Second Life releases client as open source

  14 Responses to “Second Life releases client as open source”

1. Bloggers | The Cesspit. says:

   January 8, 2007 at 12:21 pm

   […] Bloggers January 8, 2007 19:22 Second Life releases client as open source They’ve been talking about it for years, and now here it is: the Second Life client is now under the GPL. This has big implications for the improvement of the client performance, usability, and distribution. Congrats on taking this step, guys! Source: Raph's Koster Website […]
2. Adele Caelia says:

   January 8, 2007 at 1:34 pm

   *shudders* That game scares the *hit out of me!
3. Prokofy Neva says:

   January 9, 2007 at 2:08 am

   Hmm, is the response here a tad underwhelming??? Wasn’t it the critique of all your folks that they didn’t open-source this?

   I’m told that I’m tinfoiling for being heavily critical of all this, but it’s not because I don’t realize “the whole Internet is made out of open source gosh” but because I really am appalled at the social dynamics around the concept — a group of elitist programmers get an even faster pipeline to the Lindens who fete them, with even less general community input on features, and with exposure to script-kiddies who have nothing for contempt for settlers (this is the sandbox vs. settler battles, which Raph called “bone against blood”. I think we’re definitely going to be seeing some leukemia here:

   http://www.secondlifeherald.com/slh/2007/01/second_life_cli.html

   Here’s a post from the Herald, cross-posted, from somebody anonymously called Quango the Brave (i.e. not with a known SL moniker) which about sums up the extremism I find among the open-source gangsters, and what has given me a very bad taken on open-source as a movement. I wonder if you could comment:

   This is great news. I genuinely believe this wont make much of a difference negatively at all. The whole copybot beatup turned out to be pretty much that. Whilst a bunch of tech illiterate chicken littles ran about crying about the sky falling, a few cybercrime incidents happened then it all seemed to resolve itself. No harm no foul.

   In this case, theres a much stronger potential to build better digital defences of the commons by using the huge knowledge of thousands of coders who know there stuff.

   Almost everything worth protecting (the scripts) is stored server side, so like libsl no damage to the ‘nervous system’ of SL is really possible (The graphics cant be protected, and any attempt is doomed to fail).

   Those worried about what sort of ‘evil’ can be concocted really fail to understand that SL has *always* exposed code in the scripts. Nothing changes here, except a change to improve the client experience.

   What WOULD be good is open sourcing the server, so the obnoxious copy protection and useless “linden buck” nonsense can be removed so folks can finally look at liberating the SL metaverse from its mindnumbing obsession with money over fun.

   The quicker the parasites who monopolise land and assets can be made redundant the better. The commercialists should never have been allowed to drag the real worlds curse into the virtual worlds.

   This does nothing towards that end, but at least it means coders can make a more enjoyable experience for people.

   Posted by: Quango the brave | January 08, 2007 at 11:12 PM
4. StGabe says:

   January 9, 2007 at 3:02 pm

   You seem to be confused. Or at least conflating. The person you quote gives a good discussion of what open-sourcing the client means. In this case it doesn’t mean that much. At most at means that anything that a very “elite” hacker could do illegally can now be done legally by a merely proficient hacker and distributed to other people. Past attempts to do such things, far from creating toys for an elite, have created nice, free products for the general public like Firefox (a free, high quality web browser), Thunderbird (a free, high quality mail reader), Gimp (a powerful, free graphics editor), Open Office (a free alternative to MS Office), Linux, Apache (the most popular web server software in the world, also free), etc. The person you quote then goes on to give a personal opinion about what they would do with SL if they had open source servers (i.e. the same armchair dev comments that everyone gives, including yourself, about most MMO’s they play). Apart from ad hominem judgements it’s not clear that the latter has much to do with the former.

   a group of elitist programmers get an even faster pipeline to the Lindens who fete them

   Have you read Cryptonomicon? This sounds like a line straight out of the mouth of ex-girlfriend character in that book. Is this really a case of a cadre of elite technocrats taking over or is it just that you don’t really understand the details that well? I’d suggest putting aside the glib ad hominems and actually trying to dig into the technical details of what this means.
5. Prokofy Neva says:

   January 10, 2007 at 1:08 am

   Oh, these aren’t glib ad-hominems. I’ve been observing this cadre of elitist coders for two years now, and been victimized by them quite often.

   What you’re possibly tone-deaf to here is the extremism, the arrogance, the certitude that the most extreme ideology will prevail. In fact, it’s an extremism that Linden Lab, as still a proprietary company, doesn’t subscribe to themselves for their own internal purposes server-side, yet it’s one they don’t mind inflicting on the rest of us in business client-side.

   Nor does Raph embody this sort of juvenile extremism — he is the very model of an enlightened game god, who isn’t sitting there coding everything for free for the huge hippie commune in the sky, and running hacktivist raids, but making a private company to make this game Areae, which will be proprietary (at least, if it’s open source it isn’t that yet, and he hasn’t invited this sort of gang of thugs to help pry it open as reverse engineers…yet).

   I do think that Raph and some more thoughtful coders can see the ugly spirit which I’m exposing here in this very typical post. It’s not only the extremist ideologies inherent in imagining that you need to “Liberate” the Linden dollar and land and “free everyone from their obsession with money” (I imagine the kid who wrote this is logging on with his parents’ credit card ROFL) — it’s about the *process* by which a community that is not only coders but various ordinary people — some intellectuals skilled in other fields, others from all walks of life — must live, too.

   Cite girlfriends from Cryptonomicon all you like, but if you followed this link to the Herald thread, the best put-down of this aggressive young fellow actually came from one of the geeky female programmers in SL who essentially asked him pointedly why he was willing to “liberate” people’s content like textures, yet preserve for himself this domain where scripting and code itself was not copyable. Please don’t lecture me about how “that’s how it works; that’s what the server sees blah blah”; we’re all getting quite a chuckle out of the idea that scripters not only think that the CopyBot phenom isn’t possible to make *their scripts* suffer the fate of people’s textures, it’s the idea that they all assume only their creations should be protected, and no one else’s lol.

   Honestly, this kind of aggressive extremism, as the spirit that is ushering in the New World of the Metaverse, is more than troublesome. All that programmers do when confronted with this sort of ugly extremism is shrug and say, well don’t judge the whole open-source movement by these few bad eggs. The “few bad eggs” is a constant drum-beat in SL as a concept, though the eggs are in the dozens, and in a snowglobe like SL, they stand out more starkly.

   There’s an underlying assumption here, that once you open-source things, and make professionals compete with hacking script kiddies who crash the grid, why, you will no more have these griefing problems — the griefers will now have serious competition from decent folk who will work altruistically to close off the holes.

   I think that’s utopian absurdism. Just because it worked that way somewhere else on the Internet, doesn’t mean it will happen to play out that way in this walled-garden experiment of Second Life. In fact there’s every liklihhood that it will *not*.

   Why? Because the Lindens already followed this logic some 6 or 9 months ago. Faced with constant grid grashing and disruptions, they let libsecondlife be blessed and stopped sending them to the cornfield. They applauded them and even joined their group and hung out and bonded with them.

   These folk proceeded to make god-mode stalking, Megaprim,CopyBot and grief everyone else, and in the end at least 25 of them were permabanned anyway, not given jobs at LL as everyone fantasizes will happen when they implement a concept like “let’s let the script kiddies be free so that they can have competition.”

   Philip’s point is that we don’t have to worry, now there will be 10 times the people hacking at the client (and watch as the server side stuff goes soon, too) — and that “collective wisdom” *cough* will make everything better.

   But…it didn’t so far. In the time they let the reverse engineers work, sure they found holes, but they found them by griefing the hell out of everybody first and destroying businesses. They also go on griefing and finding new holes and the way you find out about a hole is that first they make a product to club everybody to death through the hole, laughing like hyenas, then they close it off. It’s the juvenile, malicious spirit involved in this that troubles me most. If their antics are offset by closing some security hole for the Lindens, it merely means that particular hole in the dam is plugged for that moment.

   Meanwhile, the 70 percent of the Lindens’ revenue comes from land sales and tier payments. That’s only some 42,000 people who therefore fund the script-kiddies’ sandbox and the numerous free accounts needed to show huge numbers of subscriptions — and it’s a very exploitative and cynical attitude shown toward them, essentially saying, “You go on paying for these kids to fool around with the client and crash the grids and it might get better down the road but who knows.” This highly cynical attitude is exemplified by Jarod Godel’s, “You are here to be fleeced.”

   Anyway, I find the spirit and psychology going into this appalling — I’ve published the transcripts of the town hall (from which I was booted by the Lindens) and the following conversation with Philip we had in Pooley (ample display of the very spirit impudence and impunity I’m talking about.

   From reading up on the open-source movement itself from its early days, I’ve seen that there are various schools of thought and debates even within the confines of this movement alone, let along outside it, but you would never know it from the extremist version of it being allowing to launch in streaming 3-D in the hothouse of Second Life.
6. Charles Ellis says:

   January 10, 2007 at 1:14 am

   As has been mentioned, both by StGabe and by “Quango the brave”, anything at all put into the client is available to a skilled hacker/cracker. Keeping the client closed source would continue to allow security vulnerabilities to be found and exploited, without giving the large community of well intentioned people the opportunity to find and fix those problems. Time and time again it has been shown that for security purposes, open sourcing can be a major plus. It is, however, a rare thing within gaming that currently used software is open sourced, which I suspect is because of gaming’s strong involvement with non-software IP.

   I can’t say for certain how this would improve communications between the Lindens and “elitist programmers”, but my guess is that part of the impetus for open sourcing the client involved allowing Linden’s employees to focus on non-client issues. After all, it’s now a community project. I also think that, with some time, additions and tools for simple addition creation will be developed with the average player in mind. Firefox is a popular open source browser which features user created extensions, and almost all of those extensions are targeted at the average user, not the programming community.

   While I think it would be interesting to open source the servers, that’s obviously a much more difficult issue for Linden Labs. The server is what really represents their technical IP. They may make their money largely as a service company, as does any MMO, but that software ensures their continued dominance as the service provider for Second Life. I doubt the server will be open sourced anytime soon, and probably not without some very compelling pressure from outside sources.
7. Prokofy Neva says:

   January 10, 2007 at 3:19 am

   Keeping the client closed source would continue to allow security vulnerabilities to be found and exploited, without giving the large community of well intentioned people the opportunity to find and fix those problems.

   Here’s where you are wrong. You’re assuming there is a WELL-INTENTIONED community. But there isn’t, not one bit. First, as a class, they scorn land development and content creation as lesser occupations and view them as temporary expedients to be exploited. That’s never good in making a society — viewing some classes as being in a lower caste that isn’t as important as you and is there to be exploited. Next, they laugh and jeer and take vicious glee in griefing, and basically allow what doesn’t at all seem to be a minority of them to espouse an ideology that says cynically, “Teh Intarnet is Serious Business” and that people who take pixel relationships and socializing and such even shouldn’t be allowed to log on.

   You’re going to get to see whether SL, which is within the gaming community whether it likes it or not, is going to be doing a good thing by this or bad. Many of the coders will only take scornful glee in disrupting what they view as either a game, or a too-serious insular world made by others, and they will put the platform uber alles. Let’s see what kind of world they create with that sort of sneering.

   You, like Lindens, have this telescopic notion of “The Community” — which they really mean to say is “those coders and smart people that we feel are our own, our tribe, which we want to bother with”. For the rest of the people, they have a snotty notice up on the web site saying “Don’t worry shoppers, your shopping won’t be interrupted, if anything we’re going to be bringing you even greater options to shop more now using customized interfaces”. It’s sick, and cynical, and instrumental.

   What is the service of Second Life, Chris? That’s what I’d need you to tell me. If they don’t make a world, if they don’t maintain an economy of land production, content sales, an auction, the LindEx, etc. where they encourage user content and IP, then what do they have?

   Anyone just tuning in right now would surely say, wow, did they kill their village in order to save it here? They made a world that was working fairly well, that had its own economy and creators and buyers and sellers but then they decided to start open sourcing it with the long-term prospect of utterly destroying the value of land, money, and creation, through the prospect of thousands of developers being able then to create land to roll out like shelf paper, money that is worthless script, and CopyBotted clothing, skins, etc.
8. Second Life goes open source, though open source doesn’t necessarily equal openness « Susan Wu - Venture Capital says:

   January 10, 2007 at 11:20 am

   […] So while Second Life still has a ways to go on the openness front, IMO, it is a pretty bold first step and opens the system to a lot of exciting new prospects.   I join Raph Koster amongst many others in congratulating them for making this step. […]
9. StGabe says:

   January 10, 2007 at 12:09 pm

   Here’s where you are wrong. You’re assuming there is a WELL-INTENTIONED community.

   Firefox. Thunderbird. Apache. JBoss. Bugzilla. Linux. Gimp. PHP. Python. SDL. Emacs. Ant. MySQL.

   Free, high-quality products, all of which I use on a regular basis (several of these you use on a regular basis, whether you know it or not). These are all maintained and kept at a very high standard of quality by well-intentioned and well-achieving communities.

   I think you’re just mad that a party is happening and you don’t know anyone there.
10. Second Thoughts: Blog Logger says:

    January 14, 2007 at 2:12 pm

    […] Argument on Raph Koster about SL going open source. […]
11. Ace Albion says:

    January 15, 2007 at 3:57 am

    I think Prokofy’s point is that the specific *SL* interested and oriented programming community isn’t so well intentioned. There’s something in the scale of these projects that promotes or mitigates the potential for malicious involvement.
12. Thunderclap says:

    January 16, 2007 at 12:47 am

    Let me put this into perspective. The SL group is very well intentioned. They have already managed to squash several bugs and help the 20 or so codes that do the core of the work. The problem that Prokofy has is that SL is a community so of like Branson, Missouri(for those who read outside the US). A small group of core people and then the masses. You has managed to offend nearly all of the core group, who now ignore her. Her rental business is not popular so once the really bad proprietary was taken out behind the woodshed and shot, she dropped to the second or third page? Why? Because the new was based on traffic.
    All she sees is the old was is going and her ability to profit going with it.
    In actuality, within the next year now that they under the gpl, firefox, flash, autodesk will all begin to transform Second life into the 3d environment to be on. They are serious issues being addressed like stability, grid management (Phillip Rosdale insists on there being one unifed grid as opposed to numerous shards)better content handling, updated physics etc.
    Those of us who joined this are like those who joined Mozilla to build Firefox. We look for the challenge of building something new and better. I love the old SL, the quiet SL. But that one wasn’t profitable enough to survive. This one is.
    Infoworld had an article in their current issue that said that gartner suggested that one of their CIO resolutions for 2007 is be involed with 3d environments and named Second Life.
    Prokofy is the luddite ringing the bell in fear. She is Sl’s Riaa. WE ignore her. She herself mentioned she got banned from the technical town hall. You get banned from a town hall for griefing. She showed up with a picket sign and wouldn’t be silent. Don’t believe me, go to her blog she has pictures of it and is proud.

    I ask that you simply ignore her. Stgabe, you hit the nail on the head.
13. baack to the future » Blog Archive » OpenSL: Your World, Your Source says:

    January 16, 2007 at 5:33 am

    […] While I add my voice to Cory Doctorow, Raph Koster, and of course many others in commending Linden Lab for taking the plunge, neither a minimum of two months before public source control nor forcing everyone to suffer through a miserable build process for an entire week by not immediately incorporating patches which were available within hours bodes well in terms of fostering active development.  Second Life has a ton of scaling issues to work through given the growth in residents we’ve been seeing recently — we can not allow their being understaffed (for what is indeed an unbelievably daunting task) to preclude the community from collaborating to extend their SecondLife experience in any way they desire.  This is Your World, Your Browser. […]
14. We the Sheeple » Blog Archive » OpenSL: Your World, Your Source says:

    January 16, 2007 at 3:43 pm

    […] OpenSL: Your World, Your Source I’ve received a good number of inquiries about the OpenSL project (OpenSecondLife.org) and its goals, and wanted to comment further on the implications of open sourcing the SL client in response to Allison Randal’s questioning the need for a community-based OpenSL browser project. First, I want to stress that OpenSL is not an attempt to fork (and certainly not, then, for “fork’s sake”) from Linden’s client. In fact, explicitly to ensure that LL can bring in functionality from OpenSL, we require that all patches are submitted via our patch submission system are authoritatively associated with a Second Life avatar. This allows contributors to the community’s code base to preserve the anonymity of their real life identity, while LL (who has this information on file) can maintain the list they’re requiring of a legal (”real life”) signatures so that they can pick and choose from OpenSL’s code those changes that (a) they see as appropriate for their official viewer, and (b) are contributed by individuals for whom they have signed agreements. As News.com observes, Programmers must sign a contributor agreement to submit code. By signing the contribution 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. But this isn’t about semantics. Much more importantly, I ultimately agree with Dawn Foster, who blogs optimistically about the ultimate effects the release of the client code under GPL: By releasing the client software under open source, residents can modify their client experience, while Linden Lab continues to provide the server side code, which is where they make their revenue. Linden Lab is providing a more flexible environment for users, which should translate to additional users, and at the same time, they continue to have the revenue stream required to keep Second Life in business. This is absolutely true. That said, by Friday there remained only a handful of residents in #openSL (of already roughly 50 in the channel that evening) who had succeeded at suffering through the process as posted on the SL wiki, eager to share their Visual Studio Express / 2005 solution files and appropriately patched code, packaged with dependencies, so that anyone could open and immediately build out of the box. The resulting diffs were too large for even temporary code sharing mechanisms such as cl1p — there was no good way to do this. Developers’ requests about a public repository in #openSL or during the town hall regarding the open source client were told plans were still in the works, but no decision would be implemented within a minimum of two months. A JIRA had been setup which allowed neither the ability to include patch files nor view other pending patches. Even throughout the weekend (when most open source hobbyists finally have time to finally play with their projects and code), nearly all conversation in #openSL was limited to individuals entering with questions on how to get through the fairly intricate build process, rather than discussion of the true potential of an open source SL client. The burgeoning OpenSL community was nonetheless emerging therein, it simply lacked tools to effectively communicate — let alone coordinate efforts to collaborate and to distribute the results. This was not quite, then, the creation of an open source project; it was a fix-it-yerself system that allows LL to pick-and-choose which patches submitted by residents (who are required to sign and submit paperwork in order to include code in LL’s browser) and periodically post a large archive of what had officially been accepted to the “community browser” that one would have to build oneself. While I add my voice to Cory Doctorow, Raph Koster, and of course many others in commending Linden Lab for taking the plunge, neither a minimum of two months before public source control nor forcing everyone to suffer through a miserable build process for an entire week by not immediately incorporating patches which were available within hours bodes well in terms of fostering active development. Second Life has a ton of scaling issues to work through given the growth in residents we’ve been seeing recently — we can not allow their being understaffed (for what is indeed an unbelievably daunting task) to preclude the community from collaborating to extend their SecondLife experience in any way they desire. This is Your World, Your Browser. Where did the word browser come from? I don’t just like 3pointD because Mark’s coverage is authoritative and inclusive — I also love that the name alone is a great play on the role into which I believe the metaverse shall (and is) evolving; the web (1.0) was a system of making information available to everyone, the web 2.0 is a series of sites embracing and leveraging the social connectivity afforded by the internet … embodied in the form of the web 1.0. But the true implications of this connectivity manifested in 3-D virtual worlds — web 3.0 — are far more significant than either of these. To limit the manner in which you experience these shared virtual spaces — the browser — to a single, official version is unwise. Just look at the list of extensions available for Firefox — and imagine having that degree of control over your experience in-world. So, where’s an SDK or even just an API for extensions when you need one, so that people can start making these krazy-kool plugins? This is one of the problems the OpenSL project seeks to solve: constructing a plug-in framework which facilitates development of modifications to the client such that developers need not build and distribute an entire version of SecondLife just to share their efforts. We will be evaluating the best way to do this in #opensl on EFnet (load .NET/mono assemblies vs. Java bytecode, security, … you name it), so if you have any thoughts on the matter, please come join the discussion or visit our wiki. OpenSecondLife.org also hopes to help other projects to be explored by developers that would be separate efforts from the client, yet share the code (and, transitively, the GPL). For example, after creating continuous integration tools, I teleported over to SheepLabs to script a quick object in-world that would check in periodically and light up to indicate the latest OpenSL build status. When my hotel’s internet b0rked a bit ago, after pestering the front desk several times, my inability to work on LSL projects using a simple, offline IDE (or potentially built out with auto-complete, compile & test offline, offer documentation or hyperlink to functions’ LSL wiki entries, much like php) now that the code is available bothered me. The potential for offline build tools is also huge, but is also an undertaking in itself. Finally, Siva over at Sun has succeeded at building OpenSL on Solaris, and — barring any objections by Sun — has indicated an interest in helping OpenSL to add Solaris to the list of supported platforms (Windows, OS X and Linux). These are indeed exciting times — we’re approaching user created content viewed via a user created tool, and the resulting synergy will produce some wonderful new experiences and opportunities. […]

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