I have this niggling dislike of how SL is setup - even though you “can do anything you want”, I keep feeling incredibly restricted by Linden Labs. SL is great for spurring interesting thoughts. I suppose I keep thinking that Linden Labs are like a dictator in charge of “their” country. Since they write their own laws, they are rulers supreme, with nobody to answer to. They are the courts, congress, the president and god all rolled into one - what is their motivation to provide a moral, fair, just and fun world for us plebs? And I have a feeling that they are spending more resources on their PR machine than they do on their actual product - they’re interested in becoming popular with non-users (like that penguin book publishing in SL gumpf). It’d be like having John Howard making decisions for Australia based on his popularity with everyone except Australians. Yech.

I strongly believe that the big SL-ish boom will begin when an open source, distributed system of a 3D world is created. When Tim Berners Lee pioneered the world wide web, his was one among many, and one of the main reasons his took off was because it used open standards… and most importantly, it was free. When we get a free, distributed (ie no centralised servers) 3D world, that’s when I think it’ll really take off.