Second Life releases some code

[Posted January 10, 2007 by corbet]

There is a wide variety of online role-playing games on the net. Second Life is unique among them, however, and not just for the lack of quests to fulfill or monsters to kill. In the Second Life environment, "residents" can lease "property" and create interesting artifacts through the use of a built-in scripting language. The environment has proved free and powerful enough to bring together hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have engaged in large-scale acts of world building. Second Life has shown what can happen when the tools of creation are available to all, but it remains a proprietary service running on proprietary software.

As of January 8, however, Second Life has become a little less proprietary. Linden Lab, the company which owns Second Life, has announced the release of the Second Life viewer application under version 2 of the GPL. The viewer is the client which runs on the user's system; it is a significant chunk of code. Its release should enable interested developers to enhance the Second Life experience - and, perhaps, stabilize the Linux client somewhat.

The way is not yet clear for an entirely free Second Life client, however, as the released code depends on a number of libraries shipped in binary form. Interestingly, many of those libraries (cURL, expat, Mesa, ogg/vorbis, openssl, zlib, etc.) are free software; it is not clear why Linden feels the need to ship its own copies of them. There are a couple of proprietary libraries in there as well, however. Linden hopes to either relicense or route around those libraries in the near future; a quick glance by your editor suggests that this objective should not be too hard to achieve. The Second Life client would appear to be almost free.

Those who would hack on the client code must sign a contributor agreement [PDF] before contributing any changes back. This agreement is essentially a copyright transfer; it allows Linden to do anything it wants with the code. Linden offers commercial licensing terms, so contributors should be sure that they have no objections to that use of their code.

The freeing of this code is a good thing; it brings the free software world that much closer to being a first-participant in the creation of interesting virtual worlds. It is only a beginning, however. The bulk of the logic which implements Second Life lives on the server side, and that code remains proprietary. Imagine if the original WWW browsers had been released into a world where a single company owned the only web server; that is, to a first approximation, where we stand with Second Life at this time. As long as this state of affairs persists, Second Life will remain just another proprietary service.

Linden has some grand visions for how Second Life could grow:

A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid - a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture.

Now that sounds like fun, but it will only reach its potential if the server code is free. Linden continues to make noises - but no promises - about freeing this code. The freeing of the client is a good start; it shows that Linden is serious about involving the community. Releasing the server code will require a rather larger leap of faith on Linden's part, however; the server is where the company makes its money. Let's hope that Linden can find a way to take that leap.

Second Life releases some code

Posted Jan 15, 2007 9:16 UTC (Mon) by JohnNilsson (guest, #41242) [Link]

In a world where the produce doubles as means of production I would hardly say that "the tools of creation are available to all" when the produce is artificially made a rival good and where you need to buy the right to use it anyway.

Second Life releases some code

Posted Jan 18, 2007 21:09 UTC (Thu) by knshaum (guest, #38431) [Link] (1 responses)

Releasing the server code will require a rather larger leap of faith on Linden's part, however; the server is where the company makes its money.

More to the point, that is where a lot of Second Life residents make money. If they release the server-side source code without a very thorough security audit, and the ablility to assure that the in-world economy cannot be hacked, Linden Lab will lose the confidence of its customer base. Those same customers -- the builders, designers, and scripters who sell their wares in-world and convert their gains to real-life cash -- are responsible for most of the content that makes SL compelling; lose them, and SL itself is lost.

There has already been grumbling among the online merchants about the risks of open source with just the client release; some success on the client side will be a chance for Linden Lab to prove to the users that open source does not equal insecurity.

Linden Lab said they would open source the client, and they did, sooner than anyone was expecting. They used the GPL, rather than cooking up a half-baked license of their own. I think this should earn them the benefit of a doubt.

Second Life releases some code

Posted Jan 18, 2007 23:58 UTC (Thu) by clamiam (guest, #42029) [Link]

There has already been grumbling among the online merchants about the risks of open source with just the client release

And there's good reason for this, too. A huge amount of SL's economy comes from people who sell avatars and other 3D-modeled stuff. It is profitable because the game lets people set permissions on their creations, and by "permissions" I mean "disallowing people the ability to copy that polygonal fursuit".

There was already a big fuss over a program called "Copybot" which allowed people to copy things. The difference here is that Copybot was created through reverse-engineering the client-server protocol. With the source to the client, copying stuff becomes much easier.

Licensing is the key?

Posted Jan 19, 2007 11:24 UTC (Fri) by alext (guest, #7589) [Link]

I would expect that release of the source has very little impact depending upon licensing. I mean what ever the license details that you accept to connect and participate on their system not the one for the software/source.

If they can alter terms and conditions at will to say only this client can be used (and failure to do so will see instant termination of your account plus any other penalties they can get away with etc) then releasing source code in the end becomes a cheap publicity driver and way to get free work done for a while until the decision is made to close the doors as their lead is judged sufficiently big that it is unlikely to be caught.

I don't know what the license says?