Linden’s Second Life developers have just announced a decision to release Second Life client source code under the GNU GPL version 2. The impetus for the decision is a need to make Second Life more scalable and reliable. A Second Life resident who blogs at Gwyn’s Home wrote in great detail about why Linden should open up their source code back in 2005. The Linux Journal wrote an article in November, 2006 called “Why We Need an Open Source Second Life“, saying that open source software would fall behind in the development of the 3D/virtual world internet, unless something like the Second Life code were opened to the online community. Author of the article, Glyn Moody, believes that it is very important for open source programmers to develop expertise in the technology underlying virtual worlds. He thinks it likely that the next stage in the web’s evolution will “incorporate elements from three-dimensional virtual worlds”. He quotes Philip Rosedale on why more evolution toward 3D online worlds is likely: continue reading »

A man known in Second Life as Marc Woebegone is suing Linden Lab for shutting down his account and costing him money after a land deal “went sour”. Marc, whose offline name is Marc Bragg and who is a lawyer in real life, used what Wired News calls a hacker-like method to buy Second Life land below market prices in Second Life auctions. continue reading »

Anya, author of the i-Anya blog and Australian academic, has been spending some time in the Second Life online world lately. There, she met a virtual model named Starr, who earns a real income from her Second Life career. (And just think, she doesn’t even have to worry about dieting – or aging!) continue reading »

On the i-Anya blog, Angela Thomas writes that Second Life has spawned a mini Western filmed in the Second Life world, called Bells and Spurs. It’s always fun to watch movies that people make of game world events. My husband, Ken, an avid player of World of Warcraft, has shown me quite a few movies made by World of Warcraft players. World of Warcrafters often make elaborate short movies, many of them set to music, like music videos. Most of them show guilds’ victories in challenging instances like Blackwing Lair. The action is nearly always synchronized to the beat of a song, which must take some work on the part of the movie-makers. Some of them are even more sophisticated, like one I saw last year that spliced together a variety of cuts to create a storyline about love, death and the resurrection of the beloved. This one was set to several songs, and it included flashbacks and cuts to a variety of different scenes. It only adds to the amusement and entertainment factor to imagine all the trouble somebody took to make one of these amateur movies. In the case of the Second Life western, this factor is diminished (at least for me) by the knowledge that Linden Labs had a hand in the making of the movie. I wonder why that is?

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