Re: [mmox] Proposed draft charter and milestone list

Morgaine Dinova <morgaine.dinova@googlemail.com> Sat, 07 February 2009 11:17 UTC

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Date: Sat, 07 Feb 2009 11:17:12 +0000
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From: Morgaine Dinova <morgaine.dinova@googlemail.com>
To: "Hurliman, John" <john.hurliman@intel.com>
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Subject: Re: [mmox] Proposed draft charter and milestone list
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On Sat, Feb 7, 2009 at 12:21 AM, Hurliman, John <john.hurliman@intel.com>wrote:

> I have made changes to the draft group charter to make the language more
> vendor neutral, and have changed the goals and milestones to be more vendor
> neutral as well as adding in milestones for a rough consensus on the correct
> approach to several of the MMOX goals.


John's changes in respect of vendor and solution neutrality are perfectly
fine from my perspective, so I won't be suggesting any substantive
modifications.  (Note however the removal of the word "proprietary" in the
final paragraph, which may be substantive, depending on what was intended
--- I believe it was there simply by mistake, since the remainder of the
paragraph did not address the subject).  I have tidied up several English,
grammatical or spelling details for the sake of better presentation though,
and I also have a comment to make about the timeline at the end:

>
> Description of Working Group:
>
> Virtual Worlds and other Massively Multi-Party Online Applications are of
> increasing interest to the Internet community.  Numerous examples exist of
> such applications, mostly using proprietary protocols. With their roots in
> games and social interaction, Virtual Worlds are now being increasingly used
> in business, education and information exchange. With a user base expected
> to grow to beyond 50 million by 2011, creators of such systems have begun to
> look at ways to make such systems interoperate. There have been several ad
> hoc efforts since 2007 to develop interoperability. We believe that the goal
> would now benefit from a formal, established process.
>
> The objective of the MMOX working group is to provide an application-layer
> wire protocol for Virtual Worlds to a) enable interoperability between
> applications, b) provide for access and exchange with other systems on the
> Internet such as identity providers, web services, e-mail and other
> information storage systems, c) allow network layers to recognize VW traffic
> and make routing decisions based on its characteristics.
>
> The core work of the group will be the production of a set of application
> protocols to communicate and interact with the state of Virtual World
> applications. Foundational protocols will be evaluated for: 1) representing
> application layer objects and serializing messages between these objects, 2)
> providing a messaging abstraction layer to support the unique needs of VW
> interactions, and 3) authenticating protocol endpoints. An attempt will be
> made to use existing standards wherever possible. For example, image data is
> typed and transferred using MIME and HTTP; message serializations are
> encoded in XML and JSON.
>
> The MMOX working group is not proposing the standardization of any one
> complete protocol, but the definition of a extensible core protocol with
> additional layers of agreed functionality as they are developed. Because the
> foundational protocols can be deployed before the entire range of VW
> functions is considered, we believe that the efforts of the MMOX working
> group are achievable within a reasonable time frame.
>
> Goals and Milestones:
>
> August 2009 Rough consensus on a set of base VW protocols
> October 2009  Publication of LLSD Draft as an Informational RFC
> October 2009  Publication of an Inter-Simulator Communication Draft as an
> Informational RFC
> February 2010 Progression of base VW protocols to a Proposed Standard
> February 2010 Progression of Virtual World Primitive Object Format to
> Proposed Standard
> February 2010 Rough consensus on a VW Authentication and VW Teleport
> protocol
> June 2010 Progression of VW Authentication to Proposed Standard
> June 2010 Progression of VW Teleport to Proposed Standard
>
> With regard to the above timeline (which I have left intact for now), I
would like to draw your attention to the third item, and to a matter that I
pointed out in a previous post, which others have affirmed as well:  that
our work is not tied to the specifics of Linden Lab's very particular
implementation.

That implementation exposes the mapping of regions to individual machines
and/or simulators, and hence conflates our very important notion of abstract
communication endpoints with the very non-abstract and non-generic details
of their exposed machinery.  As a result, I do not believe that the
publication of a specification for inter-simulator communication is in any
way related to our work here:  virtual worlds may not even have simulators,
let alone inter-simulator communication.

I am of course in no way discouraging the publication by Linden Labs of
their internal details.  Quite the opposite, I believe that it would be good
for them to have additional eyeballs trained on those details, and I will
read that material avidly.  But that work bears no direct relationship to
the vendor-neutral, inter-world protocol suite that we are developing here,
and therefore while it may be a milestone for Linden Lab, it is not one of
ours.

Morgaine.