Update: As of Wednesday afternoon, the new sole owner of Enchanted Grid says that she has no access to the grid servers to restart them and that she is told “there are no grid servers to restart.”
Enchanted Grid, a mid-sized private grid with a few hundred regions and registered residents, has been down for a few days, and documents were filed today signaling a change in ownership.
Two of the previous owners, Dai Rhys-Owain and Dawn Gemma Sian Rhys-Owain, have left, and the third owner, Julie Campbell, is now the sole owner and director of the company, according to the filings.
On its FAQ page, Enchanted Grid lists Tanya Matahari as the owner.
“Dear residents, I have now been named the sole shareholder and director of Enchanted Grid,” Matahari announced on the grid’s new Discord server this afternoon.
However, the grid servers were created under Dawn Gemma Sian Rhys-Owain’s personal account, she said. “As of today they have not been transferred to my management.”
A couple of hours later, she added another announcement, that she’s been told that there are no servers to restart.
“I have been working hard to confirm that, but it now appears that there is no way of verifying the reliability of that claim,” she wrote. “I have not lost hope of them becoming available again, but unfortunately it is not within my abilities to make it happen.”
According to a post on the grid’s Discord channel by a user named “Dai Enchanted,” the servers “cannot be accessed due to legal proceedings.”
“We have been as honest as we possibly can right from day 1, even transferring both PayPal accounts over to Tanya last week,” the user posted. “I will not be talking again in local chat. I am seeing our lawyer in the next few days to see if we can release any more information. We have been in constant contact with Tanya every step of the way.”
Neither Dai Rhys-Owain nor Dawn Gemma Sian Rhys-Owain have responded to my request for comment, or to confirm the Discord post.
Some residents have been extremely concerned about the grid’s future, and the fact that they haven’t been able to access the grid or their content.
“No one knows who’s in charge and no one can buy currency or regions right now,” one grid resident told Hypergrid Business, requesting anonymity to avoid being caught up in the cross-fire.
The Enchanted Grid is a closed grid, meaning that there are challenges to exporting content from the grid.
If the grid servers and their backups are gone, then user regions, inventories, and currency balances are gone as well.
Who is Tanya Matahari?
Matahari is a virtual world fashion designer who was well known on InWorldz and in Second Life. Her blog is here and her Facebook page is here.
Enchanted Grid also has a Facebook presence, with a private Facebook group, but there have been no new posts in the past month.
I’ve reached out to the former owners, to Matahari herself, and to other people who might be associated with the grid, and will update the story as information comes in.
Enchanted Grid history
Enchanted Grid was founded this past March, and officially incorporated on May 18, according to legal filings. At that time, there were three owners, each of whom owned a third of the company — Dai Rhys-Owain, Dawn Gemma Sian Rhys-Owain, and Julie Campbell.
Dawn Gemma Sian Rhys-Owain was the director.
Enchanged Grid runs on the Halcyon version of OpenSim, first developed by the team behind the now-defunct InWorldz grid, which was once the biggest closed grid in OpenSim.
Halcyon is based on the InWorldz version of the OpenSim software, which branched away from mainline OpenSim back in 2010. InWorldz updated the scripting and physics features, and fixed some bugs in the code. But by branching away, the fixes made by the community to the rest of the OpenSim code base became harder and harder for InWorldz to implement on its own branch, causing them to fall behind in some areas of technology.
Today, mainline OpenSim offers a number of features, such as variable-sized regions and hypergrid connectivity, that are not available in the Halcyon branch.
Other grids have made their own branches as well, but have been careful to keep their proprietary add-ons separate, so that they can continue to benefit from the advances made by the rest of the community. They also donate bug fixes back to the community so that everyone can have them. Donating bug fixes is also helpful to the original creators because it means that the OpenSim community doesn’t create its own, different, and possibly incompatible bug fixes. If that happens, then the grid either has to throw out its own bug fixes and use the community’s to maintain compatibility, or have to do extra work at each upgrade to add their own bug fixes back in. If they pick the latter, then there’s more “technical debt” with each update cycle and it becomes harder and harder for them to stay current.
Other popular versions of the OpenSim code base include the Diva Distro and the DreamGrid versions, which make setup and configuration easier for new grid owners. Kitely also has its own version of OpenSim that supports cloud-based, on-demand regions, but they’re careful to maintain compatibility with the rest of OpenSim and regularly contribute features and bug fixes back to the community.
Source: Hypergrid Business
