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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.'"
The real buzz over second life is the ability to create wealth playing the game. Seems to me that they will always be the 'Federal Reserve' for their creation, and their intention is to make money by creating it. If anything kills second life, it will be a widely distributed unlimited money hack.
The force that blew the Big Bang continues to accelerate.
But, if you're suggesting there's untaxable income to be made, then perhaps I've been looking at this thing completely wrong.
There is real-world income to be made, but it is most certainly taxable. If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
The truth is that so many people are trying to shove content down your throat in Second Life (mostly advertising, no less) that the servers just don't have the bandwidth capacity. I think that's why they're making this move - to distribute the bandwidth load among many, many users. I know I'd spend more time on Second Life if it didn't take five minutes to download 'Buy stuff NOW!!!' graphics every time I took three steps. And now we can all dream about 'how I'd run my private digital world', can't we?
My thoughts exactly. I started looking for my copy of Snow Crash when I read tis article.
I'm suddenly getting interested in trying out Second Life, not having been interested at all before.
This is just Cool(TM).
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
That's more accurate than you realize. Because of trust issues, most third-party servers won't be allowed to connect to the Linden Lab network. Instead, expect to see competing networks of servers.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
It's interesting - I can see your point. But if you replace "SL" with "Website" in your above statements, you can easily see how the attitude might change in a few years.
After all, at first I imagine many companies failed to see the relevance of a corporate website. They may never have imagined hiring someone specifically for managing it: let alone an entire staff for some.
The future hasn't happened yet. This makes it very hard to talk about what happens in it.
Read my Very Short "Stories"
Those of you who can't understand ANY motivation if it does not involve making money will have a hard time even considering this possibility.
I've had the sneaking suspicion that Linden Labs may not be a for-profit company in that their goal is to get rich and IPO.
My conspiracy theory is that the people who are funding Linden Labs, primarily Bezos and other Internet rich boys with cash set up Linden Labs to PRIMARILY develop and get the tech of a 3d world into wide use. Then their companies (Amazon for instance which is ALREADY working heavily in SL) utilize it in their buisness.
My inconclusive evidence?
1. They just don't seem interested in IPOing, when asked it's not really a priority. If you are going to IPO you do it when the hype is big.
2. They are open sourcing the client and server. If you were going to make money you'd charge a small but significant fee. Open sourcing the whole thing makes no sense. No, I don't think they are going the sendmail or mysql model by providing "consulting services". They don't seem interested in that either.
3. In their own Ego driven way somebody like Bezos could change the world. Ego inflation feels great!
So there..poopoo on it all you want. Not everything in the world is primarily motivated by money and profit.
There is still a very huge number of companies out there that see no value in a website. Where I live, it seems like the majority of non-chain restaurants do not have a webpage, so you cannot look up their menu. I'm repeatedly wanting to check some business's webpage for more info only to find they do not have one.
I don't want to say that there's no future for businesses in a "virtual world" that might share some qualities with SL, but as for SL itself, as I have experienced it over the past few years, no thanks.
Various people have been getting excited about the idea of "virtual reality" over and over again at least through the past couple decades, and while the reality has consistently fallen short of the hype, there's certainly a potential that's very compelling.
Second Life makes some of those potentials even more apparent, but that potential that it causes me to imagine makes its flawed current state even more obvious. Just a few of those flaws inherent in SL; crippling lag once you get any reasonable number of people into the same area of the grid, the ability of random people to perform unwelcome acts against your character or your land (and the meager amount of safeguards that you can protect yourself with), the random interpretations of acceptable conduct by the devs/GMs/moderators, the fact that most of these problems have existed for years and still haven't been fixed (meaning that the underlying structure or Linden Labs is unable/unwilling to change in ways necessary to solve these issues).
But the biggest difference between the web and SL is that a company could pretty much entirely control their website. They could own the server, write all of the webpages/scripts, etc. In SL, you're always reliant on Linden labs, which is in one sense, the unaccountable government that lords over the grid. This could change now that they're open sourcing the server. But at that point, I would argue that it's not SL anymore. Until now, SL has really been a service, and not a software package.
So it's not to say that no companies can find a use for a 3D based, open-ended, "virtual world" software platform. Just that the service that Linden Labs offered and called SL has not been well suited to the business related projects of the sort of scale that would justify the resources needed to develop it.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
The main problem with Second Life is that everyone talks about it but nobody plays it. It makes for great news stories only because of the title. Even for people who don't play computer games, the name "Second Life" resonates with them. They see people who play games as playing in a second life anyway. When they read stories about Second Life, they imagine that all of their nerd friends are playing it and that it will be the wave of the future. You can see this with all of the advertisers and Presidential candidates thinking they are riding the wave of the future but are really missing the point.
If you earn Linden Dollars, and sell them for real-world dollars, you're earning income, and are subject to paying income tax on those earnings.
Actually, if you're earning significant numbers of Linden Dollars your earnings may already be taxable even without converting them to hard currency. This will almost certainly be the case for anybody operating as a real estate mogul in SL - each transaction will be a tax event. It will depend on a lot of factors, but if you're setting out to make money out of SL your earnings there will be taxable and they will be taxed according to the time of each transaction, not according to when you convert the assets to hard currency.
I'm assuming:
1) The amount of bandwidth and computational resources needed to support one user are roughly proportional to the number of other users in that user's vicinity (e.g. the number of other users which are visible and thus need to be updated in the user's client).
2) The average number of users in the vicinity of any one other user is roughly constant.
Point (2) can be achieved by growing the world as the number of users increases, which should only require O(n) resources (on the server) to do.
With these assumptions, I see the server being O(n) and each client being O(1), for a total of O(n).