As I was saying...

[mdlbear]

Remember two posts downwhen where I suggested that Second Life may become the AOL of virtual realities? Here's another post saying the same thing:

Techdirt: Will Second Life Be The AOL Of Online Virtual Worlds?

Perhaps one way to think of it is that Second Life is similar to the early closed online services like Prodigy, AOL and Delphi. Eventually, they all were forced to move towards the open internet that no one controlled (some slower than others). An "open source" Second Life could certainly represent the internet in such a scenario, taking away the more limited situation of Second Life, and allowing for much more interesting social and economic experiments.

Some of the comments are worth reading, too. (Others are perfect examples of Sturgeon's Law, but...)

Comments

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

I view Second Life as an implementation of an experiment. Get the viewer down, then open-source it... as opposed to the "design the language, and only then create the viewer" situation that VRML created.

[mdlbear]

Trouble is, open-sourcing the viewer is only half of the system -- the half they don't care about. Their business model is based on owning the servers.

What's needed is a system where everyone can run their own servers, and link them together seamlessly -- like the web.

[aerowolf.livejournal.com]

If the protocol is well-defined, then there's absolutely nothing that can be done if someone decides to put a "portal" on their land in SL that points a conforming viewer to a separate server.

And Linden Lab, when they open-sourced the protocol, knew that they can't keep control of the server.

[mdlbear]

Might work, then. I strongly suspect that I don't have the compute power or bandwidth for SL right now, and I know I don't have the time. Maybe I'll look into it next year sometime.