Three-dimensional, virtual world application, Second Life has gone open source. Since Second Life opened public in 2003, roughly 2.5 million around the world has jumped on the virtual world band-wagon. Second Life is imagined, created, and owned by the application’s residents.
The residents can buy and own land and Linden Dollars. There is also Teen Second Life as well for the under 18-year-old users.
Second Life was created by Linden Lab® and now developers can access and manipulate the code. “The move marks Linden Lab’s continued commitment to building the Second Life Grid as an open, extensible platform for development, rather than a closed proprietary system” stated the Linden Lab blog.
“We feel we have a responsibility to improve and to grow Second Life as rapidly as possible,” stated Philip Rosedale, the CEO and founder of Linden Lab.
“We were the first virtual world to enable content creators to own the rights to the Intellectual Property they create. That sparked exponential growth in the richness of the Second Life environment. Now we’re placing the Viewer’s development into the hands of Residents and developers as well. This extends the control Residents can have over the Second Life experience and allows a worldwide community to examine, validate and improve the software’s sophistication and capabilities.”
The source code is available at http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource.
Developers are expected to follow the guidelines of GNU GPL version 2.
