SL - is it really open source?

When ppl say Sl is open source, does that mean I can download the software and run it on my own server? Can I make my own little version of SL????

Thnx

Not yet.

At some future point - that is the plan.

The veiwer is currently open source though - people can make their own modified versions.

Actually there is a post in the Resident Run Web site forum about an open source SL grid but its still buggy

This will help get you started in the open source effort:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Open_Source_Portal

Any further questions can be made to the mail-list:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev

The Second Life client software - the part that you install on your computer to play Second Life, is Open Source. LL did this to encourage users to come up with their own cool features and bug fixes, which may or may not later get adopted by LL as part of the official client software.

The Second Life SERVER software, the part Linden Lab installs on a fairly powerful server computer to host a region of the Second Life grid - a 256 Meter by 256 Meter chunk of virtual reality, is still NOT Open Source. Linden Lab has the monopoly at this time on servers and server software to host Second Life.

There is a future plan to offer the server software and server host specifications to other corporations, so that some corp like IBM or Disney could host their own entirely seperate grid, or possibly a grid that tangentally is accessable from the Linden's grid. But I don't see them making the server side accessible to the common user any time soon.

According to Philip it apparantly won't be for at least another 12 months (at least 24 months by more technical minded people/Lindens).

Even then, LL will only release the sim source and none of the accompanying services needed to operate an actual grid (presence, user, asset, topology, etc servers) and there's the added hurdle that the sim code contains a whole set of licensed technologies (Havok among others) for which the source will never be available (or it might even prevent LL from supplying something that will compile into a proper binary without purchasing a private license).

All in all, I think people are looking at open-sourced sims as the holy grail while the reality will be far less exciting and won't allow anything near "running my own sim on that old puter" or even tieing it into the main grid (which is really unrelated to open-source).

If you want to see an example of the open source viewer from someone in the field, check out the Nicholaz viewer. He has versions for each current variation of the official viewer, and the previous Release Candidate viewer (he's so good there may already be a version of the curent Release Candidate). He also provides his versions of the source.

To find the Nicholaz viewer just Google Nicholaz - you can't miss it.

Ah! This is so not surprising. LL would be insane to lose control of the shared server code before their endgame ... going public or acquisition.

That said, I am sure some executable form of the entire SL environment will eventually ... in more than a year ... become availabe with a fairly liberal licensing scheme. That will enable people to set up their own grids. As for setting up your own server which interfaces somehow with the existing SL grid ... as you say, that is unrelated to open source. And not at all impossible, but hard to see a good business justification for it on the retail level. For major customers, I could see this becoming technically feasible in about a year.