Island Oasis reverses OAR export policy

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Update: Island Oasis grid co-founder Karl Dreyer tells me that he’s keeping an eye on new developments in OpenSim that allow grid owners to filter content before it’s saved into an OAR file — and customers may soon be able to export their Island Oasis regions.  “I surely will be doing the filtered OAR’s when our technology can support them,” he said. The code — donated by Kitely back in the fall — saves only items that have both copy and transfer permissions, and should soon be part of the standard release of OpenSim.

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It turns out that you can’t make everyone happy after all.

Island Oasis, the little grid that allowed region exports in the form of OAR downloads, as well as hypergrid travel, is no longer allowing OAR exports, in order to protect in-world merchants.

“We’ve decided to no longer permit OAR exports from Island Oasis,” grid co-founder Karl Dreyer told Hypergrid Business. He goes by Damean Paolino in-world. ” The reasons for this decision is something that I’m certain you are very well aware of.  In an effort to protect the rights of our content creators and to make Island Oasis more attractive to future contect creators, we felt this was a necessary step.”

He added that no residents have asked for an OAR download of their region yet.

OAR exports — which make residents happy because they can have local backups of their builds, or can easily move their regions to other grids — also allow them to make local copies of their purchases, or to take those purchases to other grids.

Some grids, like Kitely, check permissions before generating OAR files, and only export those objects that the user is allowed to copy. This requires some work on the OpenSim server software, however.

John Mossman chilling on Island Oasis. (Image courtesy John Mossman.)

“At this point, OAR archives will be used solely for the purposes of backup and restoration,” said Dreyer. “OAR backups are taken of each region on a daily basis in addition to our scheduled database backups.”

Residents looking to save their builds won’t be able to save a whole region at a time — they’ll have to export them piece by piece.

“Content creators wishing to backup their creations are free to use Second Inventory which is currently on our list of approved viewers,” Dreyer said. “With Second Inventory, they are permitted to backup any item for which they have full permissions to.  Any items that carry the restriction of no copy, no modify, or no transfer — or any combination thereof — will not be backed up and therefore will not leave Island Oasis.”

Hypergrid restrictions may be next.

At this time, both inbound and outbound hypergrid teleports are permitted, with users able to carry content in both directions.

“I realize that his still leaves a door open for content to leave, but not in mass volumes,” he said. “We are monitoring this and if it proves to be an issue, we will either implement restrictions preventing any content that is not full perm to leave the grid, or we will shut off hypergrid all together.”

Maria Korolov
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