Second Life Goes FOSS!
For those who don’t know, Second Life [here] is a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents made open to the public in 2003 and today is inhabited by a total of 2,466,151 people from around the world. This virtual world is comprises of digital content including people, entertainment, experiences and opportunity where one can find land to build their house or business as well as surrounded by the creations of fellow residents. All the residents retain the rights to their digital creations thus they can buy, sell and trade with other residents through a Marketplace supporting millions of US dollars in monthly transactions handled with the in-world currency, the Linden dollar, that can also be converted to US dollars at various online currency exchanges. Linden comes from the creator of the Second Life software, Linden Labs [here] that has now released a viewer software for Second Life under the General Public License (GPL).
Linden Lab will scrutinize all outside contributions and maintain control of an official version of the viewer software. All contributing programmers must also sign a contributor agreement to submit code. By signing the agreement, a programmer agrees to assign joint copyright to Linden Lab and grant Linden Lab and anyone who receives the code a patent license relating to use of the code. With Linden Lab owning copyright, it will be permitted to change licensing terms if it desires.
Linden Lab has made its FOSS move during its struggle with growth challenges and a major architectural revamp of its virtual realm software. Second Life has earlier been built using proprietary communication protocols and now it will be moving to open standards such as XML (Extensible Markup Language) for sending messages through HTTP (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) used to transmit Web pages.
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