Breaking News: Linden Lab to Open server code

One of the main questions in (Second) Life is when Linden Lab finally goes open source. In this article I wrote:

Linden loves Open Source

Linden Lab did react to the user comments by stating:‘we’d dearly like to open-source the servers’

Which sounds pretty hopefull, but...

‘The big problem is that in the current architecture, servers are trusted. Identity information, ownership information — all that is stored on the servers, and in a closed-source, behind-the-firewall environment, we can communicate between the servers securely. Trust, identity, connectedness — all of these are huge problems.’

However, I've already seen infrastructure designs that would make this possible. The plan is on the table, so please don't hesitate to make it happen.

Wéll, it seems they've taken swift action, according to this Information Week article Linden Lab is planning to open up the servercode for Second Life in before 2009.

Miller said Second Life in 2009 will change from one grid to multiple grids. Linden Lab said in April it plans to open-source the Second Life server. The company open-sourced the client a year ago. Next year, users will be able to run their own Second Life servers, optionally behind a firewall or temporarily, for an individual event. Residents will be able to bring the same identity with them from one private Second Life grid to another.

I think in their eagerness the guys from SL Review misread the article, as they wrote:

"Linden Lab said in April it plans to open-source the Second Life server. The company open-sourced the client a year ago. Next year, users will be able to run their own Second Life servers, optionally behind a firewall or temporarily, for an individual event. Residents will be able to bring the same identity with them from one private Second Life grid to another."

What I think happened here is that they read April. This is about the 2009 architecture, Mitch Wagner wrote about april 07 when Linden Lab first spoke of their ideas to go open source. Prokofy Neva was probably right as she suggested the departure of Corey Ondrejka as CTO of Second Life in December was probably because of differences over the speed of going open source. I think she thought Corey wanted to speed up, and maybe she's right. Corey might have wanted the grid to open up sooner and Phil had his second thoughts about that. Anyway, we'll have to wait, but we'll get there.

Halting State

In real life I had a day off. Not to lean back, but to take care of the kids who were down sick. This afternoon when they were asleep I just had time to immerse and join the Information Week session on Dr. Dobbs island where Mitch Wagner, a.k.a. Ziggy Figaro interviewed SciFi author Charles Stross.

Stross has always known he wanted to be a Science Fiction writer and started writing in his early teens and sold his first bit of wordplay in 1986. After a few stories sold, the dip came and Charles went back to University (Bradford) and did a postgraduate in computer science and hopped from techjob to techjob slowly crawling towards Edinburgh and suddenly went into web consultancy - This was right about the time of the dot com crash (if not the cause to it). He managed to establish himself as a proper Linux and Free Software journalist until...

"Even more implausibly, after fifteen years of abject obscurity, his fiction
became an overnight success in the US, with five novel sales and several Hugo
nominations in the space of two years. "

Charles, or Charlie, talked about the world of 'Halting State', a world set in our near future where Metaverses and augmented reality are part of our daily routine. Mitch Wagner says:

It's really hard to predict the future on the scale Stross does. Imagine yourself in 1996. Back then, would you have predicted the ubiquity of smartphones, user-generated content on the Internet (blogs weren't even invented yet), Facebook, MySpace, the massive American entertainment industry grinding to a complete halt over a dispute over Internet video, and post-9/11 geopolitics? Could you have imagined, in your bones, what it would be like to live in that world?

One of the things Stross sees is that in a few years from now it'll be mobile all the way. A large percentage of the computers on the world right now are already cell-phones. In a few years they'll have gigs of bandwidth. As Dr. Dobbs was quite maxed out with visitors, we were all yearning for that extra bandwidth as Second Life almost came to a halting state with clothing taking its time to download, or just plainly go missing.

Unfortunately I had to take care of one of my kids, so couldn't keep track of all the exciting things and visions Charles shared with the crowd, you'd best check out the Ugotrade blog in a few days to find a smashing recap.

Read more on this session at Information Week here. Now I have to run to be on time for my own presentation on Second Life (in Dutch) at the NGI island (slurl).

Intergalactic News for July

Here's some newsbits I didn't have time to blog in the past weeks:

Second Life Blogo reports (in Dutch) on:

• Second Life according to the (sceptic) LA Times.
• The German AWOMO initiative (a World of My Own)
• The virtual Barbie World.

The Belgian Second Life Crew reports (again in Dutch) on:

• Thalys Teleports
• Also on AWOMO.
• Second Life on a Nokia n800.

3PointD seems to be too busy to keep up blogging, but a few interesting posts did come through:

• Social Limitations to Second Life groups.
• The Guardian on Virtual Worlds.
• Amazon’s Askville is Human-Powered AdWords.

Nick Wilson at Metaversed seems to be gearing up in Challenging 3PointD as the buzzplace and reports on:

• 3DCity's Rocky Launch.
• EveryScape Taps Users to Determine Next Phase of Development.
• 3D Games Portal Worth €1 Billion?.

KZero reports on:

• Latest Football Superstars environments
• Sony prepares for Home launch

Finally, Scobleizer -who's not been in Second Life for over a year now, did a blog on SL again; Second Life is trying to get rid of the nasties, which turned out to become a lively discussion between Robert Scoble, Spindoctor Eric Rice and Information Week's Mitch Wagner.

United States of Apple

For readers in the United States of Apple, this blogpost may hold nothing new. Let me just wish you a happy 4th!

For readers here in Europe, or even closer to home, the Netherlands, here's an update on the iPhone craze in the States.

Mitch Wagner (Information Week) quotes:

• The iPhone Is Actually Pretty Inexpensive - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek
  Most of the press about the iPhone talks about its high price. Even my iPhone review describes it as pricey. But if you actually think about all the things it can do, it's a bargain.
• The iPhone Makes Watching Video More Like Reading A Book - Digital Life Blog - InformationWeek
  The novelist John Irving made that observation years ago about the VCR, and each generation of video technology brings watching and reading closer together, making video more private and more under the user's control.

For you who have a more visual approach, have a look at Justine Ezarik's "Tasty Blog Snacks" running a number of great vids on iPhone.

• IPHONE MONTAGE
• BEN UNBOXES
• JOE DOWDELL
• WHOA, FREE IPHONE!
• iphone update!
• IPHONE LOVE
• NO MEDIA!
• IPHONE TIME!
• WHERE WILL YOU BE?
• COST OF OWNING AN IPHONE

Also Robert Scoble keeps on rambling on the iPone (and this is just the last 3 days)

• InCase doing something innovative with Flickr
• Home automation with iControl
• PodTech’ers review iPhone on TwitterGram
• Tribal Shout brings podcasts to your phone — which iPhone case should we get?
• Who’s going to iPhone Dev Camp?
• A fun look at the goofiness in Silicon Valley
• Photography sharing site CEO reviews of iPhones
• Nokia users hate me…
• Getting photos from iPhone to Flickr
• Comparing N95 to iPhone
• iPhone stops people
• Going on an iPhoto walk
• The worst iPhone Web page: Google Reader (UPDATED)
• PodTech videos work great on iPhone
• Former Palm software dev talks about iPhone
• Welcome to the iCult
• iGot it

So...? Does it makes me want to buy an iPhone? Nah, don't think so. I have enough entertainment already seeing a complete continent sucked into a slick PR machine.