| Second Life open-sources its viewer application |
Jan. 08, 2007
Linden Lab, creator of the "Second Life" online virtual world, is open-sourcing the code of the site's Viewer application, enabling developers to make modifications, enhancements, or add new features to the Second Life Viewer. The third-party support libraries and open-source code are available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
The Second Life Viewer is used by subscribers (aka "Residents") to access the virtual world's "Grid." Freely-downloadable from the Second Life website, the Viewer software enables Residents to control their in-world avatars, interact with each other via IM (instant message), create content, buy and sell objects, access multimedia content, and navigate around the virtual environment.
Linden Lab has released the Viewer source code under the GNU GPLv2 (General Public License, version 2), as well as under a separate license for entities that wish to reserve the ability to create proprietary extensions for the viewer. Currently, due to third-party licensing restrictions, some proprietary components are still necessary for an optimal experience according to the company. However, Linden Lab hopes to make all the Viewer code available under the GPLv2 by convincing the creators of those components to license their code similarly, or by working with the community to ensure that the open-source counterparts improve to become viable replacements for the current components.
In a statement, Linden Lab CEO and founder Philip Rosedale, said, "We feel we have a responsibility to improve and to grow Second Life as rapidly as possible. We were the first virtual world to enable content creators to own the rights to the Intellectual Property they create. That sparked exponential growth in the richness of the Second Life environment. Now we're placing the [Viewer client's] development into the hands of Residents and developers as well. This extends the control Residents can have over the Second Life experience and allows a worldwide community to examine, validate and improve the software's sophistication and capabilities."
CTO Cory Ondrejka added, "Open sourcing is the most important decision we've made in seven years of Second Life development. While it is clearly a bold step for us to proactively decide to open source our code, it is entirely in keeping with the community-creation approach of Second Life. We will still continue Viewer development ourselves, but now the community can add its contributions, insights, and experiences as well. We don't know exactly which projects will emerge -- but this is part of the vibrancy that makes Second Life so compelling."
Linden Lab plans to incorporate some of the open-source-generated code changes and enhancements into the official version of the Second Life Viewer, which will only be available from the Second Life website. All code developed outside Linden Lab's in-house engineering team will be thoroughly reviewed to ensure quality standards, stability and security, the company said. Support will continue to be given for the official version of the Viewer only, with third party projects unsupported by Linden Lab.
The initial Second Life open-source projects are expected to include: bug fixes; improvements to compatibility with less common hardware configurations; support for additional multimedia types; UI (user interface) changes; and, potentially, new look and feel "skins" for the Viewer itself.
Linden Lab emphasized in its open source faq that open-sourcing the code will not interfere with Residents copyrighted content, decrease the virtual world's security, or enable crackers to steal "Linden Dollars," the virtual world's currency. If all that sounds a bit silly, you should know that Linden Dollars can be exchanged for real dollars and vice-versa. In short, there's a real-world economy working in this virtual world.
Second Life economics are also not a small deal. According to an analysis by Tristan Louis, an application development VP with financial services group HSBC, there are hundreds of thousands of Second Life players and, on average, they "spend a fair amount of money ($50-60 a week) within the Second Life economy."
Further analysis, according to Louis, showed that "Under the most conservative growth rate, we will see 3.5 million users registered and over 600,000 using the service by the end of April 2007. Under a liberal interpretation of the data, those numbers would shift to 9.6 million and just under 7 million. However, in the most likely case, it is probable that there will be 7.2 million users registered with 1.6 million logging in over the previous sixty days." Thus, it appears that the Second Life Viewer may quickly become one of the most popular open-sourced end-user applications.
The open source code to the Second Life Viewer is available here.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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