Hi Jon,

I was at the BOF on Tues. You probably don't know me but I worked in
IETF for around 10 years, recently I haven't been attending IETF but I'd
like to offer my opinion on your email and the prospect of any work on a
virtual worlds interoperability standard succeeding in IETF. I also have
had some experience with virtual worlds, I did some work with Second
Life shortly after the client went OpenSource, and I'm involved with a
small group in Silicon Valley (FountainBlue) that is trying to organize
events to foster networking among entrepenurs, investors, and
technologists interested in virtual worlds.

My opinion is that any such effort will take years, and it will by and
large be out of date from a market standpoint by the time it is
completed. In other words, by any reasonable definition of success, it
will fail. Your email below is an initial indication of why.

Basically your company (OLIVE?)and Second Life/OpenSIM are competitors.
There are many others out there that compete with Second Life/OpenSIM.
In situations like that, where there is one company or group of
companies that want a standard and no basic agreement with other
competitors for the need of interoperability to their business,
standardization efforts in IETF invariably drag on, since the IETF rules
that everybody gets their say allow competitors whose technology is not
up for standardiztion to disrupt the proceedings. This is not a question
of morality or anything, it is just good business sense, and everybody
does it. Nobody wants a competitor's technology to get the "Good
Housekeeping Seal of Approval" that a standard confers. 

An example of the exact opposite - where competitors have collaborated
to achieve a successful standard - is MPLS, which was described last
night at the technical plenary. But MPLS was addressing an industry that
already had maybe 20 years of technical/business development, where the
business roles of service providers, vendors, and customers were more
clearly defined. Virtual worlds are considerably less mature (even given
the abortive work in the early/mid 90's on dedicated VR systems). So the
competitive posturing among VW companies is naturally more intense.

My opinion on what you guys should do is the following:

1) The SL/OpenSIM/IBM people ought to go off and form an industry
consortium and recruit some experienced protocol and distributed systems
engineers to help them design OGP. IBM certainly has many such folks
working for with experience in IETF, protocol engineering, and
distributed systems design. Once they have their interoperability
protocol done, they can publish it as an "informational RFC" if they
want, this is something any individual or group can do and it does not
constitute an "Internet Standard". 
2) You and anyone else in the OLIVE(?) community should get together and
work on the kind of interoperability protocol that addresses the system
architecture and business ecosystem that you want to develop. You, too,
can publish your work as an informational RFC.
<This will allow both you and the SL/OpenSIM folks to focus on
interesting technical issues and the particulars of your individual
systems, rather than fighting each other on IETF mailing lists and
generating carbon emissions flying to meetings that don't really decide
anything>
3) By the time these parallel tracks are complete, it will be 3-5 years
on (instead of 7-9, if that, which an IETF standardization effort would
take) and the technology and business of virtual worlds will be much
further along. At that time, there might be more clarity whether a
commonality of business interests exists between multiple groups of
virtual worlds which would allow them to supress their competitive
postures and collaborate on a Internet-wide standard.

Finally, putting on my volunteer hat, my feeling is that there are some
serious, unresolved technical challenges involved in making VW a
mass-market product. My feeling is that interoperability between VWs is
only peripherally important. Having some kind of tacit agreement within
the VW technical community about what those issues are, having academics
working on research solutions, and having companies, too, implementing
and deploying competing solutions which could prove themselves in the
marketplace would be much more productive than fighting about an
interoperability standard.

			jak

PS: FountainBlue is sponsoring a virtual worlds event in Sept. at which
companies can come and put up tables with information about what they
are doing. If anyone is interested in participating, please send me
email off-list.



> -----Original Message-----
> From: mmox-bounces@ietf.org [mailto:mmox-bounces@ietf.org] On 
> Behalf Of Jon Watte
> Sent: Friday, March 27, 2009 10:00 AM
> To: Morgaine
> Cc: MMOX-IETF
> Subject: Re: [mmox] Creating walled gardens considered harmful
> 
> Morgaine wrote:
> >
> > While the original idea came from Linden Lab, that is no stumbling
> > block:  every idea has to originate somewhere.  OGP has the great 
> > merit of being all-embracing as a concept, once you see 
> that certain 
> > ideas like /teleport/ and /client endpoint/ are actually much more 
> > flexible than they might at first appear.  /Client endpoints/ on an 
> > OLIVE server could "easily" allow Second Life clients to 
> interoperate 
> > with OLIVE clients.
> >
> 
> So, now for the less rosy situation:
> 
> Even with the definition of the three services that you enumerated:
> 
>    1. /Identity transfer is negotiated to provide continuity 
> of identity
>       across the change of environment./
>    2. /Presence transfer is negotiated to discontinue 
> presence in world
>       A and commence presence in world B./
>    3. /Asset transfer is negociated in the A->B direction to allow
>       assets from world A to appear in world B, or to deny 
> the transfer
>       where appropriate./
> 
> There is no actual interoperability achieved if those are 
> standardized. 
> For a user of any other virtual world platform than 
> SecondLife/OpenSim, 
> these services would give them zero value. Thus, for virtual world 
> platforms other than SecondLife/OpenSim, there is close to zero 
> incentive to implement these services. And, because there is close to 
> zero incentive to implement these services, there is close to zero 
> incentive to participate in the standardization effort.
> 
> I think that this is a problem. I'd like to understand how 
> others feel 
> about the same thing. I could see a number of different standpoints:
> 
> 1. "It doesn't matter if some platforms won't participate in 
> this model; 
> we only care about the ones who do." (This leads to the 
> self-selecting 
> clique problem, which leads to isolated islands of separate 
> interoperability)
> 2. "We need reasonably broad adoption for a standard to matter, so we 
> have to change the problem statement until there is value in the 
> standard for a reasonably broad set of platforms." (This leads to the 
> "re-define what we are doing" problem)
> 3. "If we start here, then we can build on that in the future, until 
> such time as more platforms will get benefits from the 
> standard." (This 
> leads to the problem of building things intended to be used by others 
> without any input on what their constraints are)
> 
> I currently am of opinion 2. I perceived the initial 
> standpoint by the 
> AWG contribution as 1. If you are of opinion 3, how are you 
> going to get 
> the requirements right?
> 
> I think that it's important that everyone who will contribute to this 
> work actually clarifies what their assumptions are in this regard (as 
> well as the use case/requirements regard).
> 
> Sincerely,
> 
> jw
> 
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