Open Cobalt
» see opencobalt.org as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obit ~
Open Cobalt's central idea was that a shared 3D space should not require anybody to own a server. Two people running the client could open a world between them, hand out portals to it, and walk into each other's spaces the way you follow a link. The code came out of the Croquet SDK, the Squeak Smalltalk system that Alan Kay and David A. Smith had been building since 2001 and that Hewlett-Packard released under an MIT license in early 2007.
Julian Lombardi and Mark P. McCahill picked it up at Duke University in early 2008 and started a community development effort around it. McCahill is worth pausing on: he was one of the people who built Gopher at the University of Minnesota, so this was his second run at making a distributed information space that anyone could host a piece of.
The Mellon Foundation funded the initial work and the National Science Foundation added a grant in May 2008 aimed at getting it to a public release. Open Cobalt Alpha shipped in April 2010 as free software under an open license. It had voice chat and a shared whiteboard, and you could drop a working web browser onto a wall inside the world.
~ the rap sheet ~
| Born | Development started in early 2008 at Duke University |
|---|---|
| Released | April 2010, the first public alpha |
| Peak | A set of university deployments and a mailing list; it never left alpha |
| Funded by | The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, then a National Science Foundation grant in May 2008 |
| Killed | October 2015, when the site stopped answering |
| Lifespan | Seven years |
| Made by | Julian Lombardi and Mark P. McCahill, Duke University |
| Killed by | Grant funding ending, and a serverless metaverse arriving a decade early |
~ the funding ~
Grant-funded software has a particular life cycle. The money buys a few years of full-time attention, a release comes out, and then the grant ends and the maintainers go back to the jobs that were paying them all along. Open Cobalt got its alpha out the door and then slowed to the pace of people working on it in the margins. The project's weekly meetings had stopped happening by early 2011, a year after the public release.
It kept limping. The last build anyone shipped was 1.0 alpha 22 in June 2015, five years after the first one and still labeled alpha, which was an accurate description of where it actually stood. I was an engineer on broadband with a professional reason to care about shared workspaces in those years, and I never installed it. Almost nobody did.
~ how it actually ended ~
There was no announcement. The Internet Archive has opencobalt.org serving a full twelve-kilobyte homepage on 6 September 2015, and by 31 October 2015 the same URL returns four hundred bytes of nothing. Somewhere in those eight weeks the hosting stopped being paid for. The domain now answers with a registrar lander, sharing a parking template with several other dead worlds.
The idea did not die with it. Croquet's core designers kept going, the serverless shared-space model resurfaced repeatedly through the WebRTC years, and the current browser metaverse attempts are solving a problem Open Cobalt had a working answer to in 2010. The engineering was not the thing that failed here. There was simply no audience that year for a peer-to-peer 3D workspace you reached by installing a Smalltalk runtime.
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