Farewell to Oz: Linden Lab's Open Source Director Retires, Leaving Position's Fate Unknown -- And Hole in Second Life Community's Heart

Emphasizing that his upcoming departure from Linden Lab "has nothing at all to do with the change in ownership of the Lab" (the long-running startup was recently sold to the Waterford Group holding company), the veteran technologist Scott Lawrence, known by tens of thousands of SL users by his avatar name, "Oz Linden", just posted a retirement notice to the Second Life user community:

I got to work on a product users really enjoy using and that makes a big difference in the lives of many of its users - for me there's no greater source of job satisfaction. Some time ago, I reached the point that I could afford to think about retiring but decided to stay to finish moving SL to its new cloud platform. I can't imagine a better last act in my working life than ensuring that Second Life has this better platform for its future growth. Now that project is done (well, except for a few loose ends), and it's time for me to move on to the next phase of my life. 

For roughly 11 years, as the company's Director of Open Source, Oz has hosted in-world meetings with the Second Life open source community, which created user-made versions of the Second Life viewer that quickly became much more popular than the company's own product. (A whole other topic in itself.) These meetings effectively made Oz one of the most prominent faces of Linden Lab to the community. (Ironic, given his avatar name -- instead of telling people to pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, this Oz was very much the man mostly in front of it.)

It's notable that Oz pinned his departure to the recently-completed migration of Second Life to the Amazon cloud. Also notable: As of this writing, no one at Linden Lab has been announced to fill Oz's large digital shoes. Or more key, whether his Director of Open Source position will continue after him. Until any updates on that front obtain, between now and February 27 is your last time to offer a farewell to Oz.

Pictured here: Oz in 2012, from "Second Life Usage Dominated By Third Party Viewers -- Linden Lab's Own Software Only Used By "Minority" Of SLers".

Comments

[Magnusbrody]

Not to sound cynical at all, and I certainly wish Oz a very happy retirement, but correct me if I'm wrong, wasn't Oz effectively put in charge of SL while the lab sansarad around, and yet he still managed to improve SL, despite the fact the lab were surely throwing money at what became a quickly sold off new project and Oz may have been told his budget for SL was probably a couple of rolls of scotch tape, an old shoebox and a 'can do' attitude? Far be it from me to suggest he has heard the thoughts of the new investors, thought bugger me if I'm going through that again, and retired before repeating the same fight, but...

[Mondy]

Then you clearly didn't read his post in it's entirety or failed to comprehend Oz's own emphasis (you saw he used italics to to point it out, right?) that the new ownership was a coincidence, he'd already planned retirement and stayed to help finish the cloud migration.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

Conspiracy theorists are the same everywhere. Crackpots even on the rare occasion that they get it right, which I certainly doubt this is one of those cases. Regardless, I wish Oz Linden a happy retirement and hope he doesn't become a stranger. Drop in every now and then, okay? SL isn't going away anytime soon.

[Magnusbrody]

It's highly objectionable to refer to me as a crackpot camilia simply for expressing my point of view. I work in a position where I discuss employee's reasons for retirement, and in fact it is rarely based solely on their wish to take life easier. Neither was I suggesting SL was going away anytime soon, I have heard that nonsense for my 14 years in SL and it's still here. I was however suggesting that another period of the lab favouring a new project (like they did with Sansara) could be one result of having new investors, and possibly contributory to someone who has contributed so much to SL deciding to move on. So camilia, wind your neck in and enough with the insult and assumption.