Second Life releases some code

Second Life releases some code

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.