don't forget the MOOs [LWN.net]

don't forget the MOOs

Posted Feb 16, 2006 3:30 UTC (Thu) by joey (subscriber, #328)
Parent article: Toward a free metaverse

There's an unconcious bias in this article toward 3d graphical worlds, and I think it's important to realise that that's not a necessary component of a virtual world, although it's certianly a component that will appeal to a lot of people and that fits in nicely with some current ways of working with computers -- ie, sitting in front of expensive screens weilding a mouse. Long ago we had MOOs, MUDs, etc, and they were text based. Just words, you know. And nearly all of them were free software. It might well be that text, or speech, or the like ends up being a better interface to virtual worlds of the future, especially if they are tightly integrated and layered on top of the real world.

And I'm increasingly convinced that if these worlds don't integrate into the real world, if the ideas that have been bubbling up out of ADVENTURE and the MUCKs and the MMORPGs and such don't spread out and become something larger and more inclusive than their own little pretend world, then in the end that whole area has been nothing but pointless games. Which I hope it hasn't, but perhaps I'm getting old..

Speaking of freedom, there are levels and layers, and it's possible to build the free on top of the non-free. After all, I'm typing this on a device that is present in the er, First Life, which is not particularly free in its implementation; it has non-free firmware and BIOS, and is composed of atoms of some substances that are less easily available than air, and which follow some annoyingly inflexible physical laws, and it needs a constant input of metered electricity to run. But on top of all that is some free code that gives me a measure of freedom.

Similarly, it would be possible to run free code in Second Life, and given how rare it is overall for such services to support coding at all, let alone explcitly give a program (or object's) creator the freedom to make it Free, that Second Life does so seems encouraging to me.

If we get a distributed standardized free online world by 2010, I'll be happy indeed.

(Disclaimer: I write text based MOOS, and have never used Second Life, though I chatted with someone there on the phone today.)

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don't forget the MOOs

Posted Feb 16, 2006 6:18 UTC (Thu) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link]

Sure, you can build free on top of non-free, but the freer the better.

A free Second Life client that ran on Linux without having to resort to recent enough video cards that binary kernel modules are necessary would be nice.

Much nicer would be the "metaverse" described in the article, though-- where you can move between servers, where you can be part of the same "world" as other people without having to build all of your creations on some officially blessed server, but can choose your server, or run your own server hooked into the metaverse.

I don't think we even have that kind of "cyberspace alternate world" even in text, never mind with 3d virtual graphics. Yeah, there are probably lots of free M** type thingies, which you can download and set up servers for, but each one set up is a self-contained world. Ideally, when you leave one "room" or "continent" or whatever and go to the next, you move to the next server... and you can hook new servers into the "world" much as you hook any old Internet server into the internet, and have people be able to come into and interact in the new server space you've built.

The client and servers that did this would need to be free, and would need to come with a well-defined protocol... so that other clients and servers, in the future, could be written that interacted with the first.

Some year this will probably happen. Unless the telephone companies with their highly controlled internet, or the tech and media companies with their intellectual property fears, all manage to lock down the Internet into something where they can deliver "content" to "consumers", rather than something where people are individuals and can creatively be sources as well as purveyors of information.

-Rob