Bart in SL

Consider yourself living on a nice, new sim of the mainland. You're happy with your small parcel, nice seaview, perhaps, good neighbors and then happening this: a new club is opening its gates.

Worse, this club has many camping spots, to fake traffic and also quite some visitors with the result that its eating up all possible traffic alone for the whole sim.

The result? You're busted. You cannot use your property anymore, because teleporting and even logging into your home becomes a new kind of adventure. "Is the sim already full or is at least one slot left for me to enter?"

So what can you do about it? Of course, you could tell the club owner to leave. "I am soo sorry, but I want to stay here, I like it and beside, I just own 4096 sqms of land and don't have the money for a private sim." Bummer. So he's eating up the whole traffic of the sim and making it unusable with just his teeny, weeny piece of it.

The next logical thing for you? To abandon or sell your land - don't think you can sell it with profit, by the way, good buyers take a look at the sim before buying it - and move to a private living sim.

So what should Lindenlab do about this kind of behaviour? Simple: they should make the tier traffic based in such a case. Why should I for myself finance the sim when some kind of business maker is only paying also a small share, but makes it unusable for the rest of us?

Their main message to us all is something like that:

While we laud LL for their foresight, and technical achievement in bringing SL to be, and find it hard to fault their stewardship of this world to date, we would argue that their management and interference in the goings on here are no longer appropriate nor required.

Neat, hu? But well, what do they really want? It boils down to this point, it seems:

LL has declared land to be in restricted supply. We at SLanarchy despise this and can't help but think that whatever they were taking when they made this decision was indeed some bad, bad shit indeed. As discussed a few sentences earlier, we see no need for this artificial lack of 'supply'. SLanarchy would like to propose that SLitizens are smart enough to create and manage their own worlds now, and call for LL to set free the tools required to embark on this unprecedented opportunity to enable every man, woman and child on the planet, to create their own parcel on this, the next digital frontier. Open the source code for the servers LL. Let us, the Slitizens, take on the burden of responsibility for our own future and the creation there of.

So I wonder when this group is demanding Microsoft to opensource Windows under the GPL with the same reasoning...

Or in other words: dream on! Lindenlabs is a company. They need to make money, even more they need to make profit. They've got venture capital pumped into them. So their investors want some kind of return of it. How does LL make big bucks at the moment? With land sales.

So while land prices are still up, expect them so trying selling much land, not giving their most valued treasure - the server part - away for free. At least not until they've got a new business model, that works equally good.

Opening up the client was a nice move, it made very gentle press on them; but: the client without an open server is not of much value. It's basically just an empty shell, then. This is like you could get Firefox always for free, but a web server (like Apache) would be only available from one company and you would have to pay for it. That's the situation with SL at the moment.

How it is going to develop we're going to see - just remember, we are all here voluntarily, no one presses us into this world, so we all choose to be dependent on LL in this or other kind of ways. Not that I complain.