OpenSim Server Open-Sourcing & LibSL

by "Fleet Goldberg"

I visited the Open Source section of SL's 4th birthday celebration sim today and had the opportunity to speak in detail with Baba Yamamoto, who is the chief of the open-source server project LibSecondLife and is also involved in the unofficial open-source SL project OpenSim. To recap things as they currently stand:: LibSecondLife's reverse-engineered open source server code is Linden Lab-approved. The use of that code to create an actual sim running ouside of Linden Lab servers is a bit more of a grey area as far as possible violation of the Terms of Service agreement goes.

Here's what Baba had to say

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Fleet: Hi Baba! I was wondering what the current 'legal' status of OpenSim is. I know libsecondlife is Linden-approved, but some people believe that using OpenSim would get your SL account canned. I just wanted to find out the facts
Baba Yamamoto: I was told by Linden Lab they they were not worried about OpenSim. Eventually they will be releasing their own server code anyway. That's the word. Hopefully by the end of the
year.
Fleet: Cool. Yeah, I wish they would release some kind of official-word document on OpenSim, because I don't want to encourage the professional organizations I work with to use OpenSim if it was going to damage their relationships with Linden Lab.
Baba Yamamoto: It might be coming soon. I'm going to be talking to Linden Lab about all of this in the coming months.
Fleet: So yes, official verification of OpenSim's approval (preferably in an official blog post) would be awesome if you could encourage LL to do that
Baba Yamamoto: Well OpenSim needs a lot of work to be comparable to SL now, but the more people who want to use it the more likely it is to receive the attention it needs.
Fleet: I haven't tried the latest build of OpenSim yet. I played with the earlier versions, which were somewhat difficult to set up to say the least. I think I heard that it's easier to compile now, isn't it?
Baba Yamamoto: There is a branch that is about to hit the main trunk that fixes a lot of bugs. It's still in testing though. Lots of changes coming ... its got a lot of features so it will be a big
improvement when it is ready
Fleet: I'll pass this info on to the people I talk to about open-source and hopefully it'll give them some encouragement to check the system about. Thanks for all your help!
Baba Yamamoto: I hope to see the new code in beta within a few weeks