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?