Zero Linden on Cory’s departure: “no major change of strategy or direction”.
Yesterday we had the chance to meet Zero Linden during his office hours and of course one of the topics was that Cory is leaving Linden Lab. This is especially important for what it means to the Open Source and the Open Grid efforts of Linden Lab.
Asked about these concerns Zero stated that development is indeed feeling the impact of the departure of CTO Cory Ondrejka. On the other hand the main project leaders spend the day before the office hour offsite to talk about goals and project planning and there seems not to be a big change in what’s happening. There was no decision on any major change of strategy or direction within that group.
He was also quite sure that it will not cause a big upset.
Zero further stated that it’s important to understand how Linden Lab works internally. They don’t have a traditional hierarchy which means that the direction they go is not decided solely by the CTO but by many people. This is also true for the Open Source efforts of Linden Lab. It is a big group of people inside Linden Lab who had that idea and are equally passionate about it and he further stressed that “[Linden Lab's] commitment to open source is continuing“.
I continued to ask if it is really clear to the company as a whole what opening up the grid means, like that it enables people to just let Linden Lab be Linden Lab and just do their own grid without any means of interconnection. I asked this because I got the impression at some office hour that not everybody seems to be so aware of that and maybe questioning that idea a little.
He said though that “There is no question that we have to enable other people running parts of the grid” and added that even right now nobody can stop anybody from doing your own grid already (if you think about it, it in fact is the only thing you can do right now, as efforts like deepgrid and others show).
So nothing really should change but with knowing this one might wonder what these differences between Philip and Cory might have been. It might be about the fact that Second Life was not always that stable in the past but I doubt that Cory would have thought that this is ok. In fact there are many projects like Havok 4 and Open Source just two of them trying to address these problems. It might also simply have been something personal. I guess we will never really know for sure and probably it’s also not that important. Interesting though might be who’s following Cory as CTO.
Zero Linden, in real life Mark Lentczner, is Engineering Director at Linden Lab and the head of Linden Lab’s effort to open up the grid and define it in an open and standardized protocol.
Technorati Tags: secondlife, lindenlab, zero linden, cto, cory, news
December 15th, 2007 at 7:20 pm
Tao, since you have the time to hang out at Linden Office Hours every day and report on them, and style yourself as a journalist, I wish you would ask tougher questions.
My God, you cannot take anything that Zero is saying at face value. Number one, he will spin it to suit himself, depending on where he personally fell down on the issue over which Philip and Cory disputed.
He is extremist in his zeal for open source, and we don’t know if in fact either Cory or Philip or both disagreed with Zero, or aren’t the big backers of Zero that he imagines — we just have no way of knowing.
The idea that it is “important that we understand how Linden Lab works” is utter fiction. We’ve heard this mantra. We’ve seen it in action — disconnection and over-confident people going off in different directions given free reign for their heads without adult supervision.
But…if this was quite the anarchy they claim, then Cory Linden, who did not wish to leave LL but was asked to leave, would still just be “doing his own thing”. There’d be no boss who would come along and say: “You’re fired.” Their mantra about distributed decision-making is completely repudiated the minute you have this sort of situation, where one person is forced to leave. And that’s because distributed decision-making is essentially a Big Lie: it feigns freedom and democracy, and the undermining of authority that suppresses initiative and creativity, but it replaces it subtly by something far more insidious: pretend freedom, where some people still do really get to rule — such as to boot Cory, for example.
I’m also not at all persuaded that this method of work produces results.
To understand better what this is all about, there are some basic questions that all journalists need to ask.
1. What was Cory Linden working on in the last 6 months before his departure? He didn’t give town halls since December 2006 or blog since May 2007, so what did he do besides go to conferences, such as the one in Dubrovnik?
2. Why was Cory Linden moved to CTO and down from a VP position?
3. What is the relationship between Joe Miller (VP of Platform and Technology) and Cory Ondreijka (CTO)?
4. Philip says in the BBC interview that the two didn’t disagree about the company’s future; yet in his departure email Cory says that they did. Which is it?
5. What are some likely sub-issues underneath the overall goal of open sourcing about which reasonable engineering minds could disagree? I would suggest they would include issues like: how to protect copyright and IP; how to assess link-up costs and methods and trust verification; whether to initiative OS by licensing only some trusted parties to use the software; whether to create a parallel grid upon which a brand-new bug-free worldwide server-distributed SL 2.0 will be launched, and who will have access to it and what costs will be involved in porting the rank and file users to this new grid; what is SL’s business model if they don’t sell land, and only sell avatar account names or grid hook-ups.
6. I understand Cory was not at any of the VW interoperability meetings of recent months. Why?