Today’s news is that Second Life is opening its source code. Or at least the client’s.

Here’s a quote from the Official Linden Blog:

Stepping up the development of the Second Life Grid to everyone interested, I am proud to announce the availability of the Second Life client source code for you to download, inspect, compile, modify, and use within the guidelines of the GNU GPL version 2.

A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture.

This is actually genius! Not only because they’re going OSS, and that’s fundamentally A Good Thing ™, but it may be the smart thing to do “politically” speaking. Many who have followed the phenomenon this year are expecting the hype about it to peak very soon if not already. The more gruesome forecasts are for a media backlash fueled by many of Second Life’s shortages – technical and conceptual/social.

One of them is the challenge of managing the influx of users who have been lured to Second Life by its inflated popularity. Even though the actual numbers of these have received some critical comments and reevaluations, the interest towards the game/world is definitely significant and it’s put to a test of coping with the newcomers and managing its own growth.

So in this context, it is really clever to share the load for development, bug tracking and security with the friendly force of the internet crowds, always happy to have something to poke and probe at. More so – by going open source Linden Labs is even further creating a community around its product, to shield it from the anticipated winter of media malcontent.

Either by clever thinking or intuition, in my opinion, Linden Labs are doing the right thing. And by that Second Life is inching even closer to become the Future of Internet, some have already proclaimed it to be.

Post a Comment | Trackback URI