Random thoughts: I've always thought that the decision to not include currency in OpenSim was an ill thought out decision for many reasons. As people have noted, the liability issue is a red herring. I believe there are much greater liability issues in the areas of intellectual property, copyright and so on in the asset system than there would be in a currency system. (I should note that this comes, in part, after talking with retired U.S. Treasury special agents).
Clearly, there are issues about people not understanding what it means to use alpha code, as we learned last April, but that is also not a reasonable excuse for not producing code. All code is alpha at some stage. As Jeroen noted, there are other aspects of how currency could be used such as a karma system, that are well worth exploring. All of that said, I have no expectation that the powers that be will ever rethink their positions and so other alternatives should be pursued. Perhaps the best would be for people committed to OpenSimCurrency to start a seperate project where they can collaborate on building a strong and robust currency system. Currency doesn't need to be part of the core to be part of many worlds. Instead, SampleMoney and OpenCurrency could be used as the starting point for an OpenSimCurrency Project. The project could be expanded to provide much more information about the pros and cons of connecting a currency system to external currency systems, and perhaps even mechanisms to make such connections. Likewise, code could be created to take currency and embed it in objects using financial cryptography which could be used to transport currency between worlds and for that matter between out of world systems. (Side note to skeptics: I am well aware of the issues with many existing implementations of financial cryptography. I'm not saying this would be easy.) So, for any of you that are really interested in OpenSimCurrency, what do you say to starting a parallel project that provides a third party currency framework that can run in OpenSim? Aldon _______________________________________________ Opensim-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/opensim-dev
