An open source "Second Life" for Linden Lab
Linden Lab, the creator of online virtual community Second Life, released its viewer earlier this year with a GPL 2.0 license, adding a clause called the "FLOSS exception," which releases developers using certain open source licenses from the requirement that any derivative works be licensed under the GPL.
Linden added the exception to make it possible for many more developers to create new applications from Second Life viewer code. "We had the sense that Second Life has the potential to be much bigger than Linden Lab alone," says Rob Lanphier, Linden's director of open source development. "We needed to figured out a way to let the world build this into a much bigger thing."
Lanphier came onboard in September 2006, after the open source initiative had begun. CEO Philip Rosedale, former CTO at Real Networks, quickly realized he needed a true open source expert to lead a project as complicated as open-sourcing the Second Life viewer. Rosedale turned to Lanphier, the person who was in charge of open-sourcing the Helix client for Real.
"[Linden] had drastically underestimated how hard it would be to get the source code out and to keep the service up and running at the same time."
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