Thank you so much for the feedback and your continued interest in SLENTRE.

Take Care,
Avarie

Thanks again for the article!

Thank you again for clarifying your position. My intent in publishing the editorial was to promote an opinion, and I welcome all alternate perspectives on this issue.

I am still educating myself on this issue and hope to provide readers with multiple perspectives so they can formulate their own opinions.

Feel free to post any links you feel might be relevant or sway the debate one way or the other.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment,
Avarie Parker

And no, Sitearm, I’m not “in any process” with you whatsoever — sorry I can’t fall in step with your fake bonhomie. We’re not working together.

In fact, you actively, maliciously undermine the inworld merchant community with your disavowal of copyright and your endorsement of a favoured closed store — and that lets us know where your loyalties lie, with interests that directly in fact DO harm the main grid despite your strangely-titled article here. This is not a path for the world to grow as a whole.

Indeed, this article was a calculated piece of propaganda to try to quell growing questions about the store and the entire set-up.

Cheers! :)
Site

Thank you so much for your thoughtful response to the editorial. I would like to invite anyone with an alternate viewpoint to consider submitting their own editorial for publication. Although, I would say you’ve already done that with your above comments.

I have forwarded your opinions to Sitearm, in hopes she’ll respond to you directly by posting her own comments.

Thank you so much for your continued readership.
Sincerely,
Avarie Parker

The idea that “you can’t get here from there” is some sort of static “forever” situation is ridiculous. No one conceives of the Metaverse that way, when it constantly changes and great leaps are made all the time. To cite one very ready example from 2005: Who would imagine that telehubs would be removed in a day and p2p installed the same day, forever losing fortunes and never gaining new ones?

You have a whole bunch of people working FEVERISHLY on interoperability and trying to internationalize the problem in IETF with the interoperability working groups that grew out of the Architectural Working Groups. You have a fanatic group of script kiddies constantly gridnauting over to OpenSim and OpenSim itself blandly capturing these same customers for less, and possibly positioned to give them their own interconnected grid. So it’s silly to go on nattering about how these things will be “never” connected. They will be connected through Avaline or Sleek or this or that anyway — or by Skype. Don’t be silly, people connect.

Remember how you geeks have always been telling us that you “can’t” have silos and you “can’t” preserve walled gardens like AOL? Hello! Boomerang time.

It’s like the way Philip Linden used to say that we didn’t have to worry about the corporate invasion of SL because they’d “stay on their own islands”. But they sucked all the best builders to themselves, they drew away crowds, they drew in the best content, even if they then abused the trust of the community and didn’t deliver much besides tumble weeds in the end. It had a dramatic impact on the mindset of people who no longer wanted to bother with inworld business.

Most of all, that corporate invasion, and this SLE implosion, very much privileges the “Sitearm License” concept which is that creatives get a job with a company that gets a “site license” and they produce “work for hire” as hired hands at the dikat of those companies, which is then the problem of the company to worry about in terms of IP theft — or not worry as they are selling non-inventoriable experience against the backdrop of ephemera content, and not discrete inventoriable content. That not everybody wants to write over their soul that way seems to escape you.

But even if that model has its charms, especially in terms of your fees, it isn’t a model for the entire world of big business that could use SLE, especially not to be imposed *by force* and by *negligence* about intellectual property protections which don’t have to be perfect technically if the spines are stiffened to fight for them legally and socially.

Obviously we all got it years ago that what this is about isn’t about IBM’s conferences but about those entrepreneurs like Anshe or Adam who will be encouraged to “run their own version of SL with their own rules” and most of all, take these blingie customers off LL’s hand-eye and manage them.

With the heavy steerage of GSP to the clients, it’s a wonder anyone would be able to “offer their services”. How? When Justin Bovington is out there crashing through the tech media warning potential clients ominously of that “deluge” of substandard content that could overwhelm the corporates with “too much choice about tacky stuff”.

Where? When the Lindens commandeer the forums and when an effort to publish even a list of 12 office furniture makers to prove that they exist — and exist at a very high standard in SL — is scrubbed from the forums by Blue Linden after it is denounced as “advertising” by Maggie Darwin (*rolls eyes*), although it was made to resist the impression created by GSP Kimberly Rufus-Bach that there just wasn’t quality material out there for people to buy. All of these are blatant protectionist tactics to favour the GSPs and position them for the lion’s share of the revenue stream by suppressing media, connections, opportunities — by force, if they must.

“Simply” sell instances of work? Where? You’re forgetting you just told us you can’t “get there from here to there” *cough*. So there will be secret midnight uploads with the reset bug now deliberately created as an “enterprise feature”? *snort*.

You’re forgetting just how little widely read media and access there are to blogs in SL, unlike the real world, and how much the Lindens assiduously scrub content they don’t like and steer, steer, steer constantly with a plethora of special programs — SL Dev, certified devs, mentors, SL Views, Community Gateway, Community Partners, special invited blog lists, Battery Street Irregulars and other insiders’ groups where the Lindens make sure the story is told their way, to the people they want to reach without you getting in the way. Only people with incredible persistence and existing RL media connections might get around this barrage of propaganda, but increasingly not (see the uncritical coverage the release got in the lapdog tech press).

You are completely whitewashing what happens here.

What has to happen in fact is the following:

1. At the very list, opportunities have to be opened up to all SPs for sales, not just GSPs that paid high fees to get in the list.

2. Applications to the SP program should be made by registering against a list of criteria that is checked, rather than through arbitrary discretion. Business people are adults. They don’t need the Lindens holding their hand and spoon-feeding them devs and consultants — they are capable of perusing an open marketplace and picking based on their needs. Oh, unless you want to ensure a job corps for all the people fired by the Electric Sheep forever and stagnate development this way in general.

3. Sims with SLE stores on the main grid must exist and be advertised openly, with classifieds able to be purchased on it within the media space of SL and its websites, and anyone willing to sign a simple form vouching that the content is their own should be able to sell there. The uploading reset parlour trick can be done by Glenn Linden after a sale is made a flag goes down on the servers somewhere. It’s a trivial matter to code in another checkbox that says “cleared for transport to SLE” or “other grids”.

4. SLE itself should be exposed to the main grid rather than having it hidden from them as if it is the plague. IN fact, a lot of them are already on the main grid and they should not be discouraged from their presences in both places.

5. Rather than creating a separate WStreet, XStreet has to be integrated with this program and again, not scorned and hidden — with better tabs, categories, search, possibly a dedicated page for SLE will ensure the content is found.

You cannot recreate the Soviet special stores system, it’s death. A growing of SL on the premise that Enterprise has to be hidden in a socialist system of company-driven transactions and content access will fail. Enterprise can maintain firewalled spaces with secure communications without also having to cut itself off from the rest of the world. The Internet sure didn’t grow that way!

Free enterprise necessitates the free flow of people, ideas, and goods. IP can and should be protected by DRM schemes that don’t have to work perfectly to mark intent and track crime, and securing IP or communications is not the daunting task you imagine that requires such sanitation and sequestering.

Finally, let me say your own performance on the thread about the third-party viewers, insisting that copyright should be done away with as obsolete, lets us know that your evaluation of these prospects is suspect and self-interested.