Below is a reposting of a comment I made in response to Openlife’s pathetic and wrongheaded rebuff to my initial post. I promised to repost my comment if it was deleted from the thread. Not only did my comment get deleted, but I have been blocked, but through the wonderful technology of alts I am able to access Onellife’s diatribe and also what others who have blocked me are posting. No surprises, it has allowed Onelife to distort and manupulate in order to put across his (wrongheaded) point of view, even to the point of contradicitng themselves on a few occasions.

Seriously, 4chan and 8chan could learn stuff from this lot! Indeed, the more I think about it there is an element in Opensim that seems to want to promote some kind of conspiracy theory. Inadvertantly I seem to have provided fodder, though I cannot for the life of me see how my few comments, none of them at all outrageous, unless you’re one of the EIOSSBF cartel, have created such a furore From that they seem to have taken on a life of their own, becoming ever more grossly distorted according to the viewpoint people like Onelife want to project. Good luck to them, my original piece is there to refute their accusations.

---ooOOOoo---

Good to see that there is at least a fewwho have a balanced view of the software industry. In the interests of full disclosure I am the person who wrote the article for which Openlife’s article is, I suppose, a attempted rebuff .

For clarity's sake, my piece is still up and there to read. Several people have rather bizarrely taken what I wrote and assumed that it is an endorsement of the EchoVoice project. It is not. It is, however, an opinion piece suggesting that if we want the nice things in Opensim, then it's likely we'll have to pay for them, or do without - it really is that simple. EchoVoice was used as an exemplary, nothing else.

I was also accused by Openlife of more or less demanding money with menaces, and by another suggesitng that I was calling people ‘cheap’*.when all I did was to suggest that most people could afford small contributions: not that they had to, and nowhere did I even hint that people should donate, merely that they more than likely could. Of course there will be a very small number of people who won’t be able to afford to contribute to anything, but I hardly think they will exist in any significant number in virtual worlds as they will be destitute, not inworld, and have far more to worry about than the people on here who are triggered at any suggestion that they could, shock, horror, pay some money for something for once in Opensim.

One of Harper Held’s comments was so abusive and intemperate that I not only deleted all their comments, but also blocked them. Both Openlife and GlennXpletive had some of their comments deleted due to them being either needless repetition, or irrelevant rants that had no place and only served to interrupt the flow of the thread. Because of this Xpletive then felt it okay to make xenophobic comments about my ethnicity. A complaint has been made about that.

Any pertinent comments were left. And yet I have been accused by Xpletive of restrictung their free speech, which is ludircrous. If they want to rant about me there are plenty of places where they could do that, and heck, they could even set up a website to do that - but of course, to do that properly, it would cost them money, and presumably these people are the core of the ‘Everything in Opensim should be free’ cult.

Sure, it's possible that someone could come along and do it for 'free', but it's unlikely. The eagle-eyed will also have spotted that my piece, whilst focusing on a voice module, was somewhat wider in scope, and was presenting an argument that maybe we should be prepared to cough up a small amount of money, if we want nice things in Opensim. There is a precedent, though it’s from 2015 (before the EIOSSBF nonsense started) https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/02/dahlia-trimbles-...

And if that wasn’t enough, there is this one so we could have decent vehicles in Opensim:https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/01/opensim-users-pl...

And... Related to what trggered the OP into writing their piece: https://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2014/01/zetamex-announce...

However, that one didn’t succeed, probably because of the avaialbility of Vivox, which, to a degree is understandable, but hardly an ideal solution.

The notion that Red Hat Linux is free of cost because Fedora is free is also a bit of a dishonest claim. Red Hat does have a cost: https://www.redhat.com/en/store/linux-platforms

EDIT: IBM through Red Hat largely finances both Fedora and CentOS Stream, and development is by both the community and paid professionals employed by Red Hat. A symbiotic relationship common to many opensource projects.

And, as Mike Chase says in his comment, there is a heck of a lot of paid-for work in GNU/Linux and the ‘free’ is more about freedom than free of cost, and, to be fair, most distros don’t make a charge for, but many (if not most) do ask for a contribution to cover their costs, such as this, from Ubuntu MATE: https://ubuntu-mate.org/download/amd64/jammy/thanks/?metho...

I certainly didn’t intend to stir up a hornets (or is it a vipers?) nest over this, all I wanted to do in essence was show how the power of numbers could work hugely to our collective advantage. Anyone might think I’d suggested that people should donate their life savings, or steal the bread from their childern’s mouths! Seriously, some of you would do well to go back to school and learn English comprehension.

*Come to think about it, I do think that most of those bitterly complaining and using the poverty of others as a weapon with which to beat me are indeed ‘cheap’. Not just because they don’t want to contribute towards Opensim project, but because they are cynically and despicably exploiting poor people to bolster their arguments rather than going off and berating exploitative employers for not paying their workers enough to live a comfortable life, or petitioning the government to ensure that adequate unemployment benefits are paid to workers unable to find work.

PLEASE DO NOT COMMENT ON THIS PIECE – ANY COMMENTS WILL BE DELETED.