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OS Partnership
Partnership is easier (and cheaper) in OpenSimulator than it is in Second Life. So is dissolving partnerships. A partnership is where two avatars declare a partnership with another (partnership in the sense of marriage and its civil counterparts). When two avatars are partnered, their profiles are updated to state who their partner is.
There is no gain from a partnership, except to say 'I am not single'. Your partner gains no rights over your account or property. It's just for show.
Second Life
To partner someone in Second Life, you log into your account on the Second Life website and go to the 'Partner' page, fill out a proposal form and send it. If the ~~victim~~ target avatar accepts, you get partnered. For the cost of L$10 each.
The fact that the partnership is performed entirely by scripts begs the question why the cost? It may be they envisaged that as a way of stopping people abusing the system by partnering and dissolving those partnerships several times each day. L$10 equates to about US$0.04, so it's not going to be any kind of deterrent at all. Having to go to the website, login and fill out the partnership form is more of a deterrent as it will quickly become repetitive and boring. No, those 4¢ add up across millions of users and long time periods such as a year.
OpenSimulator
To partner someone in OpenSimulator begins by being a little more complicated: there is no built-in method to partner someone, because OpenSimulator is just the server software, not a complete package replete with a web site. If you want members of your grid to be able to partner, you have to build it yourself - or wait until someone else builds a FOSS system you can use. Recently, someone asked about where they might get some scripts for this.
I decide to write my own, and after writing my scripts, decided to look at the outworldz scripts. The outworldz scripts use the R.O.B.U.S.T. gatekeeper URI, and uses multiple states and uses six types of http request to complete the operation, which in my opinion is far too much. In addition, it assumes there are partner-specific PHP scripts already in place. I am absolutely thrilled that I did not have to reverse engineer PHP scripts that were not visible.
My own script requires only three types of http request: 'info' (to get current partner data for proposing avatar), 'partner' to form a partnership, and 'divorce' to dissolve a partnership.
The in-world script performs both partnering and dissolving functions, allows multiple avatars to use the 'partnering machine' at the same time, provides user-definable certificates to both parties and updates their 'Notes' section in their own profiles to say when they partnered and to whom.
The PHP scripts and in-world script has been uploaded to github with complete instructions on how to set it up, configure it and debug. It requires a minimum OpenSimulator version of 0.9.3. https://github.com/stroggprog/os-partnership
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