SL still has the benefit of supporting 3 platforms whereas Multiverse and ActiveWorlds only support Windows.

Good point. For what it's worth, the developers say "Mac, Linux, and other platforms are on the roadmap."

Tony, if this is going to be like the promises of bringing Havoc 2 and HTML-on-a-prim, I think it's safe to say that the original timeline given will not be as quick as they say.

And I'd really like you to tease this apart. Cory Linden and others have been talking for a long time about having some kind of customization of the client so that your user panel will be able to be customized much like the skins on RealPlayer or whatever -- you can brand your own and work with your own community. So they have been hinting that there'd be some code or download or something that will enable you to customize the browsing or use of SL, but it isn't actually creating land itself.

When Cory says "in the long run, we want you to be able to host your own server," (he's playing to the beta-era tekkies with this one) again, does that mean there will be a complete SL out of the box, utterly unrelated to SL's servers with complete land production capacity? Or does it mean that you will get a special, expensive, licensed version of SL like a very fancy 3-d graphics suite that will enable you to emulate SL somewhere but with still a relationship to its main grid or grids (or no relationship?)

And obviously the "plug-in" for Firefox is hardly the same thing as "host your own server".

A chief feature of SL has been its centralized asssets and contiguous geography. That makes it socially and visually compellling to many people, even though some tekkies sneer at the central asset server as an outdated and clunky model that will break, and they loathe contiguous geography which they view as an oppressive vestige of meatspace interfering with their basement-brewed worlds (where they will get to have tyrannical charge instead of a game company that at least enforces equal access with a TOS).

So what will happen to the Lindens' model, borrowed from meat-world, of land having value, land as a commodity, which can be sold and exchanged for currency? If anyone can download SL and make land and then connect it to SL's central world (or even if they can't), the land the Lindens originally made and issued is rendered null and void. Even following the "compelling content" development model the Lindens have tried to force on land barons with their constant land glutting, they can't possibly retain its value.

Of course there will be any number of tekkies that sneer at this land-value model and tell people like me that we will have to adapt, suck it up, go with the changes, blah blah --change in SL is always something people urge *other people* to suck up and adapt to but rarely endorse when it affects them : )

But it isn't just about putting Anshe or Prok out of business, it's about putting the immersive world out of business with its contiguity and socializing capacity and the very land model of the Lindens themselves.

They may come to think it will be easier and less wear and tear on them to sell $1250 packages of brew-your-own software rather than to make $1250 islands they sell and then have to sustain with server management. Yet they gain $195 a month after that sale, and that's really what enables them to move toward profit-making. The real question to me is whether they will attempt to combine both models, and whether they will make a smooth transition between the use of the first one and the use of the second.

I just wish that once in his life, Cory Linden would stop playing to, feting, and pandering to the tiny lobby of early adapters and tekkies who demand open-source and licensed software to host their own servers and stop and *think* what it means and make some kind of policy statement about Linden Lab's intentions to the *rest of us* who constitute the far greater number of *paying customers* who buy and sell land and develop it, whether large land barons like Anshe Chung or tiny 512m2 parcel owners in the premium accounts.

I'd like them not just to dangle open-source and licensing and hosting your own to people they think are their targeted prosumers in the year 2007-2008, I'd like to *hear* what they are saying to *the rest of their existing, current, paying customers* about the value of the product they are selling *right now* on the land auction. Hello?

Obviously LL will make do whatever they have to do to make a buck, and if it means open source or host-your-own with licenses, they'll do that -- but then they owe it to their existing customer base to explain how they will transition out of a land-value model.

And compensation will be deserved, under a basic notion of torts called "bait and switch," if they sell a server and its access for $1250 and imply it has continued value and meaning, and then suddenly enable thousands of other people to make numerous copies of it for a one-time licensing fee if they have their own servers.

I've always viewed the job to do with the Lindens is to compel them to compensate all the people they bait and switch and enforce corporate responsibility, just as was done with the little-known but successful lobbying to enforce telehub buybacks.

They don't get to be revolutionary technicians by exploiting people using one business model that they then discard in favour of the revolution's new exigencies. I personally am not interested in funding their accelerated revolution on my own back and I suspect other land-owners aren't either.

I could see the "platform" of SL being distributed around, and I guess people will make their own walled gardens, but I can't see all the *stuff* I have in "Linden Life" as it might be called being transferable out to some other SL world, because of all the problems with permissions and holding assets over a worldwide bunch of servers. So I can see a way to have some kind of customised SL based World Wide Gor with all the features those people want set up in their (closed) systems. It would be a case of moving the islands off the shared grid onto their own microcosms.

Maybe there would be a way for someone to buy stuff in one world, and be given some kind of license or permission by the creator to be provided a duplicate of that in whichever other "worlds" that creator supports. Maybe that could work somehow.

What I can't see working, is the panic shutdown and manual deletion of grid crashing griefer objects when those are spread all over the world of worlds.

But yeah, it will be fine for the Corporate Virtual Experience people, and the people who build and engineer stuff for them, but there won't be the same community.

Hey, there is always libsecondlife.

We're approaching stability with the project, and hopefully soon we can see a full client implemented with the library. Servers may not be that far off either.

Check here and here for more on the client efforts.