Linden Department of Public Works recruits and pays ‘real’ dollars

"Linden Lab will be paying up to 40 Second Life residents US$10/hr to create content as part of its “Linden Department of Public Works (LDPW)” initiative, so Reuters reports. As reported in a previous post on MixedRealities, Linden Lab wants to improve Second Life mainland. Mainland offers cheaper land, compared to islands where covenants impose zoning rules. The disadvantage of mainland is that the lack of zoning rules causes incoherent styles, conflicts between neighbors and very disputable practices, like pressing residents to pay money to get ugly advertisements removed. Linden Lab announced measures against such advertisement practices (read Second Life tackles AdFarms and the End of Laissez Faire). On the positive side, the Lindens want to build infrastructure making mainland a more interesting place.
Several aspects of the Reuters’ story are worth noting:
* Linden will pay its workers in American dollars and not Linden dollars.
* Reuters says that Second Life Grid is Linden Lab’s principal source of revenue. Rival grids based on OpenSim technology have been rapidly expanding and undercutting Linden’s hold on the Second Life community, so the wire service explains.
* The Lindens are aware of the very real possibility that the prices of land around the projects might go up.
Questions that I do have: how rapid exactly is that expansion of rival grids? In the previous Reuters’ post about OpenSim Technology it was said that especially people who were pushed out of Second Life, because of unlicensed banking for instance, were attracted to that project. Furthermore it was said that the technology was as yet unproven. Of course, maybe lots of people are attracted to risky banking practices in totally unregulated environments, but I somehow doubt it. In my opinion Linden Lab takes a long term perspective here (whatever that may mean in virtual worlds land). Places like There.com seem to better organised, but on the other hand they also feel too much controlled and too commercial for Second Life residents such as myself. Maybe Linden Lab tries to find some middle way, offering a better experience but maintaining the liberty which so many of us appreciate in Second Life. Making that liberty even more real would be another way for Linden Lab to differentiate Second Life from other worlds. Granting avatar rights by making the Terms of Service more reasonable would be a good thing - more specifically by abolishing the possibility to cancel accounts for no reason at all and by clarifying the procedures to ban residents permanently." By Roland Legrand