Should Linden Lab Open Source Second Life?

This is a poll to generate discussion about a question I feel is important to ask.

The question:

Should Second Life be released under a free open source software licence and open the development of second life to the world development community?


Things to consider:

Why should it be open source?

Why shouldn't it be open source?

Is an API enough?

Who should manage the development of the client and server?

How can Linden Lab survive when anyone can make their own Second Life server?


As you can see by my signature, I'm in favor of an open source client and server, but I wonder what the community as a whole thinks.

What on Earth ( or elsewhere ) would be the incentive for Linden to give up their monopoly on SL - it's their creation, they earn their living from it.

And to open it up to the public would be - in my oppinion - embarassing
(They would have to back track on all of the replies about things we know have happened to the client that they have fervently denied )

Although saying that I wouldnt mind a look inside the code just to satisfy my own curiosity/beliefs.

I believe in open source anything unless I'm makeing millions of dollars a year off it.

Well, fact is they don't really charge for anything except land useage. I see Linden Lab as primarily a hosting company. Their current monopoly is based on the view of Second Life as some kind of game without a point. The the scope of Second Life is very narrow, because they're stuck into this niche between MMORPGs and the real live internet. The audience for such things is limited. People are getting tired of seing Second Life news all over the web because they see this little game with 250,000 users getting mentioned every 20 minuets. People want to see the metaverse.



I have no idea what you're talking about here.. Could you clarify?






Lucky for Linden Lab, development costs and expansions eats all of their profits! VC is still good though! Question is, will VC support OS/SL?

I support this idea only if Baba will be open sourced as well

I'm not saying this isn't true but has LL released their financials? It's a private company so I would guess not. I just have a hard time believing LL isn't making a fair amount of money off SL.

Edit: spelling

I'm in the know!


Actually in a recent article they admited they are not quite profitable yet... Almost break even.


Edit:updated quote

Not all of SL is Linden Lab's code. The sims for example require Havok, so running a sim would probably require a Havok license. There's probably other stuff too.

That's true, but many games use havok physics.. We would not be given the code to the physics engine, but maybe we could get the API. Another option is to just get rid of havok and go with something else.. Havok is a great buzzword, but I would prefer building on open source tools anyway.

I won't even pretend to understand all the implications... but wouldn't it mean they can harness all that latent nerd power?

This will come. Just not now. The first step will be an open API based on webservices (they have been doing their homework for well over an year on that area; some inter-sim communications already work that way). And perhaps after a few years, they might release parts of the software as open source.

Why not "now"? Put it simply, the code relies on obscurity for providing security in terms of IP rights and money transactions. This would mean that if you had the server software at this very moment, and able to connect your own sim to the grid, you could drop an object on the ground, enter the database, change permissions, and start to sell it on your own. You could also create an unlimited supply of money easily. SL, from the start, never relied upon having non-LL sim servers on their grid, so the extra security issues did not need to be addressed.

Does this means that LL is crossing their arms and ignoring this? Not at all. They have already hinted that "soon" there would be some non-LL-operated grids. While at first they might just have a legally strong contract to prevent the above to happen, I'm quite sure that they're working on the code to prevent that as well. A system can be devised where all database transactions (and money transactions) are digitally signed by a certificate issued by Linden Lab; so effectively your database would be "locked" unless you had a valid certificate, or you could run an "unlocked" database if you didn't want to connect to the main grid (ie. use a self-signed certificate just for your own, home-based mini-grid).

Changing all that — and making the signing/encrypting algorithms fast so that they don't add too much to CPU consumption (read: lag...), is a major undertake that has to be finished until anything is released as open source. You see, once you have the code, you can tweak it as you wish and break all protections; all the security has to be written in a way that you need a special authentication to be able to connect your "tweaked" server to the main grid and enjoy the fun

Thus it's far more likely that you'll get first a very open API before the whole code is released as open source. It's for your own protection Clever programmers might be able then to create a new SL client, using the API to communicate with the grid, but they won't be able to break it (since they'll only have an API to "talk" to). I'm imagining that the first target in mind will be a "lightweight" SL for the low-end users: something that hasn't got the building tools and the nicest features of SL, but that runs faster than a speeding bullet and has a good interface. If the API gets finished by the end of this year, I could bet that something like the Open Source Metaverse Project (to name one project that has active SL residents developing code) could easily provide a lightweight client to SL in less than a year.

So this is what I expect to happen:
- End of 2006: open API released
- Mid-2007 to end of 2007: first "SL-compatible" clients coming out; the first generation will be lightweight ones; many new applications that integrate directly with the grid are deployed (ie. to extract interesting data from the grid's databases and populate graphics, charts, widgets...)
- End of 2008: Bits of the SL client released as open source
- Before 2010: Havok 2 porting abandoned in favour of open source physics engine; other bits of server software currently needing a license are ported to other technologies (example: QuickTime, and some parts of the audio support); limited versions of the server software released as open source (eg. no asset/login server...) for running your own sim at home without being interconnected with the main grid.
- 2011: Microsoft Windows Vista 1.0 is launched (everybody will be running Freedows or something similar by then, so this announcement will be mostly ignored )

You may be right about that API Gwen, but I don't know about the timeline. I think Second Life is going to have to be open source within 2 years or so ;0

You may be right about that API Gwen, but I don't know about the timeline. I think Second Life is going to have to be open source within 2 years or so ;0

What monopoly? All that is valuable in SL is on the server. The client costs nothing, what we pay for is server maintenance. And while an open client would make it easier to write your own server, it's not very fun to sit all by yourself on your own world.


All that can be found without having the code, it's just harder. Besides, there's quite a few people just itching to get their hands on the SL source and release improvements for free.

Say, I bet there's a couple smart people willing to profile and optimize the client to run faster. LL doesn't really have much of an incentive do work all day on the client. In fact, probably from their POV, it's ideal to do as little work on it as possible.

Should they? Yes.

Will they? Absolutely not. The proprietary nature of the SL software means that if they open-source it, they'll lose their ability to keep their hold over the future direction of SL. Would be corporate suicide for them under their current business model.


- Newfie

I think you vastly exagerate what would happen. See what happened with the source for Quake 3. The modifications seem to mostly amount to bug fixes, and feature additions. The Quake 3 raytracer is sure cool, but it's still Quake 3.

But let's suppose we try to make SL in a radically different direction. Say, I take the source, and add support for quadrupeds and taurs. That'd be wonderful, except that without other clients supporting such a thing, and the server recognizing it, it's most likely to go absolutely nowhere. Such large changes can only happen if LL says "Hey, that's cool", takes the improvements, adds server side support, and adds them to the official client.

The changes you can do by having the client source are pretty much cosmetic. It's like a web browser, you can all you want to it, but in the end, secondlife.com doesn't stop being secondlife.com.

I don't see it being corporate suicide. They could exist independantly as a Second Life web host, but I think Linden Lab would fill the position as project leader for an open source Second Life pretty well. They would keep the official codebase, and with the largest install base in the form of the current Second Life community, they would have a pretty good position to direct most development.

I don't think this is a logical question to ask. It should say: "Will LL Open Source Second Life"

I doubt they will.

I don't see SL going open-source, but I do see a possibility where LL might license out the server software so people could run their own sims outside the LL server farm. How these sims would connect to the main grid and handle inventory / data / financial transactions is quite another matter. Until such things can be made rock-solid secure I don't see it happening. Once that hurdle is jumped, then it might happen if it fits LL's business plans. Or if enough people pester them for it

Well, there are two things here. The client is going open source almost for sure, IMO. If SL doesn't open it, probably an alternate client will be eventually made. After all, it doesn't contain anything out of the ordinary, and the protocol is easy enough to decode.

Now, the server part, perhaps not, but this is of much less importance, IMO. After all, the value of SL is mostly in the server side part of things. Running my own server would be nice, but it'd get boring fast without the vast world we have here.

Inventories are going to have to go client side.. Content providers may complain, but none of it is really protected anyway, so they are not really facing a new problem there. Scripts are another matter, but I'm sure there is a way of dealing with that as well.

The Linden dollar is play money.. The fact that someone puts value on having a lot of play money makes it worthwhile to trade in it, but I don't know that it is a sustainable currency. When L$ just appear in your account every week for logging on, it's play money. The L$ will have to be linked to the USD or some other form of currency. Real currency transactions are as simple as the swipe of a credit card or by using paypal.




I think a model similar to IRC could be acheived, where acollection of server opperators agree to interconnect their servers to share the load and broaden the network.

The question is, how do you get your own server connected to the network? If you host through Linden Lab, that's probably a simple matter, but then it's just like now with the island sims. The good thing is, though you have little direct control of the server(no root), you still receive the benefits of the open source sever. Updates, extensions and quick bug fixes.

How does an untrusted server get connected to the Second Life network? I'm not sure how that would work. It requires more thought.

This is technically possible of course, but IMO is a lot more problematic than IRC. To begin with, imagine SL full of servers running from somebody's closet. Slow, unreliable hardware and connections. Machines with bad RAM. Bet somebody would even figure out a way to fill a 386 with enough RAM to run the server on it. Now that would be a fun sim to have around.




Trust seems to be the largest issue here. I think LL would like to maintain the economy. How do you do that if you allow servers to be plugged into your internal network? It'd be quite trivial to duplicate objects and sabotage permissions. Here's another neat trick: Spend a couple months gathering scripts (after all, the sim has to run them). Then once you have them, they should be quite straightforward to decompile.

I think it would work like Livejournal. Sure, you can get the software and run it yourself. But very few people do that, because now you're cut off from the main site. Same way, any alternative SL servers would be cut off from the main economy. If any got large enough they'd have to establish their own economy and have their own currency. We'd end up with different virtual countries.

But at this point, it's essentially possible for somebody to do a better job than SL. Take a gamble, set up servers. Convince enough makers to move on. Figure out a way to have a more stable economy than LL, and you could become the new standard. Not easy by any means, but doesn't sound completely impossible.

This is why I think that while an open client is very possible, as LL doesn't really gain anything from maintaining it, an open server isn't so much in their interest. The server is also a lot less likely to be easily re-implemented, as it's certainly a lot more complicated and requires a lot of infrastructure.

In my opinion, this question has come and gone.

Back in The Good Old Days (TM), the Lindens would talk quite frequently of open-sourcing Second Life as The Ultimate Plan.

They said that, while they wished to do this, that the code was far too much to wrangle and would need to be dealt with first. And that Open Source was a must, before a competitor did so.




Since then, that perception has.... shifted.

And for the most part, disappeared entirely.

I think what caused that was the rampant success (or what passes for success here) of the monetizing of Second Life. Able to appease venture capitalists and pay the bills, the system became what it always does in these circumstances.

It became complacent.


There is no doubt in my mind that, had they chosen that path, Second Life would indeed be open source. What has taken its place, and what I suspect will remain, is the current closed system.

Several years down the road, and still we have the Asset Server, the Script Scheduler, and the Linden Dollar -- all of which should have been temporary crutches. Now they are fused with this world; inseparable concepts.




Personally, I'm hoping for the competition Mr. Rosedale asked so fervently for. "Bring it on."

And, as is also the case in complacent systems, competition will come. Including attempts from open source communities.


What happens next I dare not venture to guess, but Second Life will have to adapt or it will die. Open source would be nice, but I doubt it will reach that point now by virtues of the underlying system on which it rests. Shackled.

Oh wouldnt that be grand? ;0


I would be shocked if permissions made it through a move to open source.. They're pretty much useless as it is right now. The cahce is way too simple to dump.

Money can be secured. Don't let individual servers control finances. Have a secure payment gateway built into the clients that goes direct to paypal or whatever service.

Art assets are a problem.. How do you display yourself to others or sell textures or objects without essentially giving away all rights at the cost of a single purchase? That's a tough one. You will have to hope people are honest or at least fearful of punishment.



With a clientside inventory, perhaps a method for making script calls from the client to query the server. Unless you own the server or rent space, you're not going to need scripts running independant of yourself. Any script wishing to run server side would have to be trusted. This would require a total redesign of the script system.

Scripts would be more like client plugins. They could be pre-compiled to give programmers incentive to develop their proprietary methods. Object scripts might run on top of a plugin loaded when you rez the object. Common script libraries might be loaded at startup and multiple scripts run using an API.

Others will not mind open source add-ons and extensions. If you look to firefox as an example, there are many great open source extensions that do many useful things.


That's possible, but if still leaves us with the fact that freelancers are totally separated from the network..


I don't see why they would have to be segregated like that.. They're both running the same servers or close enough that they are probably 99% compatible. I don't see people running multiple worlds separate from each other, but there will be some large groupings like Linden Lab, and smaller groups who are doing their own thing, but that doesn't mean I can't hop from one server group to another, or even that someone couldnt set up a gateway between the two. Not on the same "grid" sharing an untrusted link that could offer a shuttle point between the two.. Warnings can be displayed yadda yadda...



Maybe true.. The client would be a good first step, but I think simplifying the server setup would go a long way to making Second Life a ubiquitous metaverse.

I still hear talk of open source from the Lindens, though I agree it's not on the tip of their tongues anymore.. I guess each individual has an idea of where things should be going, though I'm not sure what vision Philip has for it all.

Like you say, it's going to happen though, maybe not Second Life, but something looking to do what Second Life could have done.

And in case I had not made it clear, Jeffrey said it.. We should have dumped the Linden Dollar and the Asset server ages ago.