Open Source, Openness and Second life

Everybody is talking about Linden going Open Source with the Second Life client.

While they claimed to “welcome the inevitable with open arms” I believe they decided to go open in order to cut software production costs. Their choice has a very low degree of resemblance to the Netscape’s lately loss leader move to me, on the contrary it’s likely to result in many beneficial developments, as greatly described by Susan Wu on her blog:

  • Reducing the engineering/QA costs at Linden Lab. As one of the better implementations of a Snow Crash like Metaverse, Second Life has attracted more creator personality types than traditional online games or communities. libsecondlife, a library/SDK that implements a subset of the Second Life network protocol, is a pretty good indication of how motivated these hacker/coder types will be to extend the utility of the Second Life client beyond what it can currently do. A fully open sourced client extends the possibilities both by being a more powerful framework into which new functionality can be added and simply because it is a fully official project, supported directly by Linden Lab.
    .
  • Mashup style applications, widgets for MySpace. libsecondlife was somewhat limited, in that it was built on a partial reverse engineering of the SL protocol, whereas the full viewer release reveals the complete details of the protocol. I expect to see things like web page to Second Life widgets allowing Second Life users to check their in-world messages or chat with people who are in-world without actually loading the full viewer application locally. I also expect to see scaled down Second Life clients that can run on cell phones or other small devices, giving the user a simplified 2D experience of the Second Life world as an alternative for when they can’t run the full desktop client. I don’t expect these clients to support the full immersive Second Life environment like the official desktop client, but lightweight in-browser access would be a net positive for a lot of Second Life members.
    .
  • Improved graphics. For all the network engineering marvels Second Life possesses, its graphical engine is decidedly old school by today’s standards. There are a lot of ways in which it could be improved while still displaying the same content. I expect some bored graphics developers to take the core client and move it over to a more shader-friendly rendering model, perhaps adding in some clever automatic up-ressing of texture and 3D model content in the process, a la Tenebrae Quake.
    .
  • Better support for third-party building tools. With the full client open sourced, I’d be surprised if the 3D model builders who live, eat and breath Maya or 3D Studio Max or Blender don’t build tools to allow them to more directly interface their 3D modelling tool of choice into the Second Life world viewer.
    .
  • Accessibility by new audiences. For what I assume are the purposes of ease of cross-platform development, Second Life uses a custom UI widget system. Between this and the inherent blind-accessibility problem of untagged 3D data, Second Life just hasn’t been very accessible to the disabled. While there is no guarantee that this an itch some third-party developers will want to scratch, it would be a really nice benefit if it did come to pass. A virtual world like Second Life is exactly the sort of thing that could be liberating for a lot of disabled folks, yet the current system doesn’t cater to them at all. Hopefully motivated open source developers will fill the gap here.
    .

Talking about Open Source and Openness Susan Wu stated:

[..] open sourcing the client doesn’t necessarily result in an open platform or openness of user experience [..].Openness is a design philosophy, whereas open source is a licensing choice.

I do totally agree, openness and licensing aren’t exactly the same thing.

Related Posts