Independant Resident Owned Servers

I have played this game for a little over a year and have my loves and my hates about it. I could go on a very long, drawn out and inarguable tirade about the injustices placed upon the players made by decisions from the powers that be, but I shall refrain from that for the time being.

My question is this: Is there some possibilty of offering those interested a software suite that will allow them to create their own server with their own hardware using their own bandwidth and allow it to connect to the grid independantly of the lab's mainframe while preserving the integration? This is a less expensive alternative to those wanting to own an island but not being able to pay the forthright outrageous price scale that has been conjured up here in the last few weeks. Not only that, but since Linden Labs is "not making a profit" (though I fail to see how not making a profit justifies adding more people to your payroll) this will also cut down on the resources used there-in. Though I do not currently "own/rent" ( since in the end you will never actually own the piece of hardware you pay so much for) I am, however, paying to use one that was purrchased by a friend as well as paying back the purrchase price in increments. This is just an idea and would be more than happy to discuss this at length with anyone else interested and am looking forward to any response. Thank you for your time.

Regards,
Bahamut Harbinger

Bahamut,

This is a lovely question with a LOT of historical gravity; if you trawl the forum archives for "running your own grid" and similar queries, you'll see it's come up time and time again.

At recent exhibitions, we've developed what we dub a "Grid-In-a-Box". Not intended for public usage, but it's an actual working step towards what you suggest.

So, shortterm, sorry, no, you won't be able to run your own server. We don't have any foreseeable plans to do related things like release server code, but longterm, there *will* be some exciting developments in the months to come concerning expanding Second Life, details which will be provided as the news comes.

Very much an ongoing process...