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Irish reporter decides to test the claim that 25% of Irish citizens speak Gaelic, by travelling throughout the country speaking nothing but Gaelic. Turns out you can have a really hard time in Dublin if you’re not willing to speak English… but you can s
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My argument with Charlie Nesson about his embrace of Second Life over open source alternatives. Contains a lovely scene of Charlie committing sepukku.
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Joi’s excellent talk on World of Warcraft, focusing on interface, community dynamics, contrast with user-generated 3d environments like secondlife
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Warren Ellis has some excellent thoughts about a recent Second Life controversy, where paper millionare Anshe Chung was “griefed” in a particularly visible and offensive way. Anshe Chung/Ailin Graef (the human being behind the avatar) have evidently threa
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“Adam Reuters” story on Anshe Chung’s attempt to use copyright law to stop reportage in Second Life.
Hey Ethan :)
Please don’t go after Prof. Nesson, i mean especially since Second Life went OPEN SOURCE this morning :)
http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/01/08/embracing-the-inevitable/
So now will we be seeing more of yourself, global voices and lovely you, in second life?
Would be wonderful to dig around your open library idea now ;) the sl client code has been released under a gnu gpl2 and is available here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Get_source_and_compile and the main sl viewers here:
http://secondlife.com/developers/opensource/getit
Are there still grounds for not using second life or being associated with the sl community….
While the Second Life announcement is very interesting, Ange, it doesn’t come close to qualifying as “going open source” by my definitions. What they’ve done is made the source code for their client accessible. That’s great – it’s an important step forward – but they’re still maintaining a monopoly over their server code, as far as I understand. For SL to make me happy – as regards the discussion Charlie and I had – they’d need to open the grid server code as well and allow me to run my own grid server and either interconnect it with the SL servers, or allow you to move objects and avatars from SL onto my server.
The objection I raised in my discussion with Charlie was the fact that, right now, if you had a falling out with Linden, you’d have no other world to move to where your avatar and objects worked. While open sourcing the client is a good first step, I’m skeptical that Linden will move as quickly to open-source the servers, as that quickly provides some threats to Linden’s business model.
As for whether you’ll be seeing more of me in SL – perhaps, though I’m more interested right now in learning what’s good about SL and seeing how it might be replicated in a fully open environment like Croquet.
Ethan … this sounds like a good upcoming blog post.
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