I still think that the right answer is for LL to take a more active role in the sponsorship of the libsecondlife project, say, by creating a foundation to hold the copyrights to the code and serve as a centerpoint for development, ala Apache or Jabber (and yes, those models have drawbacks…BUT they’ve also been very effective within their scope). But, in order to accomplish this, the existing leadership is going to have to cede some control…and if their motives are as you say, this is probably not bloody likely.

The right thing to do is to disassociate from this group and leave it. To this day, it fills up with W-Hat griefer alts and is a haven for irresponsible sandbox script kiddies. The Lindens should have pulled their own staff out of it, and should have done a lot more than they have to make it clear that while they are sanctioning the reverse-engineering of their platform, they aren’t sanctioning the use of the results of that work for griefing and harming other residents.

It’s just happened over and over again — God-stalking, the megaprims, CopyBot, and Campbot — all griefing and terrorizing people while libsl just laughs in the IRC channel.

And it is certainly not for me to criticise that position.

On the other hand, corporations in Second Life distribute goods not for the value of L$ sales but for publicity at this moment, so this would not make any difference to them. The telling point might come when someone starts to sell items on the Grid which actually provide services – say, tailored prims with scripts which enable downloads. If an exploit which attacked those became known, and the Laboratory immediately and decisively acted to crush any possibility of it, well, we would know where their allegiances lay.

One question it does beg is, will this perception on the part of Residents change over time as more of them enter the world, and particularly as more identifiably “corporate” goods (American Apparel clothes, Adidas shoes, Nissan Sentras, etc.) enter the world as well? That’s a question that can’t really be answered yet; perhaps in a year or so, we’ll know more. It also sort of reduces to the general question of what effect corporate influence will have on the community…which has been asked by many people in the SL community, and which is not a new question by any means; the members of Electric Minds were debating this topic back in 1997 when that community was acquired by Durand Communications.

For now, at least, the community is not falling apart at the seams, many of the merchants who closed in protest of the CopyBot have reopened, and even some people who had been up in arms at the original news now seem to agree it’s more of a tempest in a teapot. And, far from scaring anyone off, the rate of new signups has increased…

One thing that I have noticed, though, is that even the newest of new residents, once they understand that almost everything they see has been made by someone “real”, tends to agree that it is not reasonable to make individual copies. Some of this rests, I think, on the fact that everyone who makes anything in Second Life can be seen right there and then and talked to; they are not distant impersonal corporations in the main. As well as that, many new residents have ambitions to become creators themselves, and sympathise.

We need not appeal to artificial constraints such as “copyright” in my opinion, which is often connected in the Other Place with drastically unfair legal restrictions – simple concern for others who are identifiable as actual people is universal enough to result in those breaching it encountering most definite social pressure.