Second Life To Open Source Server Code

mrspin writes "Having already taken the timid steps of open-sourcing the code for its client software, Linden Lab has confirmed that they'll be going the whole way, and will soon be opening up the server code for Second Life. This furthers Second Life's ambitions to be a fully distributed 3D network — built on interoperability and not owned by one company — a bit like the Internet itself. ZDNet's The Social Web asks: 'who will be the first to offer Second Life hosting or use the server code for their own internal purposes? IBM would be an obvious candidate, perhaps offering corporate Second Life services. And for the rest of us? GoogleLife, free virtual land — ad supported of course. It's certainly a possibility.'"

Comments

Real Open Source

[Trevor]

The Second Life open client code is already out of sync with the production code because Linden Lab just threw it over the wall and then went on happily producing private versions of their software.

Instead of waiting for them to do the same with the server, sidestep them altogether with libsecondlife.org's OpenSim or pick a new platform altogether from the growing list of real open source projects: Open Croquet, Ogoglio.com (my project), or Verse.

Croquet?

[drinkypoo]

I would ask those actually excited by this announcement to please inspect Croquet, a collaborative, three-dimensional framework for cooperative computing that is built atop Squeak, the modern implementation of Smalltalk by Alan Kay and others.

Croquet is Open and Free now. It's in its early stages, but so is second life.

I don't know if Croquet is an excellent choice for building a metaverse, but I'm pretty sure it's a better choice than Second Life.