infocyde

I'd hate to see Conan die, and this isn't the final blow, and actually could result in good changes, it doesn't look too promising.

There is only one problem with this analogy. In most corporate environments you can't sit at your work computer and surf adult content. Currently Second Life has controls built in so that land owners can keep people out of areas. There are currently no controls in place so that a group can decide that all avatars belonging to that group can't go into certain areas. The controls are entirely on the land owners. What corporations want in need in SL is for the ability to control where avatars belonging to that corporation can go. HR departments just can't take the risk in corporate America of having one a corporate employee sue the company in a sexual harassment suit because that employee was offended when they looked over into the next cube and saw employee x's furry avatar engaged in "age play" or something like that. Linden and the educators list as a whole just doesn't get this. And it is a show stopper, a barrier to entry, for a lot of corporation who would otherwise love to use SL for "serious" purposes like corporate training. You might ask what about companies like IBM and Sun in SL? They don't seem to be worried about it. I would argue that if you asked them, they would say they are worried about it, but they have just decided to move forward anyway. Other companies have, for what I see as good reason, decided to hold off. The easy response from Linden and other SL groupies is just to say your loss. No, it will be Linden's loss. A competitor will build to meet the needs of corporate America, and SL will become marginalized. My company is already in preliminary discussions about big $$$ to do just that. This is to bad because I love SL.

There is an interesting post on secondcampus.blogspot.com about CopyBot. It is an interview with one of the creators of libsecondlife and his take on the whole deal.