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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.
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.
Once its all open, guess who will be in the line to download the code and get programming? Yep, the pr0n industry!
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Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Second life is the new IRC? I can see it happening. I propose an interface to allow people to be present in second life from an IRC client.
> look
You are in a room of user-created content. Exits are north, south, and dennis.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
Distributed between two data centers, that they control, Linden Labs can't manage better than about 95%-98% uptime. Inventory items and sometimes even portions of entire sims regularly go into the bit bucket when the data centers have connectivity issues.
And to this mix we will add a heterogeneous server base, geographically dispersed, with network connections of unknown reliability?
Get ready for a Second Life experience akin to IRC in the 90s.
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?
Does anyone else think that this could be the beginning of "The Metaverse" as envisioned by Stephenson? (see Snow Crash)
Could someone build at least one world in which you purchase "land" based on the power/CPU requirements of the land, rather than its (virtual) area.
The "necessity" of getting a return on your per-square-meter fees causes SL to be overtaken by casinos and brothels. Make the fee dependent on something of actual economic value.
Just thinking aloud, don't have time to do it myself
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
This sounds like another key step to making the web how some had originally envisioned it. Back in the day when VRML was born there was the idea of creating virtual worlds where we walk to a clothing store like we would in 'first life', of course the technology wasn't quite there yet... Now with Second Life we're a hair closer but as long as proprietaryness is in the way that's just one more silly road block. Personally I want a Google Earth version of second life so I can travel the world and see a decent recreation of it made with actual photos and 3d satellite imagery, I also want to recreate my college campus and attend class virtually...
SL offers a few things that I find occasionally interesting. First off, it's a fancy chat service. I can talk with a bunch of people, and the 3D world it takes place in allows for a lot of creative ways for you to express yourself beyond just text.
Second, it's a big sandbox, and it gives you a fairly pervasive ability to create stuff. Although there are definite (and often times very annoying) limits to the modeling system and scripting system, you can still use them to make just about anything that you can imagine. If you enjoy that sort of free creativity, then SL offers it in a reasonably straight-forward package. If you spend a little bit of time being social, then you can easily find people to help you create, or just to share your creations with.
A third thing that I enjoy about SL is its potential for just ridiculousness. Parts of the SL world are a lot like those stupid, random, and often very amusing photoshopped pictures that people email to each other, except it happens in real time. I wouldn't say that spending time there makes me any smarter or a better person, but it's at least as amusing as watching most of the crap on TV these days.
If I ran a company, I don't think I'd pay anyone to waste company resources doing anything with SL.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
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.
What if you never do sell them for real-world dollars? What if, for example, you simply take your Lindon Dollars to the (hypothetical) iTMS SL store and exchange them directly into music downloads? Of course the IRS theoretically taxes direct exchange based on the "market value" of the goods (which is 100% arbitrary), but can you imagine the overhead of trying to track all those online transfers?
If you think about it, though, the whole point of an income tax is to take a cut from every transfer of currency from one person to the next. (One person's income is another's expenditure.) By performing most of the exchanges in Lindon Dollars one can avoid being taxed at every point along the way. Even if the tax on the final exchange remains it's still a major improvement.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
One of my professors is toying with the idea of working with SL for some lectures. The lectures are still in thr real world, but the assignments revolve around building stuff in SL. For example, one assignment might revolve around designing an automated "assembly line" that reacts to certain events Probably the biggest gripe he has with SL so far is that not everything is possible - he's currently trying to get a Petri network simulator going.
Having access to the SL source code would enable him to set up his own server at the university; that way we'd have much less (network-induced) lag. Also, we wouldn't have to worry about being interrupted by walking penises.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
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.
I want it to work like this: I buy a small house in Second Life, and anyone who comes through my "door" ends up on my server, and the inside of my house is hosted exclusively on that server, and I can control who comes in and out. And it can be HUGE on the inside, a la the Tardis.