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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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-nt-
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Perhaps my fears are unfounded but I would imagine that the servers would be heavily taxed if everything was going on server side. I mean, let's say you make a product. It's possible this creation process is left to your client and then the server is informed of the new object and persists it. Well, wouldn't it be profitable to make a client that just keeps notifying the server of new objects that sell well in the world? I'm not too clear on the crafting process in Second Life but I imagine it takes resources.
I've heard a lot of comparisons of Second Life to Snow Crash but I'm not sold yet on this step being purely progress forward. I don't even think I could think of server software that could handle all possible clients without the processing and network traffic getting exponential.
My work here is dung.
I think this is a surprising move, but for a different reason than client-side hacking, which is always unavoidable (although made easier by releasing source).
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.
Now people could create a SL client that can connect to an alternative SL universe: one where the servers are free software clones of the original SL servers. This makes SL an open standard. That means we can all join in and host our own stuff without having to pay LL for a server. The system is open - we can join for free.
Presumably LL are relying on "their network" being the best, so people continue to pay them for something they can now do for less money elsewhere. Bit like AOL and Compuserve assuming that their internal networks would always be worth more than Internet access.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Second Life has a curious economy. People make money by making stuff and selling to others, but it's all virtual stuff that must be run on the client. While some object code does live on the server, everything required for visual rendering must be revealed to the client at some point.
A look at SL history will show various incidents of people figuring out how to work around content protection to copy it unhindered and the vicious controversy that ensues. Now, there is simply no such thing as graphical Intellectual Property. Open client code should mean open copying.
They have just knowingly crippled one of the their models of avatars getting money from other avatars. The "steal this avatar" client will be out in a week, I'd wager. Should be interesting to see what happens.
Of course you could run your own private server, like the Construct in the Matrix. You could do things like the "jump" program and "learn karate". But unlike the movie, you can't carry your guns from the fake fake world to the real fake world.
Ah, good point. An interoperability problem. That would reduce the value of a private server.
I suppose it might be possible to come up with an open standard for object exchange, so that objects could be moved between suitably configured servers in the alternate universe. This would not provide any protection against copying though, and there would still be no way to move things into the official network.
Frankly, I'd rather pay them to host the servers than to try to host my own. What with all the griefers making life miserable for the server maintainers, it hardly seems worth the effort to try to run your own public server.
The counter-argument is this: the network would be more valuable if it was mostly composed of privately-run but publically available servers. How rubbish would the Web be if, for example, MySpace was the only company that could host a website? I dare say the WWW revolution wouldn't have happened if client and server software hadn't been freely available.
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?