Official Linden Lab blogger Hamlet Linden, who covers the lighter side of Second Life culture, tackles a bit of controversy today. Linden Lab recently announced its intention to integrate features proven viable by the independently-owned Gaming Open Market (GOM) currency exchange into a future version of Second Life. The move came after an unsuccessful attempt to buy out the proprietors of the GOM, according to co-founder Jamie Hale. Naturally, this has been a stinging blow to many members of the Second Life developer community, some of which feel utterly betrayed.

Hamlet's headline reads "When does innovation become competition?" This sums up the Linden Lab point of view quite well, given that the innovators in this situation are the founders of the Gaming Open Market, who made virtual currency exchange into a viable real-world business--earlier this year, the service had traded over $1M USD during a 12-month period. Linden Lab liked this idea so much that they planned "a direct duplication of GOM's functionality with the addition of credit card billing," according to Jamie Hale. The evident answer to Hamlet's question is that user innovators become competitors when Linden Lab wants a piece of the action. The larger question is whether Linden Lab will kill future user innovation as a result of corporate shortsightedness.