The Mandelbear's Musings

Good article on Why We Need an Open Source Second Life (from this article on LWN that unfortunately won't be available to non-subscribers until next week; some of the comments are worth reading).

The thing that made the web take off was that anyone could run a web server, and in fact anyone could write one. The underlying protocol, HTTP, was almost trivial. Writing a web browser, though more complicated than a server, was still pretty simple. Things have gotten more complicated since then, but it's still all about open formats, open protocols, and open source software.

Second Life is closed -- you can't run your own server and splice it into the SL universe. It's a monopoly, and it's not scalable. You might eventually be able to write your own client, but you can still only play in Linden Labs' private universe. It didn't work for AOL, either.

The thing that's different about the web and blogging communities like LJ and Blogger is that they're not all running on the same set of servers, and yet they're all seamlessly connected. I can post in my LJ, link to an article posted on LinuxJournal, and you can go from one to the other without having to worry about whether you have the right client and whether you've paid for access. In fact, you're going to be -- quite rightly -- annoyed if you click the link to the LWN article and find that it's only available to subscribers.

I'm hoping something like that develops in the VR world.