Yesterday's rolling restart of Second Life knocked everyone off the grid for awhile. In the ensuing chaos we were still able to pull off our Metanomics event, but all was not well. A major function (that luckily we didn't happen to be using) had just been crippled.
The technical sticking point lies in a function called llSetLinkPrimitiveParameters() which, when used right, can move an avatar into an appropriate position. It's used in hundreds (possibly thousands) of virtual goods in Second Life for that purpose, from furniture to games to vehicles. After the rolling restart, however, this function no longer moves avatars. This was done on purpose, as the effect on avatars was seen as a bug, and and it was done without notice. Entire product lines are now completely useless, and residents have filed this "fix" as a bug on the official issue tracker in the hopes that Linden Lab will turn back the clock.
Soon after this, the grid crashed and 1200 regions were inaccessible. It all seems to be running at the moment, with the only hint about the cause being "related to infrastructure problems affecting hosts on a particular part of our network."
Grid stability was acknowledged by Philip Rosedale as a critical issue for Second Life, and promises were made to improve things. Having tools that work as expected are important to all industries, and as more companies find practical uses for virtual worlds people will demand guarantees of uptime. It's not unreasonable to speculate that there could be legal ramifications for for Linden Lab when random un-announced system tweaks and outages rock the grid in the future.
I think that not only "random un-announced system tweak and outages" will be a problem, but random un-announced changes to the TOS will also lead to a "rocking of the grid" in the very near future.
A couple months ago, there was talk of "the taxman coming to SL", suddenly (overnight, last week), EU customers see an 18 to 25% increase in fees. The next step is obvious. You can bet that the US won't be far behind.
These system outages will look small, compared to what's coming.
I've wondered the same thing about taxes in the U.S. I think it's coming and I dread it. SL is becoming more and more like first life.
"It's not unreasonable to speculate that there could be legal ramifications for for Linden Lab when random un-announced system tweaks and outages rock the grid in the future"
hmmm...you might want to check the LL SLA first...oh, wait...there isn't one;-)