As I broadly hinted at last month, Linden Lab has announced today the release of the source code for the Second Life client under the GNU GPL v2. license.

Linden see this as embracing the inevitable:

In 1993, NCSA released their liberally licensed, but proprietary, Mosaic 2.0 browser with support for inline images arguably heralding the start of the web as we know it today. In an act of either acceptance of the inevitable or simple desperation, Netscape Communications released the bulk of the Netscape Communicator code base to form the foundation of projects as Mozilla, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

We are not desperate, and we welcome the inevitable with open arms.

They also provide a vision of the way forward beyond this initial release of client source

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.

Definitely a platform play.

Unlike the few doom laden end-of-Second-Life-as-we-know-it prophets sprinkled through the comments on the announcement, I share the majority view and welcome this announcement. Having had a browse around the segments of the Second Life Wiki dedicated to this release, I have a few concerns that Linden are new to the support of Open Source projects - no live access to a version control repository yet for instance. They will soon learn that letting the code out of the door is just the start.

Now lets see what the world can do with it…

Technorati Tags: Second Life, Platform, Web 2.0, Linden Lab

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