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Originally Posted by Wildefire Walcott  There will likely be competition someday, and it will come from an independtly-funded small developer just like Linden Lab. (Possibly even based on LL's own open-source server code.)
But immediate, serious competition really is unlikely, for one very simple reason: User-created content is a legal and political nightmare. No major corporation is EVER going to allow the kind of unmoderated freedom that LL does in terms of user-uploaded/created assets. Sony, Microsoft, Google, Nintendo, whoever tried to do it would have some kind of review board for every piece of user-generated content, thereby resulting in a PG and liability-free metaverse. Unfortunately, the Web 2.0 generation doesn't play by those rules.
The only way any competitor is going to attract current active SLers is going to be by offering an innocent-until-proven-tos-breaking content policy and a comparable R.O.I. for in-world businesses. This isn't going to happen on any of those "add your own sim to our grid!" projects because no content creator's going to trust an environment where every single sim is run by a potential content thief. There will have to be a known, trusted body who operates the servers. |
I don't, in all due respect, see this as an insurmountable problem. I could probably write a perfectly valid, easily understood, CLEAR and fair TOS in about a week. All it takes is a lawyer or two who understand
SL and all the various aspects of it, in a legal sense. I deal with more complex issues every day.
Then, it just needs clear, transparant and even handed enforcement.
Look, this is what I tell clients who have seemingly complex, insolvable problems: "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time." you reduce the complex problems to their simplest components and solve them incrementally, piece by piece.
Sooz