Rosedale: "Our mission is to get this thing as big as we can, as fast as we can!"

Philip Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, the company behind Second Life, just spoke to a packed out crowd at the Life 2.0 convention inworld (Metaversed coverage here). He spoke passionately about the future of the 3D platform, saying that it needed to become "as ubiquitous a platform as the web is to us today", "something everbody has to use in their daily lives". To acheive the kind of ubiquity Rosedale envisions, the company know that they must open up every piece of software, every line of code, "right down to the filesystem formats".

When asked to expand upon his vision of how the open sourcing of the server and other code, and decentralizing of Linden as government would play out, he said he saw clusters of servers and "agent services" being owned by companies or individuals and adding ot the grid as regular web servers do today. When asked where Linden as a for profit company would stand in this grand scheme, he said he saw them playing a central role with possibly a few other companies in inventory management and other roles necessary for the grid to function. Without some trusted organizatins lookng after some pieces of the puzzle, it just wouldn't work.

So when are Google going to buy Linden? I asked this rather jokingly, but Rosedale was claerly sick of hearing it, reiterating the argument that they are a profitable company, and simply dont need a large companies finance to survive, and the likely direction for them was simply growth, massive growth.

Though he acknowledged that rapid progress, expansion and changes to the system often caused problems for the developers of Second Life, Rosedale made no apology for the companies "mission to get this thing as big as we can, as fast as we can" saying that every active member of Second Life, brought the platform closer to where it needed to be in order to grow in the long term.

I can see a whole bunch of people being mighty pissed off at that statement, but personally I thought it showed balls, and demonstrated a real passion worthy worthy of a little respect alongside a healthy pinch of salt...