A bit about my background: I was once one of the top developers in Second Life, til Linden Lab stole everything, resulting in protracted litigation. Following settlement, I thought the opensim platform simply wasn't ready for prime time and proceeded to work on a better VR/VW platform of my own architecture. That failed to gain investment, so I took a break for a few years, wrote a book, and last year got into OpenSim in the Kitely.com grid, and also started working in venture capital.
I have since started a new project, the GridFone, which is intended to be a virtual smartphone for your avatar, on any platform we can provide services, to allow A2A communications between any world, grid, domain, or platform. So, rather than needing a bulky and laggy application like skype, discord, or teamplayer running on your PC as well as your virtual reality/game app, you instead would have a virtual smartphone your avatar would wear as a HUD, enabling you to "call" anybody not just in the platform you are logged into at that time, but any avatar anywhere.
I'm keeping this code proprietary. I intend to make a good profit on it. But I also want to use it to enable a truly open metaverse where people can communicate freely. There is currently no such communications solution other than the aforementioned applications that are bulky and lag your processor, taking up large amounts of RAM, which I believe is completely unneeded. SL, and Opensim both use Vivox technology for voice communications, but such calls don't work across the hypergrid, and certainly not between opensim grids and Second Life users. Same goes with text chat. Even the "open"sim grids are pretty walled up due to the very fragile and often breaking linkages of the hypergrid, never mind the opensim grids that are not even hypergridded.
So, despite being "open", Opensim isn't very open to user communications. So what is really important here? That users can communicate easily, or that coders have a free opensim app that they can then use to wall customers into their own grid? I think it is more important that users can communicate freely.
They say that the fax machine destroyed the Soviet Union. "Samizdat" Networks of political dissidents used them off-hours to transmit the truth about what was going on across their country, and coordinating their activities. I am not a fan of walled gardens any more than I was a fan of the Iron Curtain. Imagine if soviet citizens could have called anyone in the world on the phone without being spied on by the KGB, and find out the truth about what was going on in the world, how their own government really operated? They would have overthrown their own government a lot sooner.
That is why China has their "Great Firewall", to block dissidents from communicating effectively with exiles, as well. That is why Cuba put a man in prison who had the chutzpah to set up a few wifi hotspots in Havana. Those seeking to control will always try to restrict people's ability to communicate. Thus, anyone dedicated to the principles of open society should first and foremost embrace opening communications where there are walls and barriers, blockages and constrictions.
Information wants to network. The best and most successful ideas are ones that can be shouted from the rooftops without fear of reprisal. "Any place I am standing, is a free speech zone," as the saying goes. At the same time, information wants to be private, because when there are fears of reprisal and restriction for speaking one's mind, secrecy is essential to guarantee the safety of those who dare to speak and spread the truth. Anonymity and pseudonymity are essential rights of privacy.
What do you do when the goal of having open software creates such fragmentation in a community that communication becomes impossible?
