Rezzable, having first announced they’re leaving the Second Life™ virtual world for OpenSim (y’know, I hadn’t even heard about them before they were leaving, how depressing is that), have now announced the release of BuilderBot, their toolset for converting Second Life content into OpenSim region ARchive (OAR) files ready for import into OpenSim. In short, this takes an entire sim, and converts it into a nicely packaged format ready for import into OpenSim. Unsurprisingly, content creators (especially those whose content you can copy, scripts are usually more resistant) are a little upset over this. I’m therefore going to make myself unpopular and say I think this is awesome.
Lets face facts here. The Second Life content controls have been cracked like an egg in a blender. Much bigger organisations with much better backing and “trusted hardware” have tried and failed to stop content being copied, I really can’t see LL tripping over some silver bullet. Some people have argued they’re making it even easier to copy content, by making tools even easier to get at. I’m sure, of course, that it’s really hard to find copies of CopyBot. Okay, yes, it does make it easy to copy a sim wholesale, rather than in pieces. but I would like to point out you then need (at least, for now) a region to unpack the region archive in to.
What BuilderBot really means is:
- I don’t have to worry about being able to copy our sim at work, from SL into OpenSim. This is an epic time saver.
- Full sim backups become a realistic possibility. This is fantastic for if we want to let people loose on the island and just revert afterwards.
- People who want to copy content now have another tool to do it, with its own advantages and disadvantages.
- We might finally drill it into people’s heads that content controls don’t work, and are not going to solve this.
That last one is a particular pet peeve. I am fed up with features such as llGetLinkPrimitiveParams() being avoided because they would provide copying tools to people who are already have perfectly good copying tools. If you’ve ever seen shoes with tens or hundreds of tiny resize scripts, one per prim, that function is what we need to stop doing this. Instead of having individual scripts in each prim report size and handle re-adjustment, this would allow a single script in do the same job. It doesn’t make it possible to get any information out that you can’t get already, it just means you can do it with one script instead of one hundred. I’ve got tools which will already insert a script into every prim in a link set, having to use one script per prim is not hard, it’s just a giant source of lag (and of course you can delete them after copying, so the copiers never suffer this).
My stuff continues to go out almost universally with copy/mod. Given they’re scripts, that means anyone can cut & paste the entire script trivially. Some scripts are no-mod because it’s the only way to include security keys for accessing remote web apps, but that’s the only exception. A good number even ship full perms. I may lose sales, but I make a lot of sales back to people who like knowing they can always keep a backup.
We cannot beat the copiers by technology, we can only beat them by education. Get more people involved into creating digital content, let them see how much work is involved, and you’ll do far more good than any content controls will.
Oh, and can’t wait for BuilderBot!