After many months of rumors, hopes, and promises, today Linden Labs announced the open source release of Second Life. It’s released under the GPL, with an additional permission granted allowing the code to be distributed under any of a number of different open source licenses, to allow the Second Life code to be combined with other packages. It’s a pragmatic approach that reminds me of the Artistic 2.0’s “relicensing” clause.
This release is really just the beginning. Aaron Brashears (a.k.a. “Phoenix Linden”) of Linden comments:
A lot of the Second Life development work currently in progress is focused on building the Second Life Grid — a vision of a globally interconnected grid with clients and servers published and managed by different groups. Expect many changes and updates in the coming months in support of this architecture. Much of the recent work has centered on securing the code against potential threats. More recently and still in development, we are moving more of the communications to reliable and cryptographically strong secure channels.
Will the Second Life server be open sourced as well? Will this release be the beginning of a vibrant developer community? Will it be the boost the Linux client needs to make it’s way out of Alpha status? Will the many eyes of the open source community begin to locate and fix security flaws before they become an issue?
The Second Life wiki has instructions for downloading and compiling the Second Life source code on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. I’m in the process of compiling it on my Ubuntu desktop now, and will make another post based on the results.