Second Life is a virtual world where users can pilot their avatars through scenes as varied as shopping districts, live concerts by real bands, BSDM dungeons, and feudal Japan.

People can (and do) buy real estate in Second Life with real money, and some respectable firms, like Dell, have set up showrooms for customizable hardware.  Users can create new objects, buildings, and avatars in the world with a proprietary scripting language.  On top of all that, the very concept is inspired by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash.

Some companies would be satisfied by creating something so geeky it couldn’t even pledge Tri-Lambda, but Linden Labs, publishers of Second Life, decided it needed something more.  Linden announced today that the Second Life client will be released under the GPL, the software equivalent of hippie hair and a Unix beard.  It also looks like they’ll be changing their scripting engine to use Mono, so I guess scripts can be written in a CIL language like C#.  Super geeky fun.

Linden Labs may have made this decision because they were afraid of Second Life becoming too mainstream, but it was probably a strategic move aiming to keep the steam going on Second Life’s press buzz and cut the knees out from an effort to reverse engineer the client’s protocol.  Second Life has been getting all kinds of good press recently, for no good reason.  It was even featured in the New York Time’s Escapes section a few months ago.  Naturally the popular press glosses over the stickier details, such as the development of in-world worms; woefully inadequate server power, resulting in a lot of lag and downtime; and a duplicating program that can copy items from other users, revealing the fragility of an economy of nontangible goods.

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