Each year, Linden Labs, the folks behind online virtual world Second Life hold the Linden Lab Innovation Awards, dubbed the Hippos. This year Linden recognized the achievements and contributions of seven members of its open source community.

Linden Lab, creator of the online virtual space Second Life, recognized the accomplishments of outstanding individuals in its open source community this week at its Linden Lab Innovation Awards. Seven winners were announced at a "mixed reality" ceremony held both at a convention center in Florida and simultaneously within the Second Life system.

A year has passed since Linden Lab, maker of the popular 3-D virtual world Second Life, released the source code to its Second Life viewer under the GNU GPL. In that time, a viable community of developers has grown up around the SL code, and the company is pleased enough with the success that it has branched out further into open source and open standards.

Linden Labs, whose Second Life is so cool yet so lacking in profits it’s been lampooned in an IBM ad, sent out an e-mail alert this week boasting that open source is giving the company, well, a second life.

"In recent weeks, a couple New World Notes posts inspired an interesting e-mail conversation with a very interesting figure: Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, and the original author of the General Public License, which the Second Life viewer code (like much software) is licensed under..."

This eye-catching, remarkably vivid demo video shows off a Linux SL viewer built by renowned coder Opensource Obscure, using the "render-pipeline" from Linden Lab's code branch. It was so impressive, I got in touch with Obscure, for more details.

Catharina Bethlehem wrote to tell me about her work on the Ubuntu community in Second Life. As you might expect, the free and open source meme is very much alive and well in SL. There is now a group looking to setup an island devoted to FLOSS that brings together members of the whole free software community

If you ever plan on writing an open source program, then you must make an important decision, selecting a program license. Generally for open source programs, there are two main licenses that most developers take into consideration. These licenses are the Gnu General Public License, and the BSD license.

When I started using Linux I was totally sold to the concept of Open Source. I still am, but my view changed. The first code I released under an Open Source license was GPL licensed and I continued to do so for some time. The last code under the GPL license I actively developed was Zine until a few days before the release when I relicensed it under the modified BSD license.