Is popularity a good thing ?

Today one of my old SL friends, Dinova Yanyean, who saw the primskirtbuilder some time ago, and has been always telling me I should market it (which I hate to do, since it is a boring activity for me), decided to help me out with this, and notified a folks in a few groups about it.

The effect was incredible :) Well, see yourself.



Tons of people arriving, trying the stuff out, chatting - so, having a lot of fun.



After a while the wave started to decline, when I got an IM from Jerry Martin, whom I invited to the area to continue the discussion. In a nutshell the proposal is that I should close-source the primskirtbuilder and start selling it at L$2000. While the idea is interesting, it does not go very well with my principles, so the primskirtbuilder will remain free and GPL-licensed. (this does prohibit the close-sourcing of the derivatives of it and blunt reselling of them too, btw).

I will enclose the discussion for your information - according to what I know, the pasting of the public chat does not classify as going against ToS, so I presume it is OK.

I will enclose the start of the discussion for your information.

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[17:55] You: hi Jerry
[17:55] Jerry Martin: hi there
[17:56] Dinova Yanyean: hey fashion officer
[17:56] Jerry Martin: pleasure you meet you all
[17:56] You: indeed.
[17:56] You: so wanna give it a whirl ?
[17:56] Jerry Martin: sure
[17:56] You: grab a copy and rez it on the floor
[17:57] Jerry Martin: holy cow , lock that thing up and put it in a vendor , charge 2000L for it
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: looll
[17:57] Jerry Martin: not kidding
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: i told him too
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: lol
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: but its now free
[17:57] Dinova Yanyean: and copiable
[17:58] You: well, its been free for a few months
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: lol
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: please test it i want to see what you think about it
[17:58] You: that's one of the reasons opensource is good..
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: its command free
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: a really new idea
[17:58] Jerry Martin: Dinova , i'm the original inventor of the PrecisionWear Dress Maker , it's been around for a year and a hlf
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: ohh ups
[17:58] Dinova Yanyean: lol
[17:59] Dinova Yanyean: i didn't know
[17:59] Jerry Martin: it's currently in the patent pending stage
[17:59] You: i did not know about precisionwear either - i just saw a looprez freeb script and wanted to improve the user experience :)

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Since Vint was quite an integral part of the creation of the primskirtbuilder (I did create it for her, as it quite obviously says in the script :), I did invite her - so the remaining part of the chat is to be continued on her blog.

Apparently, Ged Larsen (the creator of the LoopRez, from free version of which I did borrow the base logic - even though it was modified - Thanks Ged, btw! While the formulae are not difficult, rewriting them from scratch would have been very boring) did receive even some patent claims about the same matter.

What I have said to Mr. Martin, and what I will repeat here - I would like to continue as before (especially since now that the primskirtbuilder has been out there for some time and I can not control the distribution of the full-mod object - and especially since the only time I did hear about the prim skirt building was Ged Larsen's LoopRez script that I got from Vint). And while the conversation was interesting and entertaining, this is my decision.

Today I saw myself quite a few happy people - even those that did not have L$2000 probably. And this is something I am not willing to lose.

So - feel free to grab a copy and tell your friends :-)

p.s. I do have a couple of interesting ideas for all the users of the primskirtbuilder, should post them sometime within a month (if the RL does not interfere) - so check the news every now and then...

UPDATE: I did get a reply from Ged Larsen, where he mentioned that although my free script did pretty much kill the interested for him in pursuing a new version, but that I am all right to use the script that he has released into public domain.

So - thanks a lot to Ged! And folks - Ged does make other stuff, so go and check out his blog at http://slged.blogspot.com/. He has a very nice LinkRez generator which will help you save some time if you are building the necklaces.