Friday, June 22, 2007
Missing Features of Second Life
Many of us have already commented on this particular post and now I've added my 2 cents to the fray as well. I highly recommend that we read this one and its follow-up posts in light of our experiences and attempted experiences in Second Life.
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2 comments:
Micah, do you think that SL will go open source? I get the feeling it's still going to evolve in whatever way makes the creators and owners the most moola. And that unfortunately, means proprietary tightwadism takes over. Perhaps they haven't read the Cathedral and the Bazaar??
tc
(with you being a linux guy, I understand your position, as I've stated before, I believe in that development paradigm, but as I had problems convincing Xerox almost 10 years ago to adopt it for real-time, embedded, and other systems in their digital products, it seems that unless you can completely control it, corporate America outside of Sun won't buy into it... and I believe Sun made only some things open as a desperate response to the surge in the use of Microsoft products to run business architectures...)
A lot can happen in ten years. People are not nearly as afraid of open source as they once were and companies like Red Hat are proving that they are viable. I am, admittedly, biased, but the trend in the industry is oundoubtedly towards professionally supported Open Source software. People are definitely seeing that business models based upon openness and transparency are not in nearly the danger everyone assumed they would be from theft or not paying for support. Just because people can go it alone, doesn't mean it's going to be worth their time to do so — that's the business proposition and it's being borne out.
Sounds like you were, perhaps a little too early…
Second Life has already gone Open Source with its viewer and I don't see tremendous barriers to them open sourcing the world itself, provided it's built in such a fashion that they could connect up to each other. The biggest gotcha' would probably be in the use of currency. Would each world have it's own? Would it all have to originate in banks centered in and controlled by LindenLabs?
Am I making any sense here or am I just babbling on incoherently?
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