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It will take some power not to be sucked into ‘Second Life’

One thing about Second Life, judging from how often my friend’s play, is it’s terribly time consuming and highly addictive. My first life is already time consuming, and I’m just not sure I’m quite ready yet to commit to a second one, even one where I could theoretically be a vampire or superhero or own my own virtual condo on virtual beach and furnish it a virtual hot tub for a virtual party.

Although, if I did own a virtual condo on virtual beach, I could invite the virtual versions of my real life friends over - considering how much Second Life has become part of their real lives, that might be the only way I’m going to see them for a while.

Agreed: “Second Life” is a bad name for a virtual world as it actually suggests “your first life might suck, so come in here and create a second one” - and since we only really have time for one life, what happens to the first when you focus on the second?

To the author of the above: addiction wanes with time. The real issue is the time-consuming aspect.

However, the problem is in the last sentence quoted above.

OpenSim Steps on Linden Lab Toes?

According to HyperGrid Business web site, it’s time for OpenSim developers and founders and whatnot to celebrate as a foundation has been created that will allow things to move forward on “solid legal ground”.

From the article:

The major problem that has been plaguing OpenSim until now is that OpenSim is distributed under the business-friendly BSD license — the entire code base is open source, but companies that build commercial software on top of that code can keep their projects proprietary. For example, IBM sells a distribution of OpenSim that is optimized to work with their enterprise software for around $50,000.

However, Second Life’s viewer and the third party viewers are all distributed under a GPL license — that license does not allow for proprietary commercial distributions, and any software built using the viewer code automatically becomes open-source. If any GPL-licensed viewer code were to make its way into OpenSim, then the entire OpenSim code based would be contaminated and would have to be licensed as GPL — the six-month policy was in place to prevent that from happening.

I’m not an attorney by any stretch of imagination, I am curious how Linden Research, D.B.A. Linden Lab feels about all this.

Read More

(Source: hypergridbusiness.com)

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Linden Lab | CrunchBase Profile

Fun facts (and assumptions) about Second Life creator Linden Lab, including a bullet list of hires and when, investment income and such.

Here’s a sample:

See the entire thing at CrunchBase (click title link).

Humble Says Linden Lab is Profitable, Not Looking at IPO (by Bloomberg )

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Second Life's CEO Rod Humble talks anniversaries

Second Life recently hit a milestone in the MMORPG industry: eight years in service. This is ancient in MMO terms, and yet the game has shown continued growth. How would you explain such success, especially when the game… er, world… is such an enigma? Even the players are not sure how to describe it.