Second Life releases some code [LWN.net]

Second Life releases some code

Posted Jan 18, 2007 21:09 UTC (Thu) by knshaum (guest, #38431)
Parent article: Second Life releases some code

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.

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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.