Behold the Sculpted Prim

Second Life gets an upgrade: sculpted prims.

Q: What is a sculpted prim?

A: A "sculpted prim" is a prim whose shape is determined by a texture - its "sculpt texture". Sculpted prims can create organic shapes that are not currently possible with Second Life's prim system.

Very cool. (Via C|net.)

Virtually Patent

Here's a fascinating question:

how would you feel as a Second Life resident if a real world company stepped into Second Life and started patenting things left right and centre that you'd already done without their knowledge? The real world companies already have processes and budgets for setting up and defending patents; but being new to Second Life they may not know about what people have made already.

The issue raised here is what should be patentable in Second Life? This is easy, actually: nothing. Everything in Second Life is code; in particular, all the interesting stuff is done using the SL scripting language. Since neither software nor algorithms can be patented (at least in rational parts of the world), this clearly means that nothing in SL can be patented.

And that's right. If you could patent things, then, as the post puts it, things would get crazy:

How would you feel if using a cylinder for a chair was patented? And then a box prim for a chair was patented, and so on. You'd be wading through patents before you even rezzed a prim.

And this is precisely the situation for software in those parts of the world that allow broad software patents. That is, programmers have to worry that unwittingly they are infringing on somebody's "patent" on that code, even if they are simply employing the basic building blocks of programming - the "cylinders".

In what almost amounts to a thought experiment, we see again the absurdity of allowing software - which is essentially just ideas and algorithms - to be patented. All it does is to impeded innovation. And to those who, in the absence of patents, worry about people stealing bits of their code, that's what copyright is for: it protects particular instantiations of ideas in code, not the ideas themselves, which remain freely available to all for further use and development.

It is no coincidence that the GNU GPL - essentially the constitution of free software - depends on copyright law to work. There is no contradiction between free software and copyright - quite the contrary; it is patents and free software that are intellectual matter and anti-matter.

Open Sourcing Second Life

Here's a subject close to my heart: opening up Second Life. And this is what the alpha geek behind it, Cory Ondrejka, had to say on the subject yesterday:

As we’ve talked about, the long term goals for Second Life are to make it a more open platform. Part of that process is learning how projects like libSL can be beneficial to all of Second Life. We should be thrilled that we’ve built an interesting enough set of technologies and communities that people want to tinker and explore. In the long run, this is why we’ve talked about wanting to be able to Open Source eventually. My hope is that in 2007 we’ll be able to get there.

Also of note:

HTML and Firefox . . . ah my two favorite topics of all time. We have an external contractor who has tons of experience working on it right now. Basically we’ve been trying to make sure that we can get Flash working correctly because so many of the interesting parts of the Web are moving to Flash-based players/plugins/etc. Getting the control inputs and updates to work correctly is a bear but they do seem to be making progress, which is very exciting. The order of operations will be to roll a full internal browser first, then supplement the parcel media types with URLs, and then move to full HTML on a prim. Note that HTML on a prim has several pieces, from being able to interpret straight HTML in order to build text, do layout, etc, all the way to having a face of a prim point at a web page. In terms of timeline, the next major Firefox roll out will be in Q1 – ie, more functionality in the existing pages that use it plus a floater that is a browser – followed by the parcel URL in Q2. HTML on a prim will be part of a larger rearchitecture of textures – we need to go to materials per face rather than texture per face – which several of the devs are itching to work on, but will realistically not start until Q2.

Firefox in Second Life: perfect.