Blog #5 - How my experiences in Second Life relate to Free Software and Hacking

After following my group leader to the Linux Initiation center, which was my group’s assigned task for our classes’ second Second Life (2L) session, I was able to find various note cards that very interestingly connect the inner workings of the 2L world with Free Software and the Open Source movement. According to just some of the information I gathered, I discovered that all of 2L’s servers run on the Linux operating system itself, and that the web server that provides access to the 2L website itself is run on the free, open source web server Apache. There is also an Open Source project called “libsecondlife,” which produces source code to build new clients in 2L, based on the code provided by Linden Labs as well patches submitted by the Open Source community. There are also many objects, textures, scripts, animations and body items and such that are distributed under an Open Source license that are being organized and separated from proprietary items in the 2L world by the SLForge (www.slforge.org) project. The name of the latter is a pun on the popular open source code providing website SourceForge.net (www.sourceforge.net).

So, how do all of these open source technologies relate to Free Software? It is of course because the open source movement, which 2L clearly supports and of which Linux is also a signature operating system, is mostly free software. The Free Software and Open Source movements, as described in the readings, consist of the movements headed up by preeminent hackers like Richard Stallman who believe in giving people the freedom to copy, study, modify, and even redistribute for sale or free of price (the free software movement pertains to the liberties given to the user, not to the issue of free price, and should not be confused with freeware or shareware software. Stallman says that the free in free software should be thought of as “free as in free speech, not free beer.”). Any software that does not give the user these freedoms is considered proprietary software due to the restrictive nature of the software’s usability. The Linux Initiation Center in 2L had various note cards describing the merits of Free Software and Linux, as compared to proprietary software like Windows.

Furthermore, the beach houses that we were able to explore beyond the Linux center in my group seemed to be symbolic of the locations where modern-day hackers may gather to discuss “the hacker ethic” and issues and problems facing the software industry today. According to the article “How Digital Technology found Utopian Ideology,” cyber culture and cyberspace were already showing the promise of being able to let groups of people meet online to discuss common issues in places like virtual communities (2L, MMORPGs like EverQuest, WoW, FF XI, etc.), message boards and chat rooms back in the mid-80s, so why not let people gather and meet today in a place like 2L at a nicely-built beach house where you can discuss the future of software while lying on a virtual beach? Sounds like fun…