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Second Life Open Sources Client
An anonymous reader writes "Just noticed that Second Life released their client under the GPL today, and that they're up to 2.4 million users. Article says that 15% of users contribute scripted objects."
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Current numbers:
Total Residents: 2,434,170
Logged In Last 60 Days: 883,536
Online Now: 13,150
That is right now, right this second as I post this. The highest I've seen the online now number is about 23-24k, and once it gets over 20k shit really does hit the fan.
As far as 15% contribute scripted objects. Perhaps that's 15% of the real active user count, but it sure as hell isn't 15% of the 2.4M. Scripting in SL has a steep learning curve and many people who do building in SL avoid scripting because it is such a pain.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
LL make their money by selling server space. You can't just connect your own server to SL - it has to be one of theirs. The network is closed. All of the PR and astroturfing that's been coming out of LL recently is aimed at getting more people to invest in SL space: the more investors there are, the more the space will be worth. They're trying to drive a homesteading boom like the one that happened in the early days of the Web, when companies started to go online.
On the other hand, this will be a very concrete experiment with micropayments on an effectively wide open information network. If a fully open client with just a trusted third party to handle financial transactions (or maybe ecash) can support a viable information economy through either donations or some form of copyright respect, then it bodes well for a similar "real life" system of micropayments for information and services. Realistically, since most things digital already happen on the Internet, SL will be as real as it gets in terms of the future information economy.
It's likely that Linden Labs is betting on being the manager of the Linden Dollars in the new economy and making their money that way. Hosting server space is a relatively mundane activity compared to the management of the actual money and objects used in SL. Perhaps they will now act as an object ownership repository, basically just keep a hash of every object along with the name of its original creator for the purpose of micropayments to the real creator. Make all objects fully copyable (to respect the reality of information sharing), but let everyone know who the original creator was. Obviously the problem is formally intractable because anyone can modify an object and claim that they're the inventor, but generally market forces will prevent that from happening. Once enough people have seen the original object, they will be able to spot fakes, and since anyone can copy any object, it will be easy to demonstrate the imitations as cheap knockoffs. Payments would just be donations from people who would like to reward the original artists for their creations, and of course for customizations and other services.
I'd also note that Linden Labs has always claimed that SL would be open sourced at some point, so it's likely that this has been planned out quite a bit in advance.