Second Life and Open Source

Second Life and Open Source

Laws are based on real realities.

In a free sociaty laws are based on realities of the world we live in. The 'natural laws' so to say. These are based on how the world functions and such. You just don't make it up as you go along unless your a despot.

For instance in the real world you stab somebody, they get hurt. So it's illegal to stab people, you goto jail so you can't stab people anymore.

But in a virtual world you can make it so that people can stab others. They can stab people all day and all night and there is nothing bad that can happen. So why make it a crime to stab people? Its pointless. (it's not the matrix)

In the real world the cost of production is very real. It costs stuff to make a shirt, for instance. You have to build a plant, hire and train people, obtain materials, etc etc. The cost of production is very real and people need to be compinsated for it.

The cost of production is nill. As soon as one virtual shirt is made, you can make infinate amounts of shirts. A person makes a program were you can make a mathmatical model of a shirt for a game or whatnot and then regular people can make new shirts all day long.

Unjust laws are based on pointless crap people make up for themselves.. Like segregation laws based on skin color.

In the virtual world there are real limitations also. You have limitations on how well people can interact with the computer. You have limitations on the amount of computing power you have and the amount of bandwidth you have. A DDOS attack has real consiquences, for instance.Hacking into somebody's computer can cause real personal loss.

Now a _game_ is different.

A game is something that has a rigidly set of defined rules that you can operate in. This is for pure entertainment and thus it realy shouldn't be taken very seriously.

Second life is not a virtual world. It bills itself as this new way for people to interact and deal with each other. A 'second life' in a virtual world.

In fact it's not even the first of it's type. It's basicly a interactive version of 'The Sims'. Instead of trying to your character keep a job and buy fancy furniture or whatever it's that you make the fancy furniture and buy and sell it to other players.

It's the same thing as World of Warcraft, Star Wars Galaxy, City of Heroes or any other dozens of other online video games. Then in a more limited way you had the BBS's and online MUDS that pre-date that.

A true virtual world, one that will create a new way for humanity to interact in a virtual world, will have rules and laws based on the limitations and problems faced by the very nature of having a virtual world. This sort of thing will be built into the protocols that made it.

Not abritary limitations the makers of Second life have placed on it's users.

We already have virtual world models. World Wide Web is going to be the biggest example. Something based on hypertext that has grown into this large thing that is a part of the lives of millions of people around world.