“Reducing the engineering/QA costs at Linden Lab”

Reminded me of something Matt Asay wrote in a very insightful post (June 2006 - http://asay.blogspot.com/2006/06/open-source-path-to-development.html)

“the vast majority of “developers” within a company are not core developers at all. They’re people writing drivers, doing QA, etc. In an open source company…the core development team tends not to scale well beyond 15-25 people. …the vast amount of code production (83% in terms of Linux, Apache, etc.) is done by ~15 people. Very few….
…you take advantage of highly leveraged development, where the drivers, localization, etc. is done by the community, not your core development team. This means open source companies can spend proportionately less on development while simultaneously investing a lot more in core development. ”

For my money, reducing dev/QA costs seems like a substantial benefit(driver) of taking this action.

Regards, Mark

While Philip Rosedale seems to know what he is about, I honestly think that for him to be a success, SecondLife has to move beyond his reputation and the reputation of Linden Lab. All indicators seem to point that this has already happened, and now it is a matter of riding the wave without wiping out. That said, opening the Virtual World Browser (which is really what it is) is along the lines of Mosaic.

But there is something else.

One thing that happens with open sourcing is that people like to show and tell other people what they are doing. While the media has crashed and burned under its own hype, the blogosphere just got put to work in a very serious way. People will be writing about what they are doing related to SecondLife even more, and suddenly you have a few thousand free presses printing what their authors are doing. With SecondLife. Good move.

Yes, Linden Lab still owns the virtual world infrastructure - and in a way it *is* a monopoly. But how many people really understand the way the major operating systems are similar? Microsoft’s Windows - proprietary, no question. Apple’s OS X? Open Source, but under the control of Apple. Linux? Isn’t there a benevolent dictator running around named Linus?

Someone is always in charge. If they do a good job (or a good enough job, or a good PR department), they don’t get replaced. If someone or some group gains sentience because those in charge suck (verily), well - then something happens.

Someone needs to administrate the asset server and the economy. Or are we going to vote people in to take over the infrastructure that Linden Labs paid for… nationalizing a virtual world. Amusing.

And have we forgotten IBM, lurking on sims within SecondLife itself, plotting virtual world usage… and with their budget, perhaps virtual worlds.

In the grand scheme of things, though… I think this is the year of the mobile phone. Virtual Worlds will probably get some more press with the buildup to the US elections - in fact, it is almost guaranteed - and a lot of politicians will say they put SL on the map, as was said about the blogosphere…

At the end of the day, SecondLife is one of a kind and novel in the way it handles copyrights. This model has been around since 2003 - so far no one seems to have emulated it and met with enough success to be heard of.

What this means - what this all means - is that the average SecondLife resident who cannot spell C++ will not see much of a difference; things will still get fixed, bugs will be slain, and it may happen faster - but that isn’t really a change. This is just news for those of us who grok C++, and even then I would say that the truly interesting things will happen after the Mozilla code is integrated into SecondLife.

Open Sourcing the viewer was good. How good it is left to be seen.