Absolutely not, Josh. The Opensim regions were a casualty of a much larger strike against HyperVM-equipped servers. I'd hoped I'd made that quite clear. More than 100,000 servers in the UK alone were wiped (paragraph 3).

As for "reverse engineering" - that is indeed the term that I believe is correct. That is, it was created to be compatible with system, but contains no code from Second Life. That's reverse engineering.

Reverse engineering implies the original code was somehow exploited or broken apart into tiny pieces, analyzed and then OpenSim was created copying functionality. Given concerns with Second Life's terms of service, such phrasing has potentially nasty connotations.

OpenSim wasn't created to be compatible with Second Life. There's some compatibility, obviously, given that it shares the same viewer, but the goal of OpenSim is not to be the open-sourced SL or copy/duplicate it. Certainly some grid operators have acted otherwise, exploiting frustrations in the SL userbase with LL's policy decisions to further their own enterprises, but they largely have nothing to do with the development of OpenSim and certainly don't speak for it.

This issue gets confused a lot and only muddies the truth.

Ah, I see the confusion. Reverse engineering is a very broad term with its own taxonomy, it is true. The usage here is in the traditional sense, that is "the process of analyzing a subject system to create representations of the system at a higher level of abstraction." (Chikofsky, E.J.; J.H. Cross II)

I doubt anyone would think that actual disassembly or exploitation was involved. The very notion seems unnecessary and silly.