That is, if anyone can run their own Second Life simulation server, won't that mean that the supply of land will explode and prices will plummet? And even before that happens, the open sourcing of the client raises the possibility of alternate viewers that won't respect the restrictions that content creators place on whether their objects can be copied, modified or transferred to other users. Protecting property rights is important because some residents have learned how to make money selling their digital creations.

Others are worried that releasing the source code will make it easier for hackers to create rogue viewers indistinguishable from the official one. Such a tool would allow them to create robot avatars that pose as real users, undermining the online society, or to overload servers with denial-of-service attacks.

When the event begins. Cory Linden, a.k.a. chief technology officer Cory Ondrejka, explains that releasing the client software as open source was a surrender to the inevitable, since independent developers had already created a series of software libraries that duplicate functions of the official Second Life client. That software was created independently, without the use of Linden source code, through a process of reverse engineering (working backward from the known functionality of the official client to produce software that behaves similarly), Ondrejka says.

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