Scorpia1275

The short answer to that is no. Here is the long answer...

When I first joined OSGrid about a year ago, my first thoughts were wow, this is great, I can finally have land without being ripped off by LL. All we need now is a viable currency in OSGrid to make it like SL.

As time has passed I have come to realise that actually NO, I don't want OSGrid to be like SL. If I wanted a clone or replacement for SL I have...well...SL for that. OSGrid is something different and I want something different and "better" than SL. (I accept that “better” is a matter of opinion, and most wont agree with me that OSGrid is better than SL.)

I am a Linux user, I don't use Windows at all. Many people when they first try Linux they come expecting to find Linux as a FREE replacement clone of windows, and soon get disappointed that Linux seems DIFFERENT than Windows, it works in different ways, has a different philosophy and different goals etc, and they soon start saying Linux is crap, and then run back into the arms of M$. When it isn't "crap" it is just different!

I think the same thing applies in OSGrid. Many people come to OSGrid expecting Opensim in general and OSGrid to be a clone of SL but still be “better” than SL. Well you can't be “better” than something by being the same as it.

SL is too expensive, and I think it sucks the fun out of it when you have to stump up real money to really fully immerse yourself in and enjoy the game. Yes you can just acquire freebies in SL, but without spending any cash it quickly becomes limiting IMO.

OSGrid is “better” (IMO) because it is about sharing and community. We make stuff for free to benefit others, for the joy of seeing your creations being used by others. Allowing people who may be cannot afford to spend money on a “game” like this and yet still enjoy it.

I hear content creators in SL and SL forums (like this one) talk about needing a currency in OSGrid and other OpenSim grids and needing more content security before they can expand their businesses into OS. Well respectfully, I say please stay in SL. If your only interest in Osgrid is to expand your business there and make money, we don't want you in OSGrid, we ( or may be I) don't want that mindset here, of commercialism only. Nothing wrong with making money, we all need to in rl, but I don't want that coming into my escapism play world and I think many in OSGrid agree with me.

OSGrid officially is a test grid, yes I get that and understand that, I however, and many of the people that I have brought over from SL, use it as an entertainment grid and have made our home here, and yes I understand that it will break from time to time etc etc, but still I use it as an entertainment grid, similar, BUT different from SL.

OpenSim itself is an Open Source software project, and the main purpose of open source is about freedom. Freedom to change and edit things to make things work the way you want them too, even if that is slightly different from the original creators intention, may be that should also apply to the creations we make in OSGrid as well ???

Anyway, bringing a currency into Osgrid is insecure and impractical, and I understand that, but bringing a currency into OSGrid would also ruin what we have here. So NO currency thank you! Those that want a currency, and setup virtual businesses can go play in SL or any of the other commercial OpenSim grids. Osgrid is something different entirely, and I for one want it to stay that way.

Let your flaming begin lol

Beebo Brink

I'm using my OpenSim projects as a break from my commercial focus in SL. I've created avatars and an AO for free distribution, and people can use them or not without me being any the wiser. That's very cathartic.

__________________

Siggy

I don't think the question is should there be,

more 'could there be'

And the answer would more than likely still be no.

__________________
And as it was in the beginning, so too shall it be in the end. That bullshit is bullshit, it just goes by different names.

Joshua Nightshade

I doubt that a currency would come to OSGrid simply because it's run by a non-profit that operates only on donations, and taking on the liability of real-world monetary transactions is almost assuredly beyond their meagre means.

__________________

Masami Kuramoto

I guess that's what the OP meant when he said:

"Anyway, bringing a currency into Osgrid is insecure and impractical, and I understand that"

However, the question whether lack of a currency makes OSGrid a better or worse place than SL is still relevant. Some people say that it keeps OpenSim grids from getting popular. But is that really the case? Are we missing the malls in OSGrid? The scarcity of land? Or is it just due to network effects, because SL was there first and it's hard to make people try something new?

I find the idea of having lots of virtual land to build whatever I want without economic pressure very appealing.

bladyblue

I don't think there should be a currency for OSGrid, but I believe a version of paypal could be intergrated eventually.

Joshua Nightshade

There have been other OpenSim based grids which have currencies, and that makes sense in a grid run by one company with a coherent and unified organisation. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a non-profit grid where sims can connect from someone running OpenSim on their home computer and home internet connection.

Gaga Gracious

I am of two minds about currency in OSgrid. On the one hand I agree with much of Scorpia's argument about keeping OGrid free from commercialism and since the grid is the developer's Testverse and run on donations it all rather makes sense. However, on the other hand people collect freebies like water if they are there for the taking and, over time, this puts a huge strain on the asset servers which, for a none-profit grid, will ultimately need ever greater capacity and that costs money. True enough, standalone regions have their own databases but the problem exists for them too. I use a standalone for private use but others open their's up to the grid at large - many HG enabled. Those that are open, of which there are many on OSgrid, are on home connections and thus weak, laggy and more often than not off-line which tends to give OSgrid a bad name as noobs try to explore. Moreover, the Opensim-phobes delight in pointing to OSgrid and it's weaknesses as the sum total of Opensim. But it's frustrating and annoying for those who know better because Opensim is as good as beta, very stable and has features not found in SL which, in my view, make it superior in many ways.


__________________________________________

http://metaverse-traveller.blogspot.com/

justincc

I prefer the answer that currency is something that is external to grids and happens across them - more like Paypal and credit cards on the existing web than a wholly integrated system unique to a single grid.

There are some companies doing this but I haven't heard of any major successes.

__________________
Justin Clark-Casey (justincc)
OpenSimulator core developer
http://justincc.org

Scorpia1275

I think I agree with all of the above. Am pleasantly surprised by the responses, was expecting to be flamed lol. Thanks for the replies.

Hello btw, Have read these forums a bit before, but only signed up today.

I have been in sl for just over a year and a half, and only go there now to see friends. Have been in OS for a year, and that is my main home. I have a dedicated server in a datacentre which I run myself, running 4 sims on the grid.

Argent Stonecutter

Money implies ferrets.

__________________
Argent Stonecutter -- Skyhook Station -- Coonspiracy Store

"And now I'm going to show you something really cool."


The previous is a cybernetic datum published - in direct contravention of DoD Regulation #229RR3X3 - as being conducive to the physical, psychological and/or social well-being of the population.

DanielRavenNest

A money system does not have to be part of the OSGrid project, but it enables things like paying for server farms when you want more robust hosting than your personal PC and Isp can handle, building for hire, tipping cool builds and entertainers, etc.

One of the nice things about the SL money system is it is a frictionless one for small transactions. Systems like PayPal and credit cards have minimum fees, so very small transactions get eaten up by the fees.

Scorpia1275

Hi DanielRaven.

The question I would ask is why is it necessary to build for hire? Why do you need to tip people for cool builds?

Why not build stuff for free, and if someone asks you to build something and you like the idea of it, build it? It is so ingrained into us that we need money, but actually we don't, at least here in OSGrid. I run my own server in a datacentre to run my sims on, and I don't need an inworld payment system for that. Before that I rented a sim from a sim host using paypal, again, no need for inworld currency.

All those things you are describing are part of SL, but they aren't actually necessary. I build things and let people take copies of them, you could always barter. 'I'll build you this house, if you make that gesture for me' etc. It is a whole different way of thinking.

Argent Stonecutter

It's not necessary, but money is an effective feedback mechanism. Quite small quantities of money, completely out of proportion to the effort expended, have motivated people to produce a huge variety of goods in SL. Including, and this is critically important, a selection of ferrets. Unless you have an alternate mechanism for encouraging the development of quality ferrets, I will have to stick to grids where there is money.

The barter system works. I have now and then acquired ferrets via barter, or simply from the goodness of the artist's heart, but this has been rare and the ferrets were not created in response to my interest but because many other people who wanted to be ferrets paid for their development.

Scorpia1275

Well that is kind of what I said in my OP. All are welcome, not trying to turn anyone away, but most of us survive in OSG just fine without a currency. And I would add that OSG isn't suitable for everyone anyone, a lot of the sl folk would probably run screaming back to sl lol, so horses for courses I guess.

Maria Korolov

If you're on OSGrid, you can do a quick hypergrid teleport to a number of other grids that DO have currency -- you can buy stuff, and bring it back to OSGrid. The top multi-grid currency right now is OMC from Virwox, an Australian Linden dollar exchange.

The currency is currently accepted on 19 grids. In fact, I believe there are OMC ATMs on OSGrid, or were, last time I checked.

The way it works is that if you're avatar is registered with Virwox, then whenever you're on an OMC-enabled region, it shows your balance in the top right of your viewer. When you purchase something, or give someone money, you get a little pop up screen where you go to a secure Webpage to confirm the transaction.

PayPal currently works the same way -- it's easy to accept payment for goods in OpenSim, simply by sending folks to the right webpage. And there is a PayPal commerce module that automates the product delivery part, if you don't want to give people their purchases manually.

There's also the G$ currency, which also works across multiple grids, though not as many as OMC.

OMC and G$ have no transaction fees and the idea is that people will put money in their virtual wallets and then have that "money burning a hole in your pocket" sensation and go out and spend it.

With PayPal, however, you're more likely to get people to pay higher amounts for your goods -- but you better be delivering products and services that they feel is worth it.

With the hypergrid, it really doesn't matter whether OSGrid has currency or not. It's so easy to pop over to another grid that it's a moot point. You can even have a grid that's just one region big -- just big enough to hold your store.

But buyers should beware -- with some start-up grid, there's no guarantee that the merchants are reputable and the products will be delivered as promised. To be on the safe side, if you must shop on the hypergrid, pick a grid like GermanGrid (uses OMC) or AlphaTowne (uses G$) where the grid owners are committed to sim-commerce and will intercede for you if there's a problem with a merchant.

-- Maria Korolov
Editor, Hypergrid Business

Desmond Shang

I gently suggest a hedged currency made up of equal OMC and G$ components.

Named: OMG.

And if anyone wanted to make a derivative currency commodity based in two parts on the $L dollar, and one part on the OMC, it could be called $LOL.

DanielRavenNest

Barter is inefficient. It requires you find someone who has what you want, and wants what you have, and in the right amount of each. Money functions as an intermediate trading good, which as long as everyone accepts it, simplifies trading a whole lot. Now you can trade your house to person A for money, then find a gesture maker B and pay him with the money.

Since you wanted a gesture, it widens your gesture suppliers from "gesture suppliers that want a house" to "any gesture supplier that will take money plus any that want a house". Using money does not stop you from bartering or doing favors. But it widens your options.

Also, in my time in SL, I cashed out enough to pay for two new computers, and more than cover my internet bill for the past 5 years. I don't think my Isp and PC builder would want any of the virtual goods I had to trade, and the transaction sizes are wildly different by a factor of a thousand.

Back when I had small children, we were part of a "barter network" for babysitting. It functioned on an hour for hour basis. Anyone who sat other's children earned hour credits, anyone needing sitting spent hour credits. That worked because we all wanted and could supply the same item.

When the things you want to swap are not identical, that will only work on a large scale if you can automate finding trading partners and exchange rates (like how many gestures for a custom house).

Johnnytreadlightly Nightfire

Everyone has their own uses for virtual worlds. To many creators, running a virtual business is just another semi-social aspect. Whether they make a fortune or not is often irrelevant. It's just part of the experience for them, much like going to events or owning a virtual home.

I agree with the OP and what some others have said about OSgrid not having/maintaining their own currency. It's a business aspect and while it may be appealing for some, it's not for everyone. It's an enormous amount of responsibility and liability. I only mention it because the lack of may be keeping the users mentioned above from delving too deeply. I stress it is not always about money even for people wanting a grid with its own currency.

Masami Kuramoto

That's right, but people tend to forget that feedback can go both ways: it makes some behavioral patterns more likely and others less.

Money is an incentive to produce things for the mainstream, because that's where the money is. It's also an incentive to game the system (search spam, bot farms), to defraud and steal (freebie resale, copybot) and to spy on people (CDS, RedZone). SL's monetary system attracts all the wrong people for the wrong reasons. There is a common belief that SL isn't appealing to the masses because it is open-ended and doesn't have goals, but that's not entirely correct. SL does have a goal, and the goal is to make money.

SL's rights management system is designed around that goal. It does everything to protect commercial goods from sharing but nothing to protect freebies from selling. In this regard it's even worse than RL because in RL I can release things under a license that encourages sharing but forbids selling. There have been requests for a Creative Commons checkbox that effectively blocks freebie resale in SL, but people like Prokofy Neva have been lobbying against it. Bottom line: If you give away full-perm stuff for free, it is everyone's right (and duty?) to rip you off.

I realize that the idea of granting copyright protection only to merchants is a popular one among SL residents. I've seen similar statements right here in this forum with regard to the GPL. The idea is that if you give away things for free, you have no moral right to control their distribution and make sure that they remain free. Yes, Argent, I'm looking at you now.

With OpenSim 0.7.1 (mesh!) around the corner, I am seriously considering to make it my primary building platform. I like the fact that I can run multiple regions on a dedicated server at a fraction of Linden Lab's rates. I like creating freebies, but I don't like getting ripped off. The absence of money in OpenSim grids hopefully makes getting ripped off less likely.

Han Held

...aaand, that's the problem. You can't have an economy without theft. It's one thing if everything is gratis, when everything is gratis than someone who enters into the transaction knows up-front and accepts that people will take their work without directly compensating them -they can conclude from that whether or not they want to engage in that transaction.

With an economy there's an expectation of gain and the two parties are put into competition, with the creator wanting to take as much from the customer as possible, and the customer wanting to give as little as possible in exchange for as much as possible. [not all commerce is that cut throat, but those extremes are in evidence -look at the prevalence of ripping viewers and the no-freebies grid avination]. You have resentments and deciet bourn of two parties competing to get over on the other party.

I think that by imposing an economy upon osgrid that you would lose one of the special and endearing things about that grid -IE the entirely non-commercial nature of it.

We have commercial grids up the freakin wazoo; inworldz, meta7, avination, spoton3d, I think that technical arguments aside the non-commercial nature of osgrid is one of the things that makes it culturally unique and rare.

If that was thrown away, I don't believe anything of value would be gained.

__________________

Siggy

The L$ - pre GOM, pre Lindex, was primarily a mechanism to bottleneck uploads.

In that regard I think the idea of a currency isn't a bad one.

The idea of a currency WORTH SOMETHING across the OS grid.. I think bad idea - colossally bad. For the obvious reasons.

Hypatia Callisto

I can't agree more. If I could press the agree button multiple times, I would.

__________________
"To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"

"I suppose so," said Alice.

"Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see, a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."

"I call it purring, not growling," said Alice.

"Call it what you like," said the Cat.

Argent Stonecutter

It also attracts the right kind of people for the right reasons. It's unfortunate that it enables bad behavior, but disapproving of bad behavior doesn't mean you need to eliminate everything that makes that bad behavior possible. The cost of eliminating that behavior can be higher than the cost of the behavior itself.

Why are you looking at me right now? I don't approve of the GPL, nor do I approve of things like "non commercial use only" licenses. Oddly enough, Richard Stallman ALSO does not approve of "non commercial use only" licenses, even though those are also predicated on the same "moral right". If you're looking askance at me here, you need to direct a hairy eyeball at Richard Stallman for the same reason.

Again, disapproving of behavior doesn't mean that you have problems with the fact that such behavior is possible, or that you want to prevent it, so stick your eyeball where the sun don't shine.

Masami Kuramoto

That's what I said.