Second Life is now open source. Now I’m not entirely sure to what breadth or depth this will mean to anyone that happens to read this, but WOW (not that other MMORPG, I’m exclaiming something).
To get the background on this, go here:
Second Life wikipedia Article
This is, I think, a very significant moment. I mean, I’m sure that the idea has been passed around Linden Lab, but I never myself thought that they would actually do it. Honestly, I figured it was a moment of self-preservation. There are many other competing virtual worlds out there, many with better options, but Second Life has always been the one with the best community. Actually, their community is terrific. I’ve been a “resident” (defined as one who has actually logged in to the 3D server) since 2003 or so, just a few months after it came out of Beta.
It looks like they have now made only the viewer open source. There was an on-going project of users to make their own viewer and I believe it has finished. So it looks like Linden Lab is taking things into their own hands, just like the Lindex incident of a few years ago.
I can’t wait to see what happens next. I’m usually too occupied with RL (the abbreviation users use of “real life”) to actually get involved seriously with this. For a while, I was trying to program some ALife stuff, but got frustrated with the LLScript or whatever they call the stuff they using for coding in-world.
If you’re interested, go to the website:
www.secondlife.com
Its free to log in, and the open-access area of the world is at least 100 square kilometers. The company gets revenue from selling parcels of land in the world (some of which I owned for a while).
You can also browse the world without being connected, using Slurl, which works like google maps. If you have the SecondLife browser, clicking on the map “teleports” you to the physical place. Holy crap!