Linden Lab open-sourced Second Life’s client on January 8th, 2007. In the 15 years since, open source contributions have led to countless new features and bug fixes that have markedly improved the life of our virtual world. Without open source, SL would not be as vibrant, enduring and successful as it is today.
As part of an effort to improve and modernize our tooling and better support the open source community, I’m happy to announce that Second Life’s source code is moving to GitHub, the world’s most popular version control hosting platform. You can find our open source repositories in their new home at github.com/secondlife.
As the de facto home of large open source projects such as CPython and the Linux kernel, GitHub likely needs no introduction to anyone who works with open source software. Its features and market position make it the best option for Second Life going forward.
It’s definitely true open source made Second Life a vibrant, enduring and successful niche virtual world, because the improvements were aimed at the existing user community at the expense of new users… but that’s another story for another time.
