mtl3p

sorry MK - i told you this wasn’t over ;-)

“All of this raises an interesting question - who actually owns this stuff? Linden grants users intellectual property rights to everything that they create. That was certainly useful for Kermitt Quirk, who created a popular game, Tringo, in the game and sold it to a real-world game publisher. But it’s less clear what it means for someone who builds a beautiful and complex mansion filled with carefully scripted features written in Linden’s scripting language. At present, there’s no way to move the creation onto a non-Linden server - if you decided you didn’t want to keep paying Linden Labs for server space, you’re out of luck as your intellectual property is only useful in a Linden-owned space.

This conrasts rather sharply with the online user-created content efforts I’ve been involved with in the past. If you got sick of hosting your homepage on Tripod, it wasn’t neccesarily easy to move it to Geocities, but you could save the HTML files and JPEGs and upload them onto the new server and your page would, more or less, work. That’s because web servers and clients (browsers) use common, public standards to exchange content.

Cory explains that this is coming - “public protocols” first, where Linden Labs publishes an API that would allow people to build their own systems that are compatible with Linden’s, opening the possibility that, with sufficient time, I could write a Second Life server and invite folks to migrate from Linden’s servers to my own with their avatars and objects intact, or open a portal between our two worlds. Actually opening Linden’s codebase and allowing programmers to tinker with the server or the graphics engine on an open source basis is “farther off”. Cory explains that it requires a good deal of work for a non-open source project to clean up their code so that outside programmers can work on it, referencing the ugly, hard-to-understand code Netscape released when they decided to open-source their browser.”

link

i’m not positive but i’m fairly sure that ethan has thought about this a bit more because of boris and me. that’s pretty cool.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 1st, 2005 at 12:00 am and is filed under Whatever. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.