More with Second Life and Open Source
A colleague recently sent a blog post my way about the future of Second Life. Nothing major here, I’ve blogged before about Second Life going open source. I’m just curious how this is going to play out, and figured I’d post some personal thoughts on the matter.
Our college is involved with numerous open source projects that involve using things like Plone and Drupal. So I get a glimpse into these communities and know a little bit about how they operate. Everything is bottom-up in terms of design, development, and implementation. I guess this is due to no for-profit company owning the technology. Will the Second Life community really be the drivers for all of the open-source efforts, or does Linden Labs have its own agenda? I’ve heard some people accuse LL of simply looking for free labor from the community to help solve some of their problems with the Second Life technology. I don’t necessarily buy that.
LL has been talking about open sourcing Second Life for a long time now. Even though the article above paints a glowing picture…what’s the holdup here? I would recommend providing the development community the whole server platform and technology to experiment with. Some sort of affiliate program that requires an application and approval process. Get folks like IBM involved early so their technology folks can dive into the code. The time for talk about open sourcing is gone, just open it up. Even if it’s very limited to start with. I feel like LL is trying to exert too much control over this if they really want it to succeed following and open source model.
I think the new approach is more about an open protocol and not so much about open source per se. In fact the implementation by Linden Lab might even be closed source but the protocol can still be open (I hope though that their implementation will also be open source at some point and it looks like that).
What makes this interesting is that they approach the community early and it definitely also depends on how much the community participates in how much Linden Lab will or has to do. Of course they have some sort of their own goals, one of them is being able to port the existing Second Life Grid to the new architecture. This with better scalability is there no 1 goal. But that’s clear and would be dumb otherwise.
As how open their open source initiative really is is definitely discussable. I think they can do far more. And myself being also part in the Plone community knows what I am talking about, I am used differently.
Regarding IBM there actually was one person from IBM involved in the first meeting. And for playing around there are good looking projects like OpenSim (which most likely will also be part of the upcoming architecture and they have been involved, too).
My suspicion is LL is working on a pricing model and structure for tapping into their grid from your personal servers running your world. LL does not seem to have much savvy in this area, so it’s taking some time to happen. Sooner is better for me, but I’m betting it will be 2008 before it happens.
I can see where LL is coming from…let’s just say I’m a bit skeptical. I agree, the sooner the better would be fantastic, especially for educators. The sooner we can tie something like SL into our authentication and provide a somewhat-regulated virtual world for our students, the better!
The future is here. There’s nothing to do in SL. When you arrive you already receive a couch, chairs and other sexual pose balls.
Few people read poetry and do nice things but you have to search a lot.
It’s getting more an more lag with a bunch who doesn’t have money doing works like mopping for 20 minutes to receive 1 Linden.
The clothes available makes women look like a whore and some are required to work as such.
The sims that were good has stopped growing.
I went to many places in search of education… nada.
I guess it’s about time people starts discussing about SL content but it seems that nobody wants to do it.
Oh! No discussion at SL either.
Yes Bart! The sooner the better but two years after things got worse.