February 1, 2007
The 3-D virtual online community of Second Life is reportedly teaming up with the real-world open-source
software development community.
In an announcement last month, San Francisco-based Linden Lab, the creator of
Second Life, said that it’s releasing the source code for its end-user viewer application to bring in new ideas
and thinking for the benefit of all.
In the immediate future, open source developers will be able to modify and improve the viewer code and
contribute any changes back to the project. Overall, the code release is being done under the GPL Version 2.0
license.
Second Life is a simulated community that allows participants to create virtual lives for themselves and other
“virtual people” using avatars. Using the Second Life Viewer, users called “residents” in the virtual world can
simply control their avatars, interact with each other via IM (instant messages), create virtual environments,
buy and sell objects, access multimedia content and move around, according to Linden Lab.
Second Life has users in more than one-hundred countries, according to Linden Lab. It uses a development
platform called Second Life Grid, which was created by the company.
Part video game, part real online community, Second Life is also getting attention from real-world companies
that are beginning to stake out their own turf in Second Life communities.
“We feel we have an overall responsibility to improve and to grow Second Life as rapidly as possible,” said
Philip Rosedale, CEO and founder of Linden Lab. “We were the first virtual world to enable content creators to
own the rights to the intellectual property they create. That sparked exponential growth in the richness of
the Second Life movement. Now, we’re placing the viewer’s development into the hands of residents and
developers as well.”
The source code will directly be available from Second Life’s website.
The initial open-source efforts are expected to include bug fixes, hardware compatibility improvements
and user interface changes, according to Linden Lab.
The company decided to move the viewer client to open source because Second Life users are very creative
and the move will allow developers to add their own creativity, said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer
at the company. “We’ve said before that Second Life makes sense as a fully open-source project. It’s somewhere
in the future.”
Source: IT World Canada
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