Well, GPL seems to be all the craze these days - after Sun with Java, LindenLabs now follows by Open Sourcing their viewer software under the GPL.

This is a great move for more than a single purpose. For starters, you can now add your own goodies to the SLviewer - expect to see a plug-in market popping up (I was frustrated, for example, that I couldn’t at the same time draw a weapon and change shape in LSL, the scripting language. Now, from the client, I could do that). Also expect security holes to be found (and plugged). But there it only starts.

Think about it - everything you can do with the client is now fair game. You can for example build programmatically (calculate prims and just spew out a stream of prim creation and positioning commands) without having to go through scripts - look for third-party building tools or plugins to existing tools; Eclipse can get an LSL plugin that communicates with the life or beta grid; and so on, and so on.

On the down side, this really means the end of security-by-obscurity in SecondLife. People who relied on content (textures and whatever else may be downloaded to the client) to make money will have a harder time because copying will become easy and ubiquitous, and only regular legal means are at one’s disposal - the technical protection is all but gone. The SL economy will shift towards things that still add value under this new regime, and there’s of course a very large parallel with web browsers so I’m optimistic that this will turn out to have not too large an impact.

Anyway, I’ve spent a large part of my holidays in SL (also partly due to feeling not very well - SL then is staying home and going out ), and except for the constant technical glitches I like it more and more. With LindenLabs clearly on a path to make this a ubiquitous platform (I wouldn’t be surprised if the server side code follows in a bit) and being committed to openness, it’s not hard to come up with WWW/CERN/NCSA analogies here and look where that brought us…

This entry was posted on Monday, January 8th, 2007 at 3:44 pm and is filed under SecondLife. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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