Good news, everybody! First of all there was an application for the trademark for the word „Grid“ from Linden Lab (as massively reported) which according to Zero Linden (Mark Lentczner) now was abandoned. Reasons for this was apparently that the term was seen as too generic and therefore hard to be defened.
Now at least a little move in that whole TM debate although the biggest issues with Linden Lab’s TM policy still remains.
The other good news is that the protocol which aims to make Second Life like grids interoperable gets a better name. Formerly known as SLGOGP (Second Life Grid Open Grid Protocol) Linden Lab also dropped the „SLG“ part on that („Second Life Grid“ is actually a registered trademark of Linden Lab and hence that complicated name) leaving it to „Open Grid Protocol“ (OGP).
This finally is a good name for telling people about as it should make clear what it is about (at least if you have a little understanding of Second Life or virtual worlds).
And dropping the SLG part indeed makes sense in order to spread adoption. First of all volunteers are more likely to work on a project which is not owned by a company and moreover other virtual worlds developers eventually also might be more willing to look at such an open protocol without „SL“ inside. What’s missing now of course is a foundation, the whole thing could be similar to what Google did with OpenSocial: Starting as a company project (with partners and Google related formats) moving to an open project owned by a foundation and with more open formats used.
If you are interested to learn more about the protocol and the Architecture Working Group (AWG) which is working on it, check it out here.