OpenLife Grid

» see openlifegrid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

OpenLife Grid opened in November 2007, a few months after OpenSimulator made it possible for anyone with a server to run a world that spoke the Second Life protocol. That is the context the whole thing lives in. Linden Lab had built the client, the viewer was open, and suddenly a small company could stand up its own continent and invite Second Life residents over. Dozens of grids tried it. OpenLife was one of the first to get big enough that people noticed.

It was run by Steve Sima, an Australian who went by Sakai OpenLife in world, through a company called 3DX. The engine underneath was not plain OpenSim: 3DX wrote its own server component and paired it with the GPL viewer and the open source ODE physics library. The grid shipped WindLight skies early, which mattered more than it sounds, because in 2008 a prettier sunset was a genuine reason to move your land somewhere else.

More than fifty thousand accounts were created across its life. That number always needs the usual discount for signups that logged in once, but it was real enough to put OpenLife in the conversation about whether Second Life had actually cornered anything. The top banner in 2008 read "The Global Community Metaverse Built by You!", which is the confident tense of that moment exactly.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the pitch to second life ~

The argument OpenLife made to Second Life's builders in 2008 was about ownership. Your creations sat on Linden Lab's servers under Linden Lab's terms, and every content creator in that world had opinions about it. A rival grid running compatible software could promise that your land and your work lived somewhere you had more say over. Sima made that argument publicly and loudly enough that Second Life bloggers wrote it up.

The counter-argument was traffic, and it never got answered. Second Life had the people. Moving a shop to a grid with a tenth of the visitors meant giving up customers for principle, and most builders kept a presence in both rather than leaving.

~ the rebuild ~

In September 2011 the grid was renamed 3DMee and taken offline to be rebuilt. The Internet Archive marks the switch cleanly: openlifegrid.com serves its own homepage on 3 September 2011, and by late October the same address is a redirect to 3dmee.com. Wikipedia puts the rename in early 2012, but the redirect is already in place months before that.

The rebuild went badly. What came back was smaller than what went away, and by 2013 3DMee was too small to appear on the industry list of the forty largest OpenSim grids. Renaming a community that is already shrinking is a hard thing to survive, because everyone who drifted off during the downtime has no brand left to come back to.

~ 18 november ~

The closure notice went up in the members-only part of the site rather than the public homepage, which is why almost nobody outside the grid registered that it had happened. "It's been a tremendous effort and stellar fun, too," an administrator wrote. "But this doesn't mean we won't be back with something different or better in the future." Region rental paid past the closing date was refunded. Whether residents could export their regions or their inventories before the lights went out was never clearly answered, and on a commercial grid the answer is usually no, because letting people walk out with merchant content is the one thing the operator cannot allow.

This is a corner of internet history that stayed almost entirely inside the English-speaking Second Life diaspora, and it closed with a note that only logged-in members could read. Nothing about it reached Turkey, and honestly not much about it reached anyone who was not already living on a grid. openlifegrid.com is a HugeDomains listing now, priced for whoever wants the name.

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