Update, April 13th: the full transcript of Ebbe’s VWBPE 2014 address is now available.
On Friday April 11th, Ebbe Altberg, Linden Lab’s CEO addressed a pack amphitheatre at the 2014 Virtual Worlds Best Practice in Education (VWBPE) conference in Second Life. Some 200 people were in attendance in what was around a 90-minute session which comprises an opening statement from Ebbe, followed by a Q&A / discussion session.
I’ll have a full transcript of the meeting available shortly. However, as a part of his opening statement, Ebbe made a series of comments relating to the Lab’s Terms of Service, which I think are worth highlighting on their own. So here is a full transcript of his comments on the subject:
Terms of Service. I am working with my Legal Counsel to try to try to figure out how we can make it more obvious – or very obvious – that the creators of the content own the content, and we obviously have no intent of ever stealing your content or profiting off of your content independently of the creators in some fashion.
The current terms might indicate that we might somehow have some plan to steal people’s content and somehow profit from it for ourselves, without benefitting the creator, and that’s obviously not our intent at all. It would be very damaging to our business if we started to behave in that way because this whole platform is all about the content you all create. And if you can’t do that, and trust that it is yours, that’s obviously a problem. So I’m working on that, and I can ask you right now to trust us that we’re not going to do what the current clause might suggest we’re going to do, but we’re working on some simple tweaks to the language to make that more explicit.
We also have no interest in locking you in; any content that you create, we feel you should be able to export, and take and save and possibly if you want to move to another environment or OpenSim, that should be possible. So we’re not trying to lock you in either. Obviously, it’s very important to us to get content both in and out, so I just want to put that right out there.
Quite what will come out of this obviously remains to be seen, as will whether or not the changes successfully quell all concerns. However, it would appear that the wheels are finally in motion, and that hopefully, an equitable resolution will be forthcoming.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Ebbe’s leadership so far has given me a feel of optimism that i haven’t felt in a long time about Second Life. How things turn out in the long run are yet to be seen of course. But i really like the guy so far.
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Never mind that our TOS, which caused many creators to leave and some 3rd party content makers to remove license to use their content in SL, says very clearly that we do have unlimited rights to your content. Never mind that we ignored the uproar for all this time. We don’t really mean it.
Yeah right. Get back to me when they actually change squat.
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As has been said earlier… This is nothing compared to what other companies get up to. See LinkedIn.
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His comments all the way through reinforced my positive opinion of his sincerity and grasp of the overall situation — e g his mention of policies that were in the process or have been reversed, such as Lindens being allowed to be visible inworld, and the daunting new user experience. (He also diplomatically dealt with the issue of some people evidently wanting to export other people’s content.)
He did mention the marketplace, and content creators, but not merchants, although no group has as a whole felt more abused / abandoned. I would not be surprised if he had merchants in mind when he said the customer often is not right and does not know what he is talking about — which makes engagement and communication extremely costly. Nevertheless he seems to want to encourage engagement of some sort. Hopefully some arrangement with merchant representatives can be worked out.
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I’d venture to suggest that his use of “content creator” was intended to be all-inclusive and embrace merchants as well, given that most merchants are effectively content creators (although obviously, the reverse isn’t automatically true).
I’ll hopefully have the full transcript of his session at VWBPE up within the next 24 hours.
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Thank you– is there a recording of Ebbe’s talk?
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Mal Burns is the official videographer for the VWBPE. his recording of Ebbe’s talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7pPgEHq7wo. I’ll have a transcript out using that recording shortly.
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I agree with the other comments that express optimism. From the little you quoted he was specific enough that it would be hard to weasel out of what he appears to be saying. I like your new banner, too.
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I don’t think he necessarily understands the fine detail of the many different topics covered. Occasionally it came over as a little ‘motherhood and apple pie’ but the apology for the educator discount debacle was sincere and upfront. The most positive aspect (and I’m speaking as an OpenSim educator) was that he gave the impression he enjoyed doing the session and would be doing more in the future. It was livestreamed so there will be a recording.
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Of course, we must note that the discounts for educational and non-profit institutions were not axed during his tenure. There are two other points, however, that no one seems to have touched upon.
First of all, does education need virtual worlds?
Second, do virtual worlds currently offer educators the ability to intuitively depict in a walk-through, walk-around, walk-in virtual environment what they could show their students through simulation done with tools like MATLAB, SALOME, Scilab, GNU Octave, Creo (formerly Pro/Engineer) etc? Yes, I’m talking both about file import/export and about scripting functionality support. And don’t even get me started on FIPA-ACL and KQML functionality for scripted autonomous agents…
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Does education need virtual worlds? Clearly you think not. There’s evidence that they are useful in some contexts but that’s true of many learning technologies and virtual worlds are rarely the simplest. I would comment on the packages you quote but I don’t want to get you started on FIPA-ACL etc.
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Last time I checked (as in: asked at the server/scripting/sim user group), there was no intention whatsoever for LSL or OSSL to gain support for languages designed for the programming of intelligent agents. It has to be done via connection to an external server.
Furthermore, there is no way for SL or OpenSim to show, in-world, in full 3D, a simulation of, say, how atmospheric pollutants are distributed in an area under specific climate conditions. Or how a crack propagates on a mechanical part. How can this be shown? With MOAP? I’m terribly sorry, but this just doesn’t cut it. Even ancient tools like FRANC3D (or, if we want to go all antediluvian, FRANC2D/L) are more useful than virtual worlds for these tasks.
So, unless virtual worlds are given proper integration with CAE/FEA/FEM/simulation/statistics packages, I don’t see why these fields would need virtual worlds as educators’ tools.
But, now that improved virtual reality hardware is on its way, dedicated, specialised engineering/simulation software will take advantage of VR and there really won’t be any need for virtual worlds on a local level.
What about students and researchers that are far away? Well, unless VW providers sit down and cooperate with the providers of the most common engineering/simulation/statistics applications in order to get things working within virtual worlds, it’s going to be tough. Even if this happens, though, keep in mind that several finite element models are exceedingly complex for the capabilities of SL/OS.
Also note that, even in the simplest scenario (virtual classroom), virtual worlds might end up not being necessary at all.
There is, however, room for SL-like virtual worlds in the field of architectural and archaeological visualisation, albeit within limits: these virtual worlds practically dictate low-poly models, and I’m not sure how acceptable that would be for some institutions.
Do note, though, that I’m not against virtual worlds being used for educational purposes. I want them to be better-equipped for this, and I must say I believe the discontinuation of discounts for educational institutions by LL signalled a lack of interest on behalf of the Lab for equipping the platform with the capabilities for this kind of use.
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Well, I haven’t heard Ebbe’s words “live”, and I look forward to the full transcript, but, like others, I feel there is a certain optimistic aura in the air. Ebbe’s all about community — he has been trained to think community, talk social, feel people. This is good for SL. Of course, Rod was all about content, and that gave us a smoother experience of SL overall, and completely incredible new ways of experiencing SL. I almost cry when I see the “SL pictures of the day” in the LL community forums — they’re simply gorgeous, and, if I didn’t have occasional access to a decent computer (from my roomie), I could be led to believe they were heavily Photoshopped, because nothing could really look that good in SL 🙂
But “looking lovely” is one thing, fixing the LL/residents communication barrier, and loosening the stranghold on paranoid terms of service, seems to be a huge step in the right direction. Seriously, I can truly believe that Ebbe might be appalled at the way LL has handled its community, and is just proceeding cautiously, stepwise, to dismantle those barriers.
Maybe we’ll even see Linden Liaisons again on the Welcome Areas.
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There’s a lot more coming on liaison, the L$, technology, marketing, resposiveness to the community, interaction with the community, communications.
The best way I can sum things up is that I liked Rod Humble – but I believe in Ebbe Altberg.
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