Good old Linden Labs. Hot on the heels of the shocking(?) news that they were inflating user figures comes the official announcement that Second Life is going open source. What classic political maneuvering they have performed, if only the announcement was worth the virtual ink it’s written in. Whereas my hombres might thing I would be over joyed at this news (and it’s true, more adherents to the GPL the better,) I’m more shocked at the complete lack of excitement this should engender. Unfortunately Mr. Doctorow seemed to get the wrong end of the stick over at Boing Boing.
Read the press release, and you’ll see that Linden are GPL-ing the client software only. Big whup, it would be nice to see somebody rewrite the frankly nasty 3D engin,e but apart from that how much control will coders get? My guess is minimal.
