Vivox Clarifies Voice Integration in Open Source Second Life

We reported earlier this week that Vivox's voice integration in Second Life would not be available as a part of the open source version of Second Life. It comes down to an issue of software ownership and wanting to do it right, said Vivox VP of Marketing and Product Management Monty Sharma. "Just to clarify, because there's a lot of complexity behind the scenes, right now all of the calls to trigger things off that's needed to make things work are integrated in the client," said Sharma. "We have some code for pieces of things that we don’t own. We believe in open source, but it's complex. Before I can even tell you that here's the date we hope to get it out there, we have a lot of work to do. In the short term I'd say come talk to us, and we can try to work something out. "

"Right now if someone is creating their own world off the sim, we'll try to help them out," said Sharma. "Over the long term, we'd like to find a way to simplify it so it just works for people and they can run with it."

Adding to the problem is the issue of who bears the costs of connecting between instantiations of the virtual world or between Second Life and the real world. The bandwidth issue is one that Vivox is still looking into. However, Sharma said that Vivox maintains a commitment to open source.

"There's a lot of bad open source out there, and we use a lot of good open source ourselves," said Sharma. "So when I say we believe in open source it's not just apple pie. When a company moves to open source, there's a lot that needs to be done. It takes time. Linden Lab spent a good chunk of time working towards it, and we expect to spend a similar amount of time on it."

In our previous conversation, Dave Verratti, Director of Product Management, mentioned certification from Linden  to allow for voice in open source. Sharma sees that coming in for both security purposes and allowing for communication across grids.

"If I hand out the API, there's a lot of damage you can do," he said. "We need to know it's not. I don't know if it's going to require certification or it could be locked down in code. And that would come from Linden. It's not so much that this is tied up in complications. It's ajust  lot of work. And it's work, so you do it. As the whole server open source stuff takes off, the world will be a very different place."

Regardless, Vivox seems interested in taking on more work as individuals need it to help with voice right now in the open source client.

"If you're working on the client and need more than what's available, come talk to us," said Sharma. "We're interested in helping. We're working as hard as we can."