Re: [mmox] IETF policy question

[Jon Watte <[e-mail]>]

Morgaine wrote:
> Heiner, your question presupposes that incompatibilities make it 
> impossible to find common areas of interop, and you then ask what the 
> IETF can do about it.  I think that your premise does not reflect the 
> actual situation, but only reflects that some parties have not been 
> willing to build bridges so far, and just keep making position 
> statements instead.
>

I think we should come out and say what we mean. Saying "some parties 
keep making position statements" is too imprecise. Saying "when person X 
says Y, I don't understand how this relates to a concrete virtual world 
interoperability standard" would probably be more helpful.

As for concrete proposals: I've tried proposing actual, concrete 
actions, and I then back those proposals up by describing how I see the 
needs of the market and the future, integrated, multi-vendor metaverse. 
I believe that's a solid, requirement-based engineering: Given problem 
statement X, a proposal Y is mapped to solve that problem. One of the 
problems, I think, is that different parties on this list have a 
different concept of problem statement X. Thus, having vastly different 
ideas about what Y looks like is not surprising.

What is frustrating to me is that I have not actually gotten any 
response from the Linden people about the concrete proposals; neither on 
the problem statement proposal, nor the specific concrete action 
proposals. All I have gotten a detailed response to is some, but not 
all, of my critique of the currently available OGP proposals, mostly to 
tell me that I'm wrong because my assumptions are wrong and the 
pre-existing AWG-derived assumptions are right.

These concrete proposals of mine have otherwise gotten some positive 
response from the Open Sim community, and other non-Linden-derived 
participants, and mostly absent response from other parts of the Open 
Sim community.

If we can't agree on assumptions (and there's a real chance that we 
can't), then all the bridge building in the world won't help us, 
unfortunately. That's why getting the assumptions and use cases down 
first is crucial.

> If MMOX were an /engineering/ team, the way ahead would be clear.  We 
> would break down the problem space into pieces based on the needs of 
> many different worlds, and then we would find a model and protocol for 
> decoupled services that is applicable to all the architectures involved.
>

I agree! In engineering, you start with requirements.

That's why I posted five detailed use cases for virtual world 
interoperability.

I have since asked explicitly for other use cases to complement the ones 
I contributed, but nobody has stepped up to the plate -- in fact, nobody 
from Linden Lab even replied to the use cases as posted. And for some 
reason, the chairs of the BoF meeting excluded the use case slides and 
presentation from the actual meeting, even though it was on the agenda. 
I inserted myself at the end to at least make the concluding proposal 
that perhaps we should solve smaller problems in different WGs, rather 
than one big WG that tries to solve everything VW related in one swell foop.

However, I am also definitely getting the feeling that the majority of 
the active people on this list are mainly interested in achieving 
near-term Second Life / Open Sim interoperability specifically, and not 
interested in engineering a standard that would be generally accepted 
and implemented by a majority of VW vendors/platforms (most of whom 
aren't even members of this list). If that turns out to be the end 
result, then it probably should come as no surprise that those not 
interested in that particular facet would bow out.

Sincerely,

jw