While a lot of the open source key companies and organizations exist in SL such as Ubuntu, Red Hat, Oracle, Free Software Foundation, FLOSS, OSI.. etc there presence is merely an advertising, educational and informative one. The opportunity SL presents to software developers for collaborative and distributed open source software production is yet unexplored. The reason I choose to stress on OS companies is for their experience in decentralized software development. I was looking for some statistics regarding software developent in SL and I came across the following from the oreilly open source conference. 25% of time spent in SL is spent creating objects and scripts. With a 140,000 hours hours per day , and an average real life software developer hours of 2000 hours/year you get 17.5 user-years/day. That is the equivalent of a team of approximately 6500 content developers. which would cost US$650 million/year!
Much of the open source development model (See The cathedral and the Bazaar) can be readily moved to SL and VW. However I am very surprised at the lack of development tools and collaborative systems written for second life. The great number of developers available in SL can be directed into a mainstream SL or real life project if the tools are provided.
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