early 2010 according to the readme on their github.
               Halcyon was originally based on the OpenSimulator project but was forked in 2010 to provide a stable platform for everyday use under high load.
               https://github(.)com/InWorldz/halcyon

               I remember hearing/reading something that it would take about a year to bring it back into the Moses project but even then would be a different animal with no backward compatibility with current Opensim master.