Linden Lab: No Open Grids
Avatar data, authentication information, identity data, inventory, and many other services necessary to create the Second Life experience reside on our backbone services servers and their associated databases. Our current architecture does not anticipate moving these services away from Linden Lab’s servers. Our Architecture Working Group is working on open protocols that will enable external servers to connect to the Second Life Grid. (Source)
If it was not clear before, it should be clear now. The AWG isn’t about an open metaverse, it’s about coming up with ways for people to connect servers to the proprietary Second Life Service ™.
At some point, Linden Lab was espousing the idea that they would play a central, but small role in the open metaverse, something like Verisign. Philip Linden declared that Second Life would become “bigger than the web”. There were talks about standards bodies and standardizing the protocol.
All those concepts have faded away now. It has become increasingly clear that Linden Lab is interested in one thing: Preserving the walled garden. Right now Linden Lab gets money to host servers: region servers and centralized servers. Maintaining all those region servers sure is expensive, and it’s running into limits of scale.  Linden Lab seems to be increasingly viewing the open metaverse as simply a way to farm out and distribute pesky and relatively expensive region servers, while still collecting rents on the central services.
Of course, this was always part of the plan. It was always assumed that Linden would provide a way for third parties to connect region servers to their grid, eventually. What was not clear that this would be the entire purpose and focus of the AWG. We gave Linden Lab the benefit of the doubt. We assumed there would be a quid pro quo. After all, Linden Lab would still have a massive advantage over any alternative service in terms of social critical mass. Now we can see that Linden Lab isn’t designing anything here other than a way for people to help scale their proprietary walled garden.
(Photo: Robert Scarth. Second Life is a Registered Trademark of Linden Research, Inc.)
October 18th, 2008 at 11:47 pm
[...] Lab: No Open Grids Cross-Posted from: Gigs Shrugged » Blog Archive » Linden Lab: No Open Grids https://support.secondlife.com/ics/s…uestionID=5566 [...]
October 20th, 2008 at 5:21 am
I’m not fully convinced by your conclusions. The quoted text reference doesn’t exclude coexistence with other grids, and AFAIK, the open protocols designed by the Architecture Working Group will also let people connect from the Second Life (TM) Grid to other grids.
I’d definitively want to hear what Zha Ewry, Adam Frisby, Saijanai Kuhn have to say about this. In the meantime, thanks for this article.