Recap: David Levine Visits Metanomics

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Last Monday, March 3rd, 2008, Robert Bloomfield and Metanomics hosted David Levine, 23-year veteran of IBM Research.

Broadcasting live on SLCN.tv from CMP Amphitheatre at CMP Isle 1, this event covered the business implications of:

- three-dimensional visualization
- Second Life's Architecture Working Group (AWG)
- the OpenSim efforts to reverse-engineer private servers to work with the open-sourced Second Life viewer;
- Virtual World business models of Linden Lab & There

Event highlights after the jump.

In this week's event, David Levine comments on the similarities between issues encountered in virtual worlds and at the beginning of computer networks.

I have sort of the horrifying reality of having had a stable email address since 1981 in some variation or another. dwl@watson.ibm.com has found me since then. And I got involved very early on. And IBM has a large internal network, of course. There's some funny stories about how big and how fast it grew when at some point somebody said, "Well, I'll just send that as an email to the West Coast." And the CEO said, "Oh, we can do that?" And he said, "Yes, we have something like 800 mainframes in the network now." And he practically dropped his soup.

And we had an internal system which was called IBM-PC, which is initially done as way to do file sharing and discussion on--obviously enough, the IBM-PC started in about 1981. And it laid right on top of horrible 1980's mainframe technology. It literally sent virtual punched cards around the world as conversations.

But all of the issues that we run into in building things like this are there: identity, trust, whether or not we should believe an answer, how to attribute answers, how to quell flame wars and bad behavior, and eventually how to organize and collect structures of social networking so that there are discussions about in-groups.

Levine continued by sharing thoughts on his work with the Architecture Working Group, OpenSim, and interoperability:

Linden Labs this past fall formed an internally sponsored working group of residents and involved participants called the Architectural Working Group because they'd noticed that they were coming up to a point where they wanted to do some major reworking of the core architecture of the environment. And as they were doing it, they realized that there was a really good chance to also open up some of the key interfaces and make them far more web standard.

And so they invited a bunch of people who had been involved and interested in the topics largely out of interpersonal attractions. It was largely done from people who had attended office hours or had engaged--and they also had discussion and so on, to come and meet in Linden Labs out in San Francisco and spend a day talking about this.

That group has led to an ongoing effort to build out a consensus on how Linden is going to evolve their world to allow real interoperation on the grid. I don't want to dive at all into the technical details; I want to mention two other things and then talk about some of the social implications of that.

The two other pieces are--there's a project that is an open-source clone, effectively, of the server side of Second Life called the Open Simulator Group, or OpenSim for short. And that has reverse engineered the core of behavior of what Linden Labs servers do, and allows you to run your own stand-alone island or grid of islands that look just like Second Life to a large degree. It runs on the unmodified client. It has most of the properties you'd expect. It has almost none of the content. It's a private little cul-de-sac in general. People can bring content in, but if you have content in Second Life, it doesn't come in. And that is, in some sense, the heart of the discussion, which is interoperability, which is the third piece of this, which is: At what point does it become possible for someone to host their own island or cluster of islands that in some way connects to other people's clusters of islands and into the broader grid. That's, at some level, the heart of what I'm interested in because that introduces a ton of interesting changes to both the technical landscape and perhaps more importantly the business and social landscape.

So in particular, yes. And if you look in chat, you'll see Saijanai is busy popping earls up so you can go and click on them in the web. And I highly recommend you do it if you're interested in that.

In particular, one of the insights--and Linden has been very clear on this from early on--and as a professional judgment, I think they're right--is that this isn't going to stay a closed space forever. And in fact, not only isn't it going to stay a closed space, but it's not in their interest at some level to stay in the close space. And so what they've said is--they had a choice. You can either fight it or embrace it. To the extent their attitude appears to be to embrace the fact that we're going to see an open-up world.

And as that has happened, there is now an opportunity to start defining two or three parts of meta-interaction. One of which is the technical side, which is the hard grunt work. But far more importantly, the policies and social behaviors that we want to see. And those are, in my mind, at least as important as the technical work. What happens when you want to go to visit somebody's private island? What is your expectation? What are the property rights of creators in the main grid? How do we respect that? How do we get desirable behavior so that you don't go to someone's private island and have all of your assets stripped or have your behavior imposed on you from outside? All sorts of questions like that come out.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: Is there any financial arrangement between Linden Lab with any members of the Architecture Working Group?" It's a compound question. "How are people's contributions to the project recognized and credited?"

DAVID LEVINE: Well, let me start with one thing, which I know is public knowledge, but should be mentioned. IBM and Linden have a joint development agreement for some of these areas which include some of the work we're doing here. So at some level, my involvement in the AWG is certainly entangled with that work. In general, as far as I can tell, and I can't speak for Linden, and wouldn't want to, any work that's done in the AWG is done through the Wiki in general. And if you look at the Wiki, there is a contribution agreement there which has some very specific terms. Basically, it's a Creative Commons agreement. And I encourage anyone who's interested to go read it. If they're interested in contributing intellectual property, I encourage them to think hard about what the legalisms mean or go find a lawyer or their corporate lawyer if they live the corporate setting, and go make sure they pay attention to that.

That said, it basically is a share and share alike environment. If you're going to work in there, you're saying, "I'm not bringing encumbering intellectual property to this space. And I'm going to share it freely." There's no expectation of compensation. And I think that would be unrealistic. It's largely like an informal standard's body; we discuss, we talk about how we're going to codify this, write it down and build it. And the expectation is that we're going to end up with a public specification for how the pieces interoperate.
And I think in general, so far, it's been a very informal collaboration. No one is looking to get paid to do this work, and I think that's unrealistic. The benefits--the reasons why a company like IBM might be involved, the reasons why companies like Intel and so on are expressing interest is because we end up with this very rich technical space in which we can build richer products. It's nothing more complicated than that.

There was also some interesting discussion of technical and social aspects of IP protection issues in virtual worlds.

DAVID LEVINE: The technical problem is the moment I give anybody a texture to sell, and I sell it to them, and they put it on their avatar, and it gets presented out to the world, that texture is physically on everybody's bloody machine. There's absolutely nothing I can do about that in that sense. It's sent over the internet and it lands on everybody's machines, and it's rendered. And there are about four places along that pipeline where you can snag it. That's technically unavoidable.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD: I just want to clarify. You're saying that--not just that someone can snag it, but they can then reuse it, modify it however they want?

DAVID LEVINE: Right. Now that's certainly unethical. And at some level it's illegal. Exactly how unethical it is depends on how you define ethics. How illegal it is depends on how you define copyright. I'm not going to go there.
It's far worse to take a screen shot of it. You can actually intercept it at the texture level in the content pipeline as it comes onto your client. And you can pretend to be the client and do that. You can grab it at the open GL level. There are tools that will reach in and grab the texture pieces in open GL and put them onto your hard disk. So there's plenty of ways to get at the content. And that's unavoidable.