2 bits of bright flashy news for Open Source: Second Life and Burning Man yearn selflessly for a true creative commons… by risa
hmmm…
Part video game, part real online community, Second Life is also getting attention from real-world companies that are beginning to stake out their own turf in Second Life communities. One U.S. House member, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), last week even joined the Second Life community to brief a group of invitees on the top priorities of the new majority party in Congress.
“We feel we have a responsibility to improve and to grow Second Life as rapidly as possible,” Philip Rosedale, CEO and founder of Linden Lab, said in a statement. “We were the first virtual world to enable content creators to own the rights to the intellectual property they create. That sparked exponential growth in the richness of the Second Life environment. Now, we’re placing the viewer’s development into the hands of residents and developers as well.”
The source code will be available from Second Life’s Web site. The initial open-source efforts are expected to include bug fixes, hardware compatibility improvements and user interface changes, according to the company.
The company decided to move the viewer client to open source because Second Life users are very creative and the move will allow developers to add their own creativity, said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab. “We’ve said before that Second Life makes sense as a fully open-source project. It’s somewhere in the future.”
by todd r weiss
also, for more hmmmm…
John Law, an early member of the LLC that organized Burning Man who split off from the event in 1996, has sued co-founder and director Larry Harvey, as well as board member Michael Mikel and the LLC itself.
Law is claiming that the phrase “Burning Man” should be in the public domain, rather than a controlled trademark, and that Harvey, Mikel and the LLC, Black Rock City, LLC, have acted illegally in their control of the trademark.
In a 32-page filing (click for PDF), Law laid out his complaints.
Essentially, Law feels that Harvey and Black Rock City, LLC, are not acting in the best interest of the community that makes Burning Man possible.
“Burning Man is the sum of the efforts of the tens of thousands of people who have contributed to making Burning Man what it is,” Law wrote on the blog he has started to get the issues involved in the suit out in the open. “The name Burning Man and all attendant trademarks, logos and trade dress do not belong to Larry Harvey alone or to Black Rock City, LLC.”
For its part, the Burning Man organization was just finding out about the lawsuit and did not yet have any direct comment.
by daniel turdiman.
though these moves raise my eyebrows a bit, i do think and often argue that people and businesses will come at open source from countless different directions and motivations. open sourcing has never been purely generous- it works exactly because it can be beneficial for individuals and companies that do it and for the wider community who gets to partake of the code… or of the burning man.. as the case may be..
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