One year on

This coming Tuesday marks the one year anniversary ( http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/ ) of Linden Lab's bold and gallant release of the Second Life client source code.

This release came in the wake of the CopyBot media outcry ( http://secondlife.reuters.com/stories/2006/11/14/outcry-as-copybot-threatens-copyright-protection/ ), and showed that Linden Lab were prepared to take a step in the right direction despite the possiblity that this action may have quickly revealed other major security vulnerabilities.

One year on, we have seen the substantially increased development of LibSecondLife, a library which powers many advanced SL world services today, as well as third party clients such as "SLeek" which many rely on for non-graphical world access.

Yet, with such bold statements from the Lindens as "We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.", little has been heard about the many rumours rattling aroud over the months about the release of the Second Life "server" code.

Despite an awesome project by the good folk at OpenSimulator (or OpenSL - http://www.opensimulator.org/ ), the community are still lacking the tools they need to genuinely make Second Life part of social and technological history.

One year on, the open source community has tasted blood and wants more. And they are crying out to Linden Lab - "Do the right thing"!

How? Currently simulators do a lot of things which a malicious server could easily take advantage of, allowing any asset to be stolen on a whim, money to be transferred from an avatar and so-on.

Before they can open-source the simulator source-code they'd need to re-architecture a number of core components before open-source simulators can even begin to be a possibility without them being restricted to their own lonely little grids.

Besides, there's still a ton of development work to be done on the client, it's still not very stable, and has outstanding bugs and usability issues. Open source developers shouldn't be crying out for blood at this still comparatively early stage

Releasing the sim source and allowing someone to arbitrarily connect sims to the grid are two entirely different and separate things.

Even if you're happy running your own sim that's entirely separate from the SL grid, they've stated that they're not releasing any of the back-end services (the asset, presence, inventory, etc servers) so you'd still need to have someone create those from scratch.