Broader View: New Media Consortium and Sun Microsystems to launch the Open Virtual Worlds Project

When I came across the announcement NMC Launches Open Virtual Worlds Project, I immediately wrote it up on Your2ndPlace.com - its been busy in Second Life today. But now that I've had some time to collect my wits and think through it a little more, I admit that I am quite happy to see this happening. Here's why.

Documents in Synthetic Worlds

One of the weaknesses of worlds such as Second Life is their inability to handle collaborative works with data. OpenSim, the community open source project that is beginning to rival Second Life, has HTML on a prim - but is HTML enough? We're really talking about a difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, as much as I hate those terms. I can haz AJAX?

Collaborative work requires collaborative access to manipulate data.

The image, taken from this movie of Project Wonderland, immediately brought Qwaq to mind - the use of Microsoft Office in a virtual world has already been done, but lets consider something else: this is Sun Microsystems. This is open source. This is different.

Even with Microsoft's latest spin of honoring the EU's demands by opening source code, Microsoft is really not doing that well with Open Source. It really is behind the ball, and that might even be one of the key reasons that they are sending soothing emails to Yahoo might just be part of their strategy to survive.

So, is this a big deal? Yes, it is. And its definitely something I will keep in mind for clients - certainly the educator demographic out there will want this sort of ability. In fact, if this takes off Linden Lab may feel a mild exodus of educators from Second Life. I say a mild exodus because, despite the hype, educators are not a majority in Second Life.

Open Source, Take Two

Linden Lab may have open sourced the Second Life client, but the dual licensing is less than clear - something I found out about when I tried to find out for a client (I am a Second Life consultant, though I may expand that to virtual world consultant). Linden Lab has been talking about open sourcing the server code for years, but has made no solid progress in that regard.

Educators and Companies Don't Really Need An Economy. They Need Data.

Despite lots of talk related to 'metanomics', most educational institutions and corporations do not need an inhouse economy. I am not 100% certain that these Project Darkstar and Project Wonderland do not have them - but do they need them? Likely, no. Lots of projects are actually the evolved equivalent of an intranet application. They are for internal use only. Even IBM's presence within Second Life is mainly for IBMers only, with PR coming from blogs and media.

And what about Sun Microsystem's presence in Second Life? What have they done aside from open sourcing Java within Second Life? Not much, really. Indeed, the most relevant business presence in Second Life belongs to Cisco Systems - and they're about to have a great event tomorrow (details to come, in time, I hope).

Now lets really consider something: What is the currency of an information economy? Information, of course.

Overall

This is simply great news, and I do hope that it works out. However, it is a shot across the bow for other synthetic world developers. How will this affect the synthetic worlds of the future? I do not know- but my gut reaction is that it is positive.

And the future does look just a little more open. Options, collaboration and evolution.