Nigel Paravane

Linden Labs has open sourced the client for Second Life . This opens up all sorts of new possibilities but also raises some questions.

One possibility, raised in the transcript of Cory Linden’s Town Hall held yesterday, is for the creation of robot clients that then move through the SL world. (The client is the viewer code that runs on your computer today, be it a Mac, Linux, or Windows desktop.) Cory stated that it will happen whether or not the client is open sourced any way, and I agree because one could always sniff out and decode the traffic that goes back and forth between the client and the SL servers. Indeed, there are already APIs that allow you to interact directly with the server infrastructure. Having the client source makes it that much easier, but also brings a lot of brains and eyeballs to making it better and more secure.

Speaking of clients, I’m looking for news of the first Sony PS3 Linux versions as well as those for 64 bit Linux. I wonder when we will see the first Linux distros that state they are optimized for SL.

Here are a few tidbits I found interesting from the aforementioned town hall transcript:

• The servers run Debian Linux.
• Linden Labs has a contract group working with the Mozilla codebase so that web pages will be able to be rendered inworld.
• The client was open sourced on Monday and they have already had the first bugfix contribution by someone in the community.
• Linden dollars might be paid to open source developers who provide bug fixes.
• Better build tools might come along with the open sourcing of the client. My comment: I could imagine a SL build environment (that is, tools that help you create building, furnitures, clothes, and other inworld objects). You could also directly implement GIMP.

You can read more about the open source program on the overview page.

Incidentally, Linden Labs uses WordPress for its Second Life blogs.