Just yesterday I was watching the YouTube video in which Ethan Zuckerman argues with Charles Nesson about Second Life. Charles Nesson is William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and he started an Harvard course inside Second Life. Ethan contested the fact that Charles in this way is creating “Intellectual value” that is locked in a proprietary platform where he is not able to get it back, and that with his reputation is giving a lot of visibility to Second Life in exchange for nothing and urged Charles to embrace open source alternatives, such as OpenCroquet.
At the end of the video Charles committed sepukku and this is a pity because this was not needed … it is in fact news of today that Second Life released its source code under a GPL licence, hence making it Free Software. The title of the post on Second Life’s blog announcing the huge news is particularly appropriated as well “Embracing the Inevitable“.
So now we have this great Second Life world that is Free (as in Freedom), we will soon have Ryzom Free, we now just wait for World of WarCraft to not wait until they are desperate to embrace the inevitable, and Free their source code: the inevitable is that PlaneShift or some other MMORPG already released under GPL will make World of WarCraft desperate.
“May you live in interesting times”, well, are we not? Is there anyone out there able to forecast what will happen in 1 or 5 years of Second Life now that its code is liberated? I doubt it. We live in really interesting times.
UPDATE: thanks to a comment by Francesco, I now know that Ryzom.org offer to buy the source code of Ryzom and make it free was not accepted since there were bigger monetary offers. I guess they will have to embrace the inevitable as well, sooner or later. Sooner would have been better for everyone.
UPDATE #2: I blogged too quickly and too enthusiastically the news. The points made by Ethan in his post are totally correct: LindenLab just released the code of the client (in some sense hoping to outsource the development to the Free Software community, while they maintain the code of the server absolutely proprietary and hence I cannot run my SL universe (as Francesco notes as well in the comments). Anyway I still think it is a positive news. For example now that the client code is available it would be easier to start from scratch a compatible server on SourceForge (or am I wrong again?), anyway go read the points made by Ethan because they are much deeper and more interesting than mine!
Try a search for “wordpress blog” on Google and you get an advertisement of Google that says “Tip: Want to share your life online with a blog? Try Blogger”. As you probably know, Blogger is a product of Google. Advertisements to other products of Google are displayed when searching for “photo sharing”, for “calendar”, etc. So where is the problem you might ask? According to Blake Ross, of Firefox fame, “this is a bad sign for Google … Google lost me today”. The title of the post is interesting as well: “Tip: Trust is hard to gain, easy to lose“.
And very timely there is the announcement of Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, that plans to launch a new search engine in the first three months of 2007 (read the article on BusinessWeek).
“Like Wikipedia, the new search engine will rely on the support of a volunteer community of users. The idea is that Web surfers and programmers will be able to bring their collective intelligence to bear, to fine-tune search results and make the experience more effective for everyone.”
Users will be allowed to rerank search results by clicking on an “edit” link and programmers will be allowed to read and improve the code since it will be free software, based on Apache’s open-source Web search software Lucene and Nutch.
Wikiasari is the name of the project and I think we will speak a lot about it in the next future (few years ago I would have said we will hear a lot about it in the next future, the change of perspective is amazing). And everything goes back to trust as usual: who would you like to help with your knowledge? A trust-me-on-openess project like Wikiasari and Wikipedia or a trust-me-on-faith project like Google or Britannica? I personally have no doubt at all.
Reading the long thread discussion on CouchSurfing titled “how’s the money flow?”, I found Irv Thomas’s contribution that summarizes an article of Forbes about Craiglist. The article is delicious: it is so good that Internet has been able to make reasonable and possible something that would have sounded totally unreasonable just few years ago.
Excerpts from the article below (by the way, I would love to be able to write in English half as well as this article …):
Craigslist President and Chief Executive Jim Buckmaster isn’t nuts. He just sounds that way, particularly to anyone who thinks that the point of running a business is, you know, to make money.
And that was enough to make his appearance last week at the UBS Global Media & Communications Conference feel like a dizzying trip through Lewis Carroll’s looking glass.
Speaking in an unflappable, near-monotone, Buckmaster calmly discussed with UBS analyst Ben Schachter a business model which, by any rational standard, is completely insane.
(…)
OK, so Craigslist boasts a huge potential to make money, but isn’t really interested in generating big profits. Given that combination, why not raise funds through equity investments or advertising and then give the money away to charity, Schachter asked.
“I think it’s a valid argument and one that we don’t necessarily have a persuasive answer for,” Buckmaster said. “That is a proven model for doing good in the world. It just doesn’t happen to be our model. Ours is to try to be as philanthropic in our core business as we can be and leave all the money out there in the hands of users.”
We now return you to your regularly scheduled reality, already in progress.