Simon Willison’s Weblog

The Second Life Viewer is now open-source (via) I’d heard that the biggest barrier to this was the need to protect the SL economy from malicious disruption. The FAQ is fascinating, and a real tribute to open-source principles.

Posted 8th January 2007 at 6:47 pm

Tagged opensource, secondlife

2 comments

It's really worth reading the FAQ in full - there are some real gems in there, like this bit on copyright infringement:

We believe that vigilant community members will shun plagiarism, and evolve increasingly effective social norms to encourage creativity through enlightened self-interest (the desire to benefit from further creativity).

Before it was open-source the principle defence against copyright infringement was an in-game variant of very weak DRM - the CopyBot controversy demonstrated just how weak it was. It's great to see them embrace social as opposed to technical countermeasures.

Simon Willison - 8th January 2007 18:57 - #
The Copybot controversy probably helped this to happen - in that more eyes can find bad things more quickly.

The FAQ is good, but I've found that the developer mailing list is pretty quiet.

Taran Rampersad - 9th January 2007 04:46 - #