What a wonderful present to get in this otherwise moist and boring january! The company behind SecondLife (one of my favorite passtimes) has open-sourced the code for the SecondLife client. This is a really important step in my opinion.
SecondLife has already for some time been one of the most advanced and cool virtual worlds, but for some time I had been fearing it's doom due to the proprietary software and protocol it used.
Now, when it's been open-sourced I can't wait to see what will come from all my fellow geeks.
One obvious project I have been considering for some time is to try to harvest some of the information within SecondLife and try to index / cluster it with a decent search tool (who knows, perhaps I'll even give MondoSearch a try here) - cause the search functionality within second-life has always left me wanting more (although the current one is relatively usable, it's merely an advanced database lookup, nothing like a free-text search engine which could be ideal to navigate this entire world of structured and unstructed information). So far I havn't been able to identify if the code-parts that are now open-source will allow me to access all the information - but as soon as I have time I'll definetly dig into that. This could very well be a new business area for my little bizz, "Pear Computers".
I'm convinced this is a major step in SecondLife's attempt to take over mine (and others) first lifes :-)
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