the Lindens in Open Life at the time. Everybody was explaining their personal drama, telling how much money they had lost due to the price raise, and swearing they’d not trust Linden Lab anymore, never. I bought a private cluster of four sims in Open Life (right) to get some experience in the new world, I cloned the terrain from SL, and I started to migrate stuff using Second Inventory. I learned a lot in the process, but at the same time I realized that Open Life was not the place to be: there was no serious company behind (indeed most of the time it looked like a oneperson project), scripts behaved erratically when they worked at all, and, above all, you were substituting the Lindens by the Openlifes, which was no improvement at all (indeed it was worse because of the above: there was no real company behind, etc). I tried Legend City Online too, but it was performing so poorly that after some few attempts I stoped caring. And finally I also tried OSGrid, but OSGrid is not intended to be a stable grid, but as an experimental grid for technical pioneers. Since both Open Life, LCO and OSGrid were based on Opensim, I decided to give it a try myself. I downloaded Opensim and MySQL and
installed my first Opensim. Here’s a blog article I wrote about it: http://zonjacapalini.wordpress. com/2009/01/03/installing-opensim-in-windowsxp-with-mysql/ I discovered that Opensim is a charm to work with! You can make a backup of your database and some few control files, and clone your micro-world anywhere else, avatars, inventory, terrain, scripts, objects, everything! After having lost inventory in Second Life (not to speak of Open Life too), feeling that you can always go back and recover inventory or assets if you need it is really invaluable. Besides, Justin Clark-Casey, a core Opensim developer, was developing a very nice tool to zip a whole