A second life for 'Second Life' with open source? (LinuxWorld)

A second life for 'Second Life' with open source? (LinuxWorld)

Posted Nov 3, 2007 19:25 UTC (Sat) by robla (subscriber, #424)
In reply to: A second life for 'Second Life' with open source? (LinuxWorld) by JoeBuck
Parent article: A second life for 'Second Life' with open source? (LinuxWorld)

Hi, I work at Linden Lab (about me). Here's the scoop. Since we're the licensors rather than the licensees, and we haven't incorporated any outside GPL code, we're not bound by the GPL. That means that we can incorporate proprietary components in an otherwise GPL'd piece of software. Anyone who wants to redistribute the code under the GPL must remove those components first.

So, if that makes you say "that sucks for everyone who isn't Linden Lab", you're right. We hope to rectify this situation over time, and the external contributors interviewed in the article (Callum Lerwick and Jason Giglio) are two of many people that are doing great work to make that happen. We love the fact they're doing this work, and would be doing more to help them if we weren't just trying to keep our head above water dealing with growth.

This article is a pretty good article; looks like some real reporting happened. One minor quibble I had was that the article overlooked one of two big ways to reduce proprietary dependencies. The first is to find open source alternatives (covered), but the other is to convince the third-party vendors to open their code. For at least one of the components (the Vivox voice code), that's actually a reasonably likely and very probably better alternative to a rewrite. An example of why open sourcing is a good thing can be seen with the infusion of interest in OpenJPEG caused by the release of our initial implementation of OpenJPEG support in the Second Life viewer.

It would be very, very cool to see "(yum|apt-get) install secondlife" just work for a lot of Linux users. If anyone here is interested in making that work, let me know (robla at Linden Lab)

Rob Lanphier
Open Source Busybody
Linden Lab

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Looks like Debian has been working on it for a while:

http://bugs.debian.org/406335

Perhaps you could work with the people listed on that bug to get it in.