Once upon a time some guy got his hands on the opensource version of lindenlalalands SL engine. Together with some friends and like minded people who were intrigued by the software, they decided to start a grid. They named it TSgrid. It's purpose was to be a test grid for development on the engine, which was named Opensimulator,More and more people showed interest in exploring this mysterious open source grid, and playing with the engine and its modules. So the group of friends chose to open their gridservers to all people interested. Free of charge, as after all, it was a test grid with a clear goal. Development of the opensimulator engine.
The volunteers worked hard to improve the engine and make it live up to the expectations of the users flocking into the grid. Secondlife limitations where shattered, and cutting edge technology was implemented before Lindenlab had a chance to so so. The TSgrid had grown to a massive userbase, each avatar calling TSgrid home for his/her own reasons. Some had homes, other had testlabs, people studied on how to run their own grid, script, or build their creations in TSgrid to later export them to commercial grids and own a buck. Even clubs and hosting providers started to notice the grid.
But the grid is still the TSgrid, started by some guy and his friends, with as purpose of testing and developing Opensimulator. Since the grid got real big, the costs to run it went up exponentially and with help of the donations of its users, and hard work of various volunteers it was kept running.
One day the grid went down... A plane had crashed into the datacenter where it was hosted, and both the TSgrid servers and all of its backups in the rack on the other wing of the datacenter were destroyed in the flames. The inferno left noting but piles of smoking ashes, not a single prim survived.
Obviously the users got very, very upset with the admin volunteers as they "should have had the backups outside the building". Some even furiously criticized the chosen location of a datacenter near a busy flight route....Idiots...All their precious prims and pixels, all gone. Stupid volunteers.
Nobody ever told them to make a backup for themselves, or that they were in a test grid. So they spammed their invaluable advice on how things should have been done in to the community's forums, and they left the TSgrid to rot, to go on with the rest of their digital lives and vent their superior opinion elsewhere. People welcomed them everywhere, and this time they were properly informed, so life was great once again !
The TSgrid volunteers however, never gave up on their beloved grid, and rebuilt it from scratch. The non commercial grid would rise once again. A lot of TSgrids users loved their grid, and went back to the testgrid they called home since many years.
Their world, their freedom still applied. No greed, no drama. And it was a much nicer place now all the people with their "relevant opinion" on how things should work in "their grid" decided to go elsewhere. Perhaps they even build their own grid. And all are welcome to go live there and tell them how they should run their grid and operate things. All others are welcome to come test life in the TSgrid. This chapter should explain how great it really is, and how awesome the people inhabiting and running it are, but that would be part of another story.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
