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Via Virtual World News, I found the After a year of open source, Second Life looks ahead - an interview with the Linden Lab Director of Open Source Development, Rob Lanphier.

As you would suspect, the article revolves around the client - but the tidbit is here:

...But don't expect to see the SL Grid server source code released any time soon. "There are a number of things about the architecture of our current server infrastructure that inhibit a source code release. There are a lot of cases of monolithic design and improper trust relationships between components that would need to be addressed."

"We've been putting a lot of effort into re-engineering the back end systems and the way in which they expose formal APIs," Lanphier says. "This is largely based upon using Mulib and Eventlet to turn our internal and external APIs into highly modular and secure Web services. We've designed a security model based on granting capabilities to use particular APIs, and we're separating out the management of 'agents' (resident information such as appearance and inventory) from the management of 'regions.' This breakup will allow residents to log in once and move between regions operated by different hosting providers, and the use of fine-grained capabilities will allow for servers in our agent domain to grant different levels of information access/manipulation to region simulators depending on which region provider the agent is visiting."

The Architecture Working Group plans to eventually hold quarterly meetings, but at this time has not scheduled its next event...

A lot of these design issues are what some consider to be the problem with opening the server code - like transactions in the economy across servers, and moving user inventory back and forth across servers not under the control of Linden Lab.

The Open Land Economy

Some believe that opening the servers will impact the land economy as well - but honestly, I don't see that. The amount of money that it costs to run one's own server won't allow smaller land owners to be cost effective - but larger land owners such as Anshe Chung might actually see benefit to running their own servers and renting land from there - cutting out the middle man. The perception of how opening the server code would affect the land economy seems largely a matter of anxiety in most cases: People will still want smaller pieces of land. People who want larger pieces of land and want the headache and cost of running their own code will be given an option.

Right now, anyone can register a domain and install their own open source weblog software - as an example. The vast majority of people with weblogs do not do that. If there is a land scare, that land scare should belong to Linden Lab: If larger land owners begin running their own servers that connect to the Second Life service provided by Linden Lab, Linden Lab could actually miss out on potential revenue - and lose existing revenue.

But again, this isn't happening soon.

The Client

There is a lot of mention of the client being open sourced in the article, but there is no mention of the fact that the client itself is dual licensed: the [w:GPL] for non-commercial uses, and the commercial licensing is of indeterminate cost - as I found out late last year. I was asked all manner of questions about how the client was intended to be used, but I was loathe to give details of my client's information to anyone at Linden Lab because I am, frankly, afraid of someone telling one of their friends who would then try to compete with me for my client. That may be unwarranted; I may have personal trust issues because I wasn't hugged much when I was growing up - but I also don't mix matters when it comes to paying the bills.

To date, no information on commercial licensing costs can be found - yet Electric Sheep Company (ESC) somehow navigated through and got their commercial license for the client. There is more trust between ESC and Linden Lab than between myself and Linden Lab, I suppose. Maybe sheep got hugged more than me. I don't know. We all know that ESC couldn't possibly have better connections at Linden Lab than anyone else, right?

To their credit, the last Second Life Solutions Developer Survey did take that onboard, or at least noted that at least one person (me) commented on it as something that they needed to address. But it is difficult to balance that with anything called 'Open Source'. I'd settle for 'Kind-of-sort-of Open Source'. Somehow that escaped the entire Linux.com article.

The Future

I have said it before and will say it again - open sourcing the server code when open simulator is moving at such a steady clip makes me think that the best interest of Linden Lab would be to abandon speaking of opening the server code at this point - which they basically have - and focus on the real problems, which Gigs Taggart recently summed up quite well.

All the client side DRM has to go away and become a part of the server code - it is quite likely that this is how Eros LLC had the sex bed copied without permission in the first place. No one actually came out and said it, but there are a bunch of quietly nodding heads. But what does it mean? It means that the open sourcing of only a part of the code - the client - allowed people to bypass DRM because of the design.

In other words - they made the client open source before it was ready to be open source, to the detriment of creators within the synthetic world as well as to their own detriment - not to mention the issue brought forward with this that open source can cause security issues - something that other open source projects have demonstrated otherwise on. Why the difference? Poor Q&A, as Taggart points out, as well as incomplete open source. Sad, but true. And it is largely ignored, at least in communication with the wider community. It is the dirty little secret. And it still exists, just as some clients can bypass parcel level bans.

And, oddly enough, open source has allowed more people to run landbots, and some of those people do rip people off.

Largely, Linux.com missed some big issues that Linden Lab has with open source. Sure, they're learning - but the cost of the education is largely paid by the community. Meanwhile, it is in Open Sim's best interest to deal with the issue of connecting to the Second Life grid... or not.

Either way, one server is open source. One is not.