Gloebit is open sourcing our OpenSim plugin

We’ve always planned to open source our OpenSim Gloebit Money Module when it was mature enough, and we feel it’s reached that point. A year and a half of use in OpenSim has allowed us to improve the plugin while growing to be the most broadly used OpenSim commerce service. We’d like to thank the more than 50 OpenSim worlds which have enabled our service, provided feedback, and helped us get here. We’re looking forward to where we will head together next. Many have requested access to our source code for various projects and have been waiting patiently. We’re hoping they’ll be pleased with the quality of product which that patience has earned. We’ve chosen to open source under the LGPLv3 license to enable use as broadly as possible, while requiring that improvements to our plugin are contributed back to benefit the entire community. Please take a look at our repository, and help us continue to grow the Gloebit Ecosystem.

Here are some of the actions we believe open sourcing our plugin will enable

No more linking and dependency issues breaking payments

Whenever OpenSim makes a new release, we do our best to publish new dlls to our download page for grids who would like to upgrade. However, some OpenSim grids run off of the latest OpenSim code being developed, and occasionally a change in the core of OpenSim will break the linking or dependencies for the existing Gloebit dlls. Now, these grids which like to live on the cutting edge can pull in our source and build their own Gloebit dll against their exact version of OpenSim and system configuration, ensuring they never have a linking or dependency conflict again.

Improved OpenSim functionality

We get lots of OpenSim feature requests. Often times, these come from developers who are more than happy to help us implement those features. Now they can, and we can speed up the pace of improvement of the module for everyone.

Improved C# Gloebit API

Building our OpenSim plugin also allowed us to build a generic C# API for consuming the Gloebit services from which we hope many other platform plugins will be built. Now, all of those integrations can contribute back improvements to the core C# API.

Web plugin

We’ve had many requests from developers working on web services and marketplaces for OpenSim as well as for other platforms and types of digital goods. Now, we’re hoping those developers can move forward with integrating Gloebit and creating web plugins.

Unity plugin

We built a very simple Unity plugin a while back, but it still required a lot of heavy lifting to integrate. We’re hoping that someone will help us build a Unity plugin on top of this new C# API which automates much of the integration and transaction logic.

Thank you to all those who have helped us get here. Please help us continue to improve the OpenSim Gloebit Money Module and C# API and expand to support more platforms for the benefit of the entire Gloebit Ecosystem.