Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

A nice recent example of the benefits of open-sourcing software is Second Life, the well-known online virtual world. The Second Life client was released under the terms of the GNU GPL (version 2) roughly two weeks ago.

Since then a lot of community activity has been observed:

• A Solaris x64 port.
• A PowerPC port.
• A Mandriva package.
• A Debian package is in the works.
• Initial build notes for Ubuntu are available.
• OpenSL, an independant project not affiliated with Linden Labs, has been formed (I'm not sure what their exact goals are, though).
• Felix von Leitner (fefe) has done a cursory code audit and identified several potential security issues, which have also been reported on the Second Life development mailing list (I don't know whether they have already been fixed).
• Susan Wu mentions lots of other potential benefits of open-sourcing the client.

Most of these things (and others I might have forgotten) would certainly not have happened with the closed-source client anytime soon...

Is this just me or do we see a highly increased rate of (important and interesting) stuff being released (or announced to be released soon) under the terms of the GPL lately?

A few examples:

• VirtualBox — a VMware-like virtualisation solution
• Second Life — the client for now, but the server software might follow
• Fortress — Sun's Fortran replacement
• OpenSolaris — scheduled to be released under the GPLv3
• Java — this might have a huge impact...
• Sun UltraSPARC T1 — a complete, modern CPU

This is a great trend and good news for all of us. A special thanks to Sun for releasing more and more stuff under free licenses!