Second Life CTO Cory Ondrejka leaves the company

Posted by Cory Doctorow, December 12, 2007 12:52 AM | permalink

Wagner James Au sez, "Massive news for Second Life and the metaverse industry in general: citing irreconcilable differences in the technical development of SL, Chief Technical Officer Cory Ondrejka has just left the company after being there since 2000. He was a strong force behind the open sourcing of the viewer code, and was leading the effort to open source the servers that comprise the world's fabric. As you can see by his Flying Spaghetti Monster avatar, he also had an anarchic wit that did a lot to shape the zany culture of the world." Link (Thanks, James!)

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Discussion

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#1 posted by Crash! Bang!

, December 12, 2007 5:10 AM

nerds!

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#2 posted by CVR , December 12, 2007 5:44 AM

I guess he also goes by (went by?) "Cory Linden". That's how he's named in the article linked to. The Lindenlab company bio page does list him as Cory Ondrejka, so I'm assuming that's his legal name. Anyway, I'd never heard of him so it was confusing to me.

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#3 posted by stpete420 , December 12, 2007 7:30 AM

NERDS!

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#4 posted by Santa's Knee , December 12, 2007 8:05 AM

I guess he's off to reconnect with his 1st life...

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#5 posted by the Other michael

, December 12, 2007 8:19 AM

#1, #3 - nerds, yes. But that should be obvious because you're reading BoingBoing.

It's a tautology. But not reversible. Ie, all readers of BoingBoing are nerds, but not all nerds are readers of BoingBoing.

And, with that tar-brush, I dub thee....

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#6 posted by abb3w , December 12, 2007 8:38 AM

Hiro Protagonist has left the building....

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#7 posted by W. James Au

, December 12, 2007 9:14 AM

"I guess he also goes by (went by?) 'Cory Linden'"

All Linden Lab staffers' official avatars have Linden as a surname, so in SL, Cory Ondrejka is Cory Linden, Philip Rosedale is Philip Linden, etc.

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#8 posted by Andrew M. , December 12, 2007 1:01 PM

More info on this here:

http://www.massively.com/2007/12/11/was-cory-linden-fired-or-did-he-quit/

From the statements made, it sounds like Cory got fired. There could be any number of reasons for this -- SL's changing, and not necessarily for the better.

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#9 posted by Nato Welch

, December 12, 2007 2:02 PM

This is worrisome; a Free Software license for the server code is the single most important thing for me right now.

But, after digging, I did find this bit on Nov 21st by Rosedale:

"Second, we need to keep opening SL up, as we’ve started talking about lately. This means formats, source code, partners, and more. We are working on turning our clear vision on this into more detailed plans. Virtual worlds, in their broadest form, will be more pervasive that the web, and that means that their systems will need to be open: extended and operated by many people and companies, not just us."

I realize talk is cheap, but that's not the kind of thing that you hear from CEOs with purely proprietary business strategies, or even from web 2.0 companies interested in openness from the sole perspective of profiting from the work of users.

That said, time will tell. I'm STILL waiting to be able to make my own backups of the Second Life creations I allegedly hold the copyrights to. What good is a copyright if I can't actually make a copy?

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#10 posted by js7a , December 13, 2007 10:28 PM

Nato: You can actually make pretty good backups with libsecondlife. Except for animations, which can't be downloaded once they are uploaded, you can copy any link set of prims, textures, sounds, scripts, notecards, clothing, and landmarks that you have full perms to. Prim inventories are a little tricky, but again, you can copy everything but animations.