Second Life vs.

OpenSim
By Maria Korolov 18Share 5 inShare Digg Digg You cannot compare Second Life and OpenSim. One is a social world. The other is an open source piece of server software. You cant even compare Second Life to individual grids using OpenSim as their backend software. Second Life has around a million users logging in each month, while the most active OpenSim-based grid, Avination, has just 9,000. There are an average of 50,000 Second Life users on at any one time in Avination, there might be as many as a couple of hundred. So, really, no comparison. But its a holiday weekend, so Im going to compare the two, anyway. Second Life If youre looking for a social group, you can find anything you want. Political activists. Role players. Educators. Artists. Designers. Sexual minorities. Large user base for event promoters looking for audiences, retail merchants looking for customers, marketers looking for influence, and activists looking for publicity. OpenSim If you already have a group, you can bring your group to a grid or start your own grid.

Small groups of widely dispersed users. Some merchants may find niche pockets of under-served customers on new grids.

Free if you run it on your own computer or USB stick. $295 a month per region, plus Starting at $9.95 a month per region with no setup fee $1,000 setup fee. Texture uploads for professional hosting. Up to $100 a month for a highcost money. performance region, or on a high-end commercial grids. Texture uploads are typically free. Unreliable for mission-critical Some enterprise users report higher stability than business meetings due to problems Second Life, due to high-end hardware and plenty of with voice, unexpected region bandwidth. Typical commercial grids have less crashes or restarts, login problems, stability, however. Open grids where users can lag, and other issues. But stable connect regions hosted on home computers can have enough for classes, in-world talk extremely poor performance and stability on those shows, fund raisers, and social regions. Grids running older software can also

Second Life gatherings.

Lots of content available both through in-world merchants and freebie shops and through a gigantic web-based marketplace.

Some content protection and digital rights management technology available to protect content creators, but content theft is still frequently reported. Linden Lab owns all the content in Second Life. Users just get a license to use it. Linden Lab can remove individual items from user inventories, entire regions from the grid, or shut down any user account at any time. Linden Lab allows individual users to make backups of content in which they themselves have created every part of the object. All Second Life land is provided by a single vendor, Linden Lab. However, resellers and middlemen may step in to subdivide or improve virtual land.

Second Life uses the commercial Havoc physics engine.

OpenSim have instability issues due to bugs that have since been fixed. Grids running untested, experimental versions of OpenSim can also suffer due to the appearance of new bugs that havent yet been fixed. Content slowly becoming available from in-world merchants on commercial grids and for download from websites. As grids mature, infringing content in freebie stores on open grids is discovered and removed, and replaced with non-infringing original content. Some merchants beginning to offer DRM-free content on websites and in hypergrid-enabled shopping areas. Content protection is completely up to the grid owner. Some commercial grids, including Avination and InWorldz, have the same level of content protection as Second Life. Other grids offer more freedom to users, allowing them to back up their inventories or regions. Private grids run by companies, schools, groups or individuals can put as much or as little content protection in place as they want or need. Individual grid owners determine the content use policies on their grids. Some commercial grids follow Linden Lab model. Others allow their residents to have rights to their content. Meanwhile, companies, schools, groups and individuals who run their own grids have full ownership of those grids similar to the way they have full ownership of their websites. Individual grid owners determine backup policies. Some, like InWorldz and Avination, mirror those of Second Life. Other grids allow more backup options. Owners of private grids can backup any objects, can make backups of entire inventories of individual users, of entire regions, or of the whole grid. More than 50 different vendors rent land on individual grids or as standalone regions, mini-grids, or run full grids for customers not counting in-world developers who subdivide and resell land in individual commercial grids. OpenSim grid owners can take advantage of OpenSims modular nature to use any of a number of either open source or commercial physics engines. Most OpenSim grids tend to use the default physics provided with the OpenSim software, ODE, which is inferior to that available in Second Life particularly when it comes to vehicle physics.

Second Life

Second Life uses LSL, the Linden Scripting Language.

Second Life uses a voice system from Vivox.

Second Life uses the Linden dollar currency. Users can also make offgrid transactions via PayPal or PayPal Micropayments.

There are several third-party exchanges that trade Linden dollars for US dollars or Euros. However, officially, the currency is not actually owned by users but is licensed, and Linden Lab can terminate that license at any time without a refund.

Teleports only between regions on the Second Life grid.

OpenSim OpenSim currently supports more than 95 percent of all LSL commands, and adds a number of unique OSSL commands. Users can also write their own scripting commands and include them as an OpenSim module or create a completely new scripting engine. InWorldz, for example, has deployed its own scripting engine, called Phlox. Grid owners can also choose to install modules for a couple of different free voice systems, including Freeswitch and Whisper/Mumble, or buy a commercial license. Avination, for example, has a license to Vivox, the same voice system used in Second Life. OpenSim grid owners can create their own in-grid currency. Many commercial grids, including Avination and InWorlds, have done this. As long as all regions on the grid are hosted by the grid owners, this is as secure as the currency system in Second Life. OpenSim grids can also install modules that use the multi-grid OMC currency from Virwox, or enable in-world payments via PayPal or PayPal Micropayments. With both OMC and PayPal, final confirmation of transactions take place on a webpage, for maximum security. The OMC currency can be traded for US dollars, Euros, and Linden dollars on the Virwox exchange. It is accepted on 28 different grids, and if a particular grid goes out of business, the currency will still retain its value. Avinations currency is also now traded on Virwox, but is unlikely to retain value if the grid closes. Other in-grid currencies can only be bought from their grid owners and may or may not be redeemable in the future. Teleports between any hypergrid-enabled grids by using a hypergate, link region, or simply entering the hypergrid address in the Map dialogs search field. Currently, hypergrid teleports are limited it doesnt work between grids running versions of OpenSim that are too far apart, or between regions located too far apart on the map, and doesnt support friends or instant messages. These limitations are expected to be addressed in future releases.