A second chance at life

Already one of the most popular MMOGs to date, Second Life prides itself on being not so much an online game, but an alternate reality in which to play.

For those unfamiliar, one of the unique features of the game is the ability for users (or 'residents' as they like to be called) to create unique objects which then appear in the game world.

As a result, entirely new businesses have sprung up in the world making clothing, cars, houses, furniture and a whole lot more besides. There's an entire economy built around this.

It's not surprising that, like other MMOGs, these items frequently end up for sale not just in game, but on EBay as well. In fact, the in-game currency, Linden Dollars (named after the development house Linden Labs) can be traded online. The dollars even have their own exchange rate against the US dollar.

Second Life has seen its fair share of success stories -- some players actually subsidise their real-life income from the game, with real-estate moguls selling virtual property online. Heck, even Dell has got involved to sell 'virtual PCs' in the game world!

There's also been controversy, the most recent being the breakout of an tool called 'copybot' that hitched into the network stream to enable players to make exact duplicates of items in-game -- thereby diluting the unique creations of other players -- and upsetting a wide swathe of its populace. The program was open-source, and ostensibly started to aid and not cheat players.

So it's interesting that Linden Labs has recently announced the open-sourcing of the Second Life client. The servers and underlying technology are still proprietary for now, but the end-user client 'viewer' is now under the GPLv2.

Interestingly, this isn't a one-off move. According to Wikipedia, Linden Labs wants to standardise on open technologies, and intends to replace the in-game messaging system with Jabber and the scripting language with Mono. Already the in-game help browser is powered by Gecko.

Given the problems with copybot it's not clear how Linden Labs will attempt to mitigate any other loopholes that could be used through changing the source, but if nothing else there's likely to be new interfaces and features in the hands of the community.

In fact there's already an outstanding bug and feature list for Second Life which Linden Labs is hoping developers will work on, not to mention new features or ideas which it hopes the community will create for the viewer.

aturally code still needs to be accepted by Linden Labs to make it into an official release and be compatible where necessary with the server code base.

And while there's already a Linux client, no doubt this will undergo some improvements in the hands of the community too. If nothing else, Gentooers will be able to build optimised viewers!

Ultimately Linden Labs is extending the life and reach of Second Life immensely. Open Source projects have a life of their own, and as long as an interest remains developers and users alike will ensure its reach far beyond the scope of a closed source alternative.

I'll be keeping a virtual eye on this one to see how it transpires.

To get the source, head over here and read more about the release here.

 

Second Life: Live another life with Second Life. Source: Flickr