"Meanwhile, InWorldz can’t take advantage of any of the recent developments in OpenSim — mesh, media-on-a-prim, NPCs, megaregions, super stability, hypergrid friends, hypergrid landmarks, hypergrid instant messages, filtered OAR exports (and, soon, filtered hypergrid exports as well). They’re still on 0.6.5 and everyone else is on 0.7.3 and they can’t upgrade because they made a lot of fixes early on that were needed — but they didn’t contribute those fixes back to the open source community. So the open source guys went on, on their own, refactored, fixed everything — but in a different way than InWorldz did. And now InWorldz is stuck out on a branch all by itself. It has to [take the time and] pay for its own development — and there’s no way a single company can keep up with everything being done by volunteers in a giant open source community.
Now, you can try to convince your users that they don’t need mesh, media-on-a-prim, hypergrid, megaregions, backups, Linda Kellie’s magnificent OARs. And maybe a lot of your users don’t. But some will want some of those things, and, increasingly, there will be more and more things that some people want, that they can’t get on InWorldz, and they’ll quietly peel away. They’ll go to Second Life or OSGrid or Kitely or a New World Studio on their own computer, and spend less and less time and money in InWorldz.*
Three years ago, when InWorldz first launched, they were ahead of mainline OpenSim — more stable, with features that nobody else had. Their technology was a big selling point.
That is no longer the case. InWorldz scored about the same as the average OpenSim grid in technology in both our 2010 grid survey and the 2011 grid survey – even though most of the other grids in the survey just ran standard OpenSim and did little or no technology work at all."
* I believe we are seeing that now. There are more active users but concurrency hasn't changed (rarely ever over 300). While this may seem contradictory, the obvious explanation for the apparent paradox is: more people are spending less time in InWorldz.