Is SL Linden Lab's own world or Player's world.

She or he should join and start studying.

As a technicality "Your World, Your Imagination" has nothing to do with ownership things. Users Created SL the linden's didnt. Everything you see in world was made by someone there and as such it becomes the users world. We may have to pay for it but we still create its content. As I say time and time again to people if all you wanna do is complain about how things are why bother staying the door is there you can leave at any time.

I think the SL client will become more open but SL will never fully go open source on both client/server end it'd be a bad move really. I can see opening up the client a bit more as a good thing if they limit what people can edit or have access to thru the client.

SL is the players world no matter what way you spin it. Just because you dont actually own SL doesnt make it any less your world. Content isnt made/controlled and premade by the lindens (unlike TSO). In that retrospect Your World, Your Imagination is very true unless you take it in a literal sense and take it to mean that you yourself should own SL.

Thats not neccessarily true. LL will not survive if they only take the profibility side of SL into account. They would end up having to work things in SL towards the business spectrum alot more and they'd lose a huge user base that exists in SL purely for social/non-profit/non-commercial reasons. I dont see LL's goal as being profitable really i see them as more trying to create like a future of the web sort of thing that will catch on more and then become profitable at that point when things are cheaper to buy and run .

Next Lets look at some stuff Bloop said. While a RW business can come to SL i think most wont do well unless they accept the limits of SL. American Apparel is a good instance selling virtual clothing before it comes out in real life spreading the base of what is "popular" among people here first because you know as well as I do people are buying what they like here and are succeptable to buying it in real life alot of the time if it is an option. Next we run into server loads. How SL is split is odd and unlike how WoW or other mmorpgs is run the data is simply streamed to your computer. We dont have this huge 2-8 gb install to get the same thing going.

I figure that alot of people sitting in this bit of the forum are looking at LL's goal as making SL profitable and trying to bring rw business into SL. Philip said on a podcast interview once that he isnt sure how well real world business would do in SL simply because he wasnt sure how accepting the residents of SL would be to it. I for one would ignore a real world business if they couldnt accept the SL limitations and actually make products in World like the rest of us.

Simply put if i own a r/l business and i make clothing in the RW that doesnt mean i can come here and successfully transfer it over. SL has its limits and like everyone else RW companies should accept them or they wont succed

Hey, for the most part we're creative and good-looking guinea pigs more or less happy with having a world that can be shaped.

And it's much better than a world with some automated set of predefined polygons that puts out unlimited virtual currency and experience points when killed over and over and over again, where your real life skills mean zzzzzip.

About "Creation" vs "Crafting", you should read that : http://lindenlab.com/whitepapers/Escaping_Guilded_Cage_Ondrejka.pdf

Wrote by the CTO of Linden Labs, Cory Ondrejka. When you read his bio, he's not the dumbest (even better than our Great Economist(tm)):
[...]
He also spearheaded the decision to allow users to retain the IP rights to their creations and helped craft Linden's virtual real estate policy.
Prior to joining Linden Lab in November, 2000, Ondrejka served as Project Leader and Lead Programmer for Pacific Coast Power and Light. At PCP&L, he brought the "Road Rash" franchise to the Nintendo for the first time with "Road Rash 64" and built the core technology teams that completed multiple products for Nintendo and Sony consoles. Previous experience includes Lead Programmer for Acclaim Coin-Operated Entertainment's first internal coin-op title and work on Department of Defense electronic warfare software projects for Lockheed Sanders. While an officer in the United States Navy, he worked at the National Security Agency and graduated from the Navy Nuclear Power School. Ondrejka is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, where he was a Presidential "Thousand Points of Light" recipient and became the first person to earn Bachelors of Science degrees in two technical majors: Weapons and Systems Engineering and Computer Science.

Additionally, about some LL staff and investor :
- P. Rosedale served at RealNetworks as Vice President and CTO, where he was responsible for the development and launch of RealVideo, RealSystem 5.0, and RealSystem G2.
- David managed the Mobile Developer Program at Macromedia
- Harper was the Vice President of Marketing at Maxis, a division of Electronic Arts (EA).
- Also while at Maxis, she established SimCity as one of the most recognized brand names in entertainment software, and was named one of the marketing 100 by Advertising Age/Newsweek.
- Miller has spent nearly 30 years squarely at the intersection of engaging consumer experiences and interactive technologies, including senior executive positions at Atari, Koala Technologies, Epyx, Convergent, and Sega of America.
- Yoon was general counsel and corporate secretary at Airespace, a wireless LAN equipment company, where he negotiated key strategic relationships, including the sale of the company to Cisco Systems.
- Team members have previously worked at leading entertainment companies such as Electronic Arts, Disney, THQ, Acclaim, Hasbro, and Mattel.

I can't find the source (i saw it some hours ago), but you can find some well known investor like the founder of Ebay and the founder of Amazon. And they are not poor

The way I look at SL is how I look at travel.
I'm from a tiny, tiny, TINY place and every time I go away, it's to someone else's place. Their rules, their customs, their way of doing things, I just gotta try to acclimate.

I think this may be why I don't get all the "SHAME ON YOU LL FOR <insert gripe here>"...

I look at SL like a tourist.

(Train of thought here, so forgive if there's any offence)

I think there's a lot of "Ugly American"-ness going on. Not being Anti-American, just using the phrase to extend a metaphor.
You know the type... go to Japan and only eat at McDonald's... go to England and drink Bud and complain that everyone's driving on the wrong side of the road...
The ones that go to a foreign country and bitch and complain the whole time that no-one speaks American.
(I live in a tourist destination... *grin* I know the type)

I think there's a lot of this mentality going on with regards to SL.

I mean, honestly, it IS their "country", we just visit... and, like tourist destinations everywhere, they're more than open to suggestions on how to make the product better. However, it's out of line and non-productive to DEMAND that they make it how you want. ANd probably goes over as well as demanding Ketchup for your sushi in Okinawa.

Does this make any sense to anyone? I've only had one coffee, so my brain is racing, but not awake enough to organize...

This concept just seems to make sense to me... it seems to fit with regards to some of the more vocal detractors of various aspects of the game.

Someone, write my thoughts better... please! *grin*

Edited to Add:

Yes, I am aware of the holes in this hypothesis, that tourists can't work or make money in the destination, yadda yadda. Think of it more as loose philosopy than etched-in-stone metaphor.

This is exactly why though that the term "Your World, your Imagination" cant be taken in the literal sense that we actually own the world we can own land in the world and we can create the world. That begins the "your world" bit of that. Now we use our imagination to create the world and there you have "Your imagination". While if you take it in the literal sense it isnt our world but if you take it as the implied sense more likely what it was supposed to be it makes sense. The investors are important for development and the upgrading of things. LL has to be able to have control with investors and they need to really.