Baba Sucks

It’s finally happened folks.  Second Life’s client is open source under the terms of the GPL v2.

Some people have questioned whether or not libsecondlife will continue now that Linden Lab has open sourced the client. The answer is an emphatic –YES!

While the client is now open source, libsecondlife has a few advantages over the more complete client from Linden Lab.

libsecondlife is…

1. BSD licensed as compared to the GPL.
2. libsecondlife is has less baggage(we only do networking).
3. libsecondlife is easily cross platform in C# or java.

That’s right. The libsecondlife website is now pretty. We’ve traded in the old CMS front page for a clean wiki. It took a bit of hacking on MediaWiki to get it to play nice with us, but in the end it’s a better platform for our needs. Less frontage and more substance.

Some nice functionality with the new layout is the ability to scale down to profile tab size as well as making the site more open to the rest of the community. Hopefully it will herald the end to outdated links because somebody(me) was too lazy or forgetful to update the static pages.

Please send any issues you my have with the new layout to me at baba@libsecondlife.org.

Take a gander at this pretty sight. That’s right, the Nintendo Wii connected to Second Live(via IRC). It’s too pretty. It uses the libsecondlife IRC gateway and CGI IRC on EFnet. That’s the best we got til WiiLi releases their juice. Enjoy Pix

Using libsecondlife irc gateway to get chat to IRC where it is relayed to an IRC connected Nintendo Wii.. sexy

The Opera browser pointed at a web based CGI IRC client which relayes chat to #libsl on EFNet and then into Second Life. RAD

How?

Go ahead and try it for yourself. Join the channel #libsl, and chat! Your words will carry on the internet tubes to the libsecondlife HQ in Hooper (no longer, but it was fun while it lasted. The Wii in IRC is still cool.)

The Register gave libsecondlife a little writeup.

Second Life is certainly at an intriguing point in its development. A fully open sourced Second Life has the potential to become the de facto standard for a three-dimensional version of the world wide web. “We would love to see a fully open source metaverse,” says Freedman.

Cory’s town hall went off pretty well, except for some repeater issues. Cory covered most of the major topics in his info-dump. Linden Lab is working on scaling, and it’s hard work(tm)

Here’s some of what Cory discussed, covering HTML on a prim, libsecondlife, open source, Mono, and the ever popular Havok. I’ve removed all those annoying line breaks in what was essentially a copy and paste job. Read more

It’s starting to get crowded now.. moo Money and Eddy Stryker are here now. It’s almost a party ;0 Check out the bot(squat)!!

Pooley Stage: Camping for Cory

Something’s going on over at Trimagination!

So lots of people seem to think IRC is the place to find true character. Let’s talk about what I knew about CopyBot, Second Life, and you.

People seem to think CopyBot was developed to cause the destruction of Second Life. That’s simply not true. Am I saying it wasn’t going to cause a lot of discussion and worry? I knew it would, because it’s something that’s important.

The issue isn’t CopyBot. The issue is what real protections you can expect in Second Life.

Nothing will prevent copying. You can only react to it after the fact. Trying to stop it will only lead to failure, and it will have the effect of limiting fair use.

We’ve seen the same words from Linden Lab, from Robin and Cory. We’ve all been saying the same thing. I’ve been saying it for months, others have been saying it for just as long if not longer. A lot of people are aware, and it still seems that those who would be effected by it, the content creators, do not hear us.

CopyBot isn’t a very good copier. It’s inefficient and buggy. One good thing about CopyBot, and also mirrored in my comments taken from IRC, if it can copy an avatar down to the last prim and with the same appearance it will have HUGE visual impact. That’s the kind of thing you don’t shrug off. It almost instantly connected all those disparate dots for anyone that watched it do its thing. What is yours is now suddenly somebody else’s.

I didn’t develop CopyBot, but I was aware that it would cause a controversy. I was glad for that because now almost nobody is not aware of the limitation in the protocol. Happier? Probably not… Do you want to be happy, or rather oblivious of libsecondlife and angry at Linden Lab for something else?