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!
*shudders* That game scares the *hit out of me!
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.