Second Life is More Than the Sims

Interesting piece from Prokofy Neva and the pic is a map of sl real estate; "I was thinking today about all this excitement and even hysteria about the new rendition of CopyBot and the projects like OpenSim and Central Grid. There's a kind of myth going around that these new "autonomous zones" will be free to have unregulated banking, gambling, ageplay, etc. as if the problem with Second Life is that the Lindens are too strict. Of course they won't be able to do that if they reach any significant size. If they hope to be truly international and open, they will have to cross the same bridges that Linden Lab already crossed. It's not like they are going to get exceptions just because they can proclaim "non-walled-garden status". This is silly, and entitlement-happy, and self-indulgent. But let's say these worlds being reverse engineered or being mounted on other game engines or whatever they do are able to replicate Second Life, that is, that rolling brown and green land with the waving trees, the sims connecting to each other you can walk up and down on, the ability to make things and put them in inventory and exchange them -- all that virtual world stuff. Let's say this is open-sourced, and you can host it yourself, and then the "business model" becomes whatever you can do with it, just like, say, your use of Microsoft Word, if you took a free copy of it, would depend on what you wrote on the page and how you could sell your writings. What, then, is back of Second Life, that is not just the sims? Isn't Second Life more than the sims?"http://secondthoughts.typepad.com/second_thoughts/2008/03/second-life-is.html