Open Source Second Life's Next Steps

Monday's Second Life will be opened up to anyone who wants to contribute to its future development generated wide-ranging commentary in the bloggers. open source should enable more innovation to emerge as anyone with some post in late December and specifically this Second Life blog post about the announcement. Not everyone there thinks this is a good idea. In the meantime, you can be sure an awful lot of creativity will be going on by programmers of every type, from one-man-bands to large companies. One other development concept resulting from this announcement that I think is very exciting is that of producing versions of the Second Life client for mobile devices (mobile phones, for instance). Imagine what that would mean for usability. I'd say there's a chance of such an application emerging sooner through the open source development community. Or perhaps it might enable Linden Lab to concentrate on that sort of application development. Looking further ahead, it's not difficult to make a leap and think about other possibilities, such as this current growth trends, though, SL could be a real economic force in a few years. When things really start to hop, SL will look more like it's own private Internet. Or a privately held virtual nation. At the point that millions of people spend most or all of their waking hours within the SL world, we'll know this has happened. I think people (and governments) will start to get a little nervous at that point. It will be impossible for SL to put both its shareholders and users first, and history suggests that users will get the shaft. [...] What might make more sense in the long run is more of a Wikipedia-like approach to Second Life. A non profit organization running open source software where people can add their own island just by plugging in a server in their living room or the hosting provider of their choice. Whoever builds that and provides a serious alternative to the SL experience could help the world at least as much as Wikipedia has. And so Growth predictions for Second Life Second Life: Just say yes NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at NevilleHobson.com