Questions about the future of SL

I'm new to SL, and these forums, so forgive me if I'm asking FAQ's.

My questions are regarding the future direction and evolution of SL. In the short time I've been on, I've fallen in love with this idea that SL represents, and wonder how its going to look in 5 years.

Will there be a time when I can own servers which are running the SL simulation, and connect seamlessly to the existing SL world? (Would this be called running my own 'sims'? My own grid?) If this is in the plan, any prediction when it might be available to play with?

In the same vein, will there be a time when I can create a 'personal space' in SL, which is either hosted locally, or cached locally, on my client. Such that I can use the things in my personal space without connecting to the larger SL world. I say the same vein, because I could see this as running a local version of the simulation.

I've read that LL plans to release SL as open source by 2010, and assume these things I've mentioned could be done after that for sure. I do like the philosophy that LL seems to have regading creation and management of this virtual space, and would like to see this be the company, and the software, which builds the 'next internet'.

Thanks for your time!

Rupert (aka James)

Well I am happy to hear so much about your passion, Rupert aka James. Yes, these are popular questions, but all for good reasons: it's great to see discussion inworld and on the forums about it.

First, we don't have a specific target date of "2010"--not sure where that came from (altho it sounds like a nice Clarkian number). If you have a source I could look it up.

We do want to move towards greater self-governance: as you know, we currently have private islands, and are increasingly adding tools into the land system to give more control to landowners. It does make sense that a future extension of this would be the whole "run your own grid" thing, altho realistically, this will be some time away and has not been determined yet--we have many development projects going on at present to lay the groundwork, first of all. An example would be the overhaul with how "regions talk to each other" in 1.9: more info on that here.

You may also want to check out, on a tangent, the following keywords: offline sandbox, like Jeffrey Gomez's initiative.

Ah, pardon, I wanted to show you some neat posts and discussion from our history but the forum search has problems with some popular keywords. :\ However, Philip Linden did bring up the exact topic you mention at the recent audio Town Hall--find Town Hall transcripts at the Resident-run SL History Wiki, and knowing how much of interest this is, it will likely be brought up time and time again in the future to come.

Cheers!