AARRRRRGH!!!!!

OpenSpace Sim Prices SHOULD NOT Be Going Up! VOTE To Stop This ridiculous increase! (JIRA MISC-1776)

Effective 1st January 2009
Monthly maintenance USD$75->USD$125
Upfront fee USD$250->USD$375

"We will no longer offer an educational or non-profit discount for new Openspaces. As mentioned earlier, this is due to the increased back end resource required for us to support Openspaces in the way that they are now being used. For the small number of Educators that already have Openspaces, we will be contacting you directly to discuss this change."

Educators? What about those who are students of virtual world and what those worlds can become? These are the people who have created Second Life as we know it.

Academic pricing is ubiquitous in the real world. Anyone creating something of value and not-for-profit should be offered the possibility of doing so at reduced cost, even if it requires some proposal or certification process. One shouldn't have to be affiliated with an insitution: how many true artists are?

There is a clear rationale for the educational discount: the people getting the discount (often as high as 50 percent) are using the product for teaching and learning. So the seller is both supporting education (the development of human capital) and is also promoting their product, in this case a successful SL, full of user-developed fun and entertainment. These discounts feed into a much bigger package - these developers (whether technicians or artists or both) produce great resources for the casual user, student, or trainee professional, and this encompasses wide and inspired educational goals.

There are those who might say the new price is not excessive. The fact is, it's a huge price differential, and will destroy much of what is good about Second Life.

So log in and vote or you may be saying goodbye to you favorite SL attraction, and to many you haven't even seen yet.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/MISC-1776