Will Linden Lab's Customers Get to Improve Upon Linden Lab's Discarded Projects?

The Rod Humble/Will Wright era of Second Life, as I reported a couple weeks ago, citing insiders, involves working on projects for Second Life and for spinoff products that they may never reach production. Linden's CEO confirmed this in a Gamasutra interview last week:

"What happens is we'll code up a fast prototype or just have an idea, kick it around, and then quickly see if we can stand it up and prove it out," he explains. "Then we decide whether to throw it away or keep going on it." So far this year he says he's thrown away four ideas and kept two that his team is continuing to develop. [emph. mine]

Which raises an obvious question: Will Second Life's many creators get to play with these discarded projects, tweaking and expanding on their code and assets to create projects of their own? I put the question to Linden Lab's Peter Gray like this: "Have you guys considered letting users play with some or all of these blue water projects that are discarded, to see what the community comes up with?"

And Mr. Gray answered thus: "We wouldn't absolutely rule it out, but it would depend a lot on the project and our reasons for not pursuing it further."

I hope that is the case. Second Life's development community has always improved upon Linden Lab's efforts, especially after the viewer code was open sourced. In this specific instance, my hope is Rod Humble follows the example of original SL founders Philip Rosedale and Cory Ondrejka -- and less his former employer, Electronic Arts, which has a less stellar record of openly sharing content with its customers.

Macro via wigflip.com/roflbot

Comments

[bongo]

Ownership of IP for us. Lord of the Flies for you.

[Tateru Nino]

Certainly many of the projects - if they involve anything server-side would be useless to the community. All you'd get would be an idea and no useful code - and that idea would only be usable for opensim.

[Hamlet Au]

Tateru, I don't understand your negativity with this comment and most of the others you make on NWN. I've talked with some Lindens about these projects (server side and otherwise) and my sense is some of them *would* be valuable for SLers to play with. But in any case, aren't you even a little curious what they might be?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

The problem that Tateru refers to is a technical one Hamlet - the user community doesn't have access to the entire SL server and infrastructure code.

[foneco zuzu]

And here we can see the true problem, of lack of communication and misunderstandings that happen all days on Sl!
Between casual users as LL staff and Hamlet, and hard core ones, that spent at least 3h daily in world!
And those hard core ones, are the ones that the Lab must take care on these times, cause they are the ones that pay the bills, not the casual user that logs in, logs out and moves!

[Hamlet Au]

"the user community doesn't have access to the entire SL server and infrastructure code"

And that doesn't describe many of the blue ocean projects the Lindens are working on, as I understand them. Click the blue water link to get a better hint of what Humble's referring to.

[Ezra]

I'm not sure about users tinkering with any usable code after its already been declared a dead experiment by Linden Lab, but I do think it'd be cool if Linden Lab had a formal process for allowing us to volunteer and participate in the thumbs up or thumbs down of some of those new ideas.

Right now, we do get to see new things on the beta server releases, the Project viewers, and I think there's always been a very private invite-only process that's allowed select SL users to experience things like mesh even before the initial SLCC announcement, but it'd be better if there was something formal and more inclusive like the old Google Labs "join this experiment" button before they've decided to shut it down recently.

Wave came out of Google Labs, but so did Gmail. Right now, Linden Lab is the sole decider of what'd be an synonymous Wave or Gmail like success with us. Which is fine, they have to know their customers without customer input, but we could definitely help if somehow involved. Even if we didn't get to experience the tested features, we could still do something like vote on 'em given a text description.

So some kind of involvement would be nice. Anything from input to hands on experience.

[Ezra]

Rod says "we'll code up a fast prototype". It doesn't matter what the prototype actually is or what business management methodology backed it, things are either coded server-side or client-side. Most often times the smallest of new features is dependent upon code running both sides. All Tateru pointed out was that releasing code to us to tinker with would most likely be pointless. There's no Snowstorm for the Second Life servers, nor open source repository to contribute to anyway.

So...we just can't contribute to projects already discarded. There's nothing negative about that its just the plain truth. It would be nice if we were involved in deciding if a project was discarded in the first place or not though.

[Nexii Malthus]

It's true that there are no such options. That doesn't mean we should discourage such thought but publically welcome and foster it.

The more we can open LL up the better.

[shockwave yareach]

for these Blue Water projects to fly, the server code would have to be opened up. And the instant that happens, LL will be counting the days until the griefer incident that utterly destroys all of SL. Imagine someone connecting their own server to SL's grid and being able to see every script in every object that they bring in -- that's easy to do if the server is in your own garage.

If the projects were shelved, then they were shelved. Letting us see the code makes little sense if we can't tinker and run it on something. And giving us something to run it on makes little sense when such a capability leads to one of 2 things. People who create their own islands in their own servers and don't pay LL anything anymore, and people who attack the grid and potentially destroy SL entirely.

[Hamlet Au]

"things are either coded server-side or client-side"

This mistakenly assumes that these are the only two options, and that these projects are only related to the SL client/server.

"So...we just can't contribute to projects already discarded. There's nothing negative about that its just the plain truth."

This states a "plain truth" about projects which are unknown even to many people in Linden Lab itself.

Folks, I've talked with some insiders involved in or more informed than me about these projects, and when I raised the possibility of sharing some of them with SLers, it was considered feasible at least in some cases. (As Peter Gray's official statement also suggests.) So again, rejecting the possibility out of hand isn't very accurate to what we know, and more to the point, pretty ahistorical to how SL has evolved. Time and again the creative community has spun off Linden projects in ways Linden never imagined.

[Simeon Beresford]

no one has rejected the idea out of hand Hamlet, Indeed Kirsten's exploitation of abandoned LL projects has been a major influence on the success of TPVs. they have merely pointed out that only a small subset of LL labs projects are capable of being exploited.

[Hitomi Tiponi]

@Hamlet - yes there will be some viewer-side (or mostly such) projects that it would be interesting to work on - I was just trying to explain what I believe Tateru meant by her comment.

I do believe that most of the more interesting possibilities may require a fair bit of server-side input.