We’ll have a lot more to say about SecondLife in upcoming articles on this site. However, just released are new versions of realXtend’s Naali viewer and Taiga server, which are Open Source implementations of the SecondLife server and client software. We discuss in the book that the client-server protocol for SecondLife was reverse engineered well before Linden Labs published the source code for their client software. Now the protocol is available in source form, various efforts have been made to reimplement the server side and make more flexible client software. RealXtend is an advanced effort, and the platform is moving towards supporting various different networking protocols. Watch this space for our own experiments in this area; for a long time we were running our our OpenSim server, but that lapsed when the server machine got appropriated for a student’s experiment.