Second Life certainly is not just a platform, just as Skype or MSN Messenger is not. It is an implementation of a platform, namely VR, to create a specific fantasy world with its own laws and norms and economy, etc. The platform behind it is the server software which is only accessible to the owners. When compared to OpenSim, an open platform for creating virtual reality spaces, it is easy to see this. For someone who has become immersed in the world of Second Life, I can see how it would be difficult to tell the difference.

No, you are the one who is either confused or just trying to create confusion… we were never talking about the client, it is the server that is closed source. Nice of Linden to OS the client, though, since that allowed reverse engineering required to create OpenSim. I don’t blame them for trying to make a buck off their product, but I don’t feel like supporting them in it either.

I am the founder of Kannonji, and am glad to see you have started up a new forum for Buddhist teachings with Buddhaverse. I hope it goes well for you.

It is true that we have rental homes on the sim. These amount to three in all, although we have five homes altogether. The house which was at the center of this silly drama was not a rental, however. Sapien, who calls the space his own, is a benefactor of the sim and the home is simply his. He doesn’t pay rent for it in the traditional sense. The rentals are actually a very small portion of how we offset our monthly costs, and they are located on the other side of the sim far from all of the temples. The same can be said for the store. The only reason we have the store is to offset the cost of running the sim. The bulk of our sim costs are offset by our group of more than twenty owners and monthly donations. We will be ordering a Homestead in the coming months to move our homes to next-door, making way for more temples for RL organizations on our main sim (which, yes, we own all of).

True, the name of our sim (Kannonji Zen Retreat) implies we are leaning more toward Zen Buddhism. That isn’t entirely inaccurate, though Al is right in that we are actively seeking to bring other teachers there from a variety of traditions. In fact, Ken McLeod of Unfettered Mind, Kalu Rinpoche’s translator for many years and a lama with the Karma Kagyu, is giving a talk here on Sunday, December 13 at 4:00 PM. I have also contacted some Theravaden teachers, mostly from the Insight Meditation Society side of things.

“While I agree that Second Life is a silly game, I would still argue that the platform used to create Second Life has great potential.”

I found this statement a bit perplexing because it would seem to me that Second Life literally is *just* a platform. So yes, one can easily do gaming in Second Life. But, for me anyway, Second Life is not a game. Kannonji is dedicated to offering Buddhist teachings in a nonsectarian way and is providing visitors with a variety of speakers from a range of traditions the way it should be offered—freely. Those of us paying the cost to bring that to others do so happily.

Caspian (Adam Tebbe)

I am interested in open source as a principle but I think you might be slightly confused about how closed source Linden Labs is. After all, how do you think that all of the open source SL clients exist? In any case, I will just drop this now.

I think you misunderstand my arguments about Open Source. The reason Linden is able to charge such prices as they do is because it is Closed Source. OpenSim is changing that. I assumed you were into promoting the values of open source software… if it is just a professional interest, then that is different. I see it as a part of my Buddhist practice to support such things, and I appreciate the benefits, cost being only one of them, of open source software.

I never expected Kannonji to invite me to teach, it is you who seem to think that I should leap at the opportunity to ask them to let me teach there. If I were truly interested in teaching in SL I would approach the Buddha Center first; we agree that I am not a Zen teacher, I don’t know why you get the idea that the rest of us should come and be a side show to the main Zen attraction…

Thanks for the well wishes… it was never my intention to encourage you to start your own OpenSim server, just open your mind to the idea that it might not be such a dead end road as you originally thought.

Good luck with Kannonji.

This is not correct. They aren’t a “rental agency” as you state. That is factually incorrect. They do have a store for stuff if people choose to purchase things but it is away from the Zendos. They don’t charge anyone rent though they do take voluntary donations if people choose to give them. Frankly, money just never comes up in conversation. There is a donation box in places and sometimes various efforts to raise money but they aren’t directly hitting people up for cash. This weekend, they just made a Zendo for the Boundless Way Zen Sangha in preparation for Rev. James Ford speaking there. As far as I know, they put the time and energy into doing this (because Rev. Ford is not a SL geek) for free.

I am “attached” to Kannonji because I respect the amount of work that the people involved have put into it and have put into supporting a variety of teachers in SL. You seem to simply dismiss it as somehow a money making agency with the talk of it being a “rental agency.” Have you even *been* to the Kannonji space?

I also think that it is a lot of work to run and maintain your own sim. I have a tech job already. Outside of that, I have my practice, my study, and I have a marriage. I’m not really interested in the time and energy it takes to start a sim from scratch and maintain it when I can use an existing infrastructure for free (to me) and it is free (to the other users).

Personally, as someone who works professionally in Open Source, I think your arguments above are a little skewed. Open Source is not about free as in beer but free as in speech, as they say. It’s about source code, not whether some corporation makes money working on it or running it. If that were not true, then the company I work for, Mozilla, or Canonical, who makes Ubuntu, wouldn’t be open source companies, by definition, since we make money and pay employees. Linden Labs can do a better job opening up the code but they have done a significant job going down that path from what I’ve seen during the last couple of years.

“I guess we differ on our respect for teachers and teachings. It is incredible to me to think that I should go out of my way to ask a Zen center for permission to give talks at their center.”

*shrug* It is incredible to me to think that you wouldn’t have to talk to someone and that it would just be magically handed over without any discussion. They aren’t going to come to you, tracking down your e-mail, hat in hand and ask you to, pretty please, give a talk. Why would they? I know you’re monk but from our point of view, you aren’t any different than any of the Zen priests who do talks there. Some of them have been approached by Kannonji and some have done the approaching themselves. I’m not sure why you think that it is disrespectful for you to initiate the conversation. In any case, since I’m neither you nor an actual representative Kannonji, it isn’t really my business at the end of the day so I’ll stop trying to sell you on it. You clearly are resistant to the idea and it really makes no difference to me. I’m not a Theravadan after all but a Mahayana practitioner with my own teachers. I simply thought that making you aware of the opportunity would be helpful and that you might sincerely follow up on it.

Good luck with your sim.

Kannonji pays for their sim by renting out space, is that not correct? This is the reality of closed source software – you pay their prices and make sacrifices. You are confusing issues; both OpenSim and SL are free for users*, the difference is that SL costs an arm and a leg for the people who run the show. Buddha Center has a store, Kannonji is a rental agency, Zen Retreat almost shut down when the owner had financial difficulties in real life. None of this is necessary with OpenSim. OSGrid is a perfect example of what SL could be. At 30,000 users, it is pretty impressive for Alpha-stage code. Once people realize what they could be doing with this platform if they weren’t crippled by the insane rental costs, I think we will see a real shift.

* Free is not totally true for an SL user. Every time you upload a texture, animation, or sound you pay 10L. Starting a group costs 100L. And when you want to build, you need land. And land costs $30+ for 10,000 sq ft. and <1000 prim limit.

Besides freedom from the thousands and thousands of uninterested people who wind up as griefers more often than students, things like the ability to create megaprims, free uploads (many people upload 100s of textures for their projects), full control over the working of the sim, full access to the database, Skype linking, IRC chat linking, no prim limits, no space limits, the ability to connect to other grids on the fly, pull regions up and down on the fly, use multiple scripting languages, etc., etc. there are many reasons to prefer OpenSim over SL. And this is while it is still in the alpha stage. I think the problem is you are still only involved on a superficial level with the workings of SL; once you see the true price of it, as with all closed source affairs, you should be able to see the point. I invited one of the owners of Buddha Center to visit Buddhaverse. She was literally amazed at the potential she had been missing. I gave her an entire sim to work with, something that, in SecondLife, would have cost her $1,000 US to buy and $250/mo after that to rent the sim she had bought. And even then she would not have all the power over the sim that I can give her.

As a professional software geek, I think you’ll like OpenSim a lot; it sounds like you just have a bit of an attachment to Kannonji :) Maybe we should move this conversation to email…

SL is free to me and to all regular users. It is only not free if you want to have land. So, for the normal seeker, it is a free space. I have no idea what Kannonji pays and they haven’t asked any of us for payments for the use of their land. The costs are between them and Linden Labs. They make space available to teachers in order to help spread the Dharma. Their interest is largely Zen but non-Zen teachers have been welcomed.

I believe that there is a Dharma talk both Saturday and Sunday by teachers there this weekend.

Why would you want to avoid the thousands upon thousands of people? That’s the whole point if you’re trying to teach the Dharma: to reach people, not to avoid them. Expecting people to come and log into your server instead of making yourself available where people already are asking questions strikes me as a bit backwards.

My mind is open but I also have no interest in joining a new sim. I’m not a Theravadan practitioner either. I’m a Zen priest. While I am interested in all forms of the Dharma, I’m not looking for a Theravadan teacher or to spend more time chanting sutras. I have quite a bit of that in my daily practice as it is. :-) I’m happy that you’re doing something interesting to yourself and others. I do wish you the best. I just know that the barriers to starting and maintaining a new service/forum/whathaveyou are pretty high and most fail.

Personally, I’d be interested in hearing more about the technical side (as a professional software geek), such as who you are hosting on, what server software you are running, etc. in case I ever wanted to try to do the same but I’m disinclined to do so at the moment without a driving reason.

And saying SL is free is also weird… how much does Kannonji pay for their island? $250/mo is standard, and that still limits you to one sim and 15,000 prims. I can probably pack 50,000 in our nine sims and we pay $60/mo for a dedicated server. Either one is free for people to use. All I ask is you open up a little bit and look and see… you’ll find the benefits are real. The biggest benefit to me, though is avoiding the \thousands upon thousands of people\, mostly there for cheap thrills and fake lives.

The open and closed source issue is not clearcut in Linden Labs’ case anyway. They have opened up their client code, though I don’t think they are taking contributions, which is why alternative clients like Emerald (which I run) can use their code. As far as I know, they have also opened up the server code or at least stated that they are going to do so. I’m not sure how it is a waste of money when use is free though. I’ll have to ask them about the source the next time I run into a few of their people (which isn’t uncommon here in the Bay Area).

I’ve mentioned you to Kannonji and I was told that that they would love to have you but you’d already said you were quit of SL and didn’t respond to my suggestions to contact them via twitter. They have their hands full getting various Zen teachers situated with avatars, etc. so I doubt they are going to track you down to convince you to come *to* them. :-) That said, they are open to actual Buddhist teachers in SL and supporting them, not simply Zen ones, and have set aside space for a Nichiren temple and teacher, for example.