On August 1st, 2014, Psyke Phaeton announced that he was releasing his popular PDS HomeSecurity Orb as Open Source. You can read more about his decision here. I discovered this fact a couple days after he made his announcement. At that time, I made the decision to adapt his security system into my land and eventually as the security mode for the houses I’ll be selling.
The PDS HomeSecurity Orb and, by extension, Darkwatch Secure Land, is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. You can read the full licence here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
Adapting and expanding Darkwatch Secure Land will be done over a series of stages.
1. Converting the online documentation
The first step is simply converting the HS Orb online documentation. This stage has been completed and is available here.
2. Create an inworld group
The inworld group will deliver the updates as group notices, and be the conduit for announcements related to Darkwatch Secure Land.
3. Rebranding as Darkwatch Secure Land (DSL)
As PDS HomeSecurity is a trademark of Psyke Phaeton, it is important for me to remove references to PDS HomeSecurity, Psyke Phaeton, and connections to his servers. This will include removing the automatic update functionality.
4. Add new administration level
The current PDS HomeSecurity has Operators that manage every aspect of the orb’s functions. When used in a rental scenario, it requires renters to be added as operators so they can add their friends and ban those they need to ban. The problem with this is that they are also able to make changes, intentionally or unintentionally, that could affect other renters or even neighbors in other parcels. This could potentially lead to sanctions against the owner of the orb, instead of the person who actually made the changes.
The proposed idea will add a new level between Friend and Operator, called “Manager.” A manager can add/remove guests, friends, targets and even other managers, but cannot add or remove operators. A manager can set the access modes and visibility, but cannot change any of the range information or anything related to the networks. In addition, they can view the logs, but not delete them.
5. Integration into my prefab homes
After the rebranding is done, and before the new administration level is complete, I will be able to include the DSL orb with my homes that I will be selling. The orb will be included with the rez box for the home, ready to use. Ultimately, though, I would like it to be better integrated with the home. This may require creating an API for DSL that my home controls can call. This way I can keep my home scripts separate from the security, thus preserving the license.
Even though my homes and related scripts are a commercial project, I am not violating the licensing of the Creative Commons license. The cost for the home is for the home, and will remain consistent, with or without DSL. DSL is basically included for free. In addition, all the DSL scripts will remain full perm, to comply with the license.
6. Future plans
Create a roadmap for future plans and fixes that may need to be done. The version of PDS HomeSecurity that DSL is based on was very feature rich and extremely stable. It is highly unlikely that any changes will need to be done after the new administration level has been added. I will be taking ideas for feature requests, though, and determining what can or should be done.
Darkwatch Secure Land 