SL, Open Source and Franchising

Interesting news that Linden Labs have open sourced the 2.4mil residents, 800,000 who have logged in during the past 60 days, the value of Second Life is in the community, not necessarily the code. Today's move helps drive community growth. I found 2 very interesting points when reading the This seems like a great play by Linden. Let other groups publish and manage Second Life servers in different geographic regions, (as long as you're approved to do so by Linden I would imagine). Borrowing from a recent Roberto Galoppini, Linden appears like they're becoming a this CNet article on Linden's architecture, I think it makes a lot of sense for Linden to enable other (approved?) groups to publish and mange Second Life servers. According to the article, Second Life servers handle a maximum of 3 users per server at peak load. This is compared to 116 users per server over at Google+warns/2100-1010_3-5988090.html" class="bluelink">increasing electricity and real estate (to host the servers) costs, could Linden have realized that franchising the publishing and managing of Second Life servers may be a more profitable venture? Linden is already spending $$ on developing the software and has a large community, the latter of which is a strong control point. So why keep spending on the low-value aspect of managing servers (i.e. weak control point)? The second interesting point in the post:

"At Linden, we have always been strong advocates of the use of open standards and the advantages of using open source products. Though Second Life makes abundant use of non-standard technologies, our basic UDP protocol message system for example, we rely on open standards and open source implementations when appropriate and available."

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