It seems that Cory Linden the technical chief at Linden Lab has left or had to leave the company. Hamlet Au has a pretty good
roundup of the news which originally was published
bit by bit via
massively.com. Also Prokofy Neva's
thoughts about the event are worth reading, because (unlike myself) Proky has met and interacted with Cory and Philip in the past. Last but not least, Daniel Terdiman of c|net
sums up the facts in a fairly compact way.
I met Cory once online at the Open Source Awards where he spoke, but besides the Spaghetti Monster avatar I don't remember anything about what he said. I don't even remember why I don't remember, it was either because it appeared to be the usual blurp said on such occasions or because voice transmission (it was an in-world voice event) made it hard to listen to. Probably it was both.
Looking at the articles above leaves me as clueless as everybody else as to why he left or what it means for the future about SL. He seems to have masterminded some of Linden Lab's ideas of putting power into the hands of the people, giving the residents the intellectual property rights of their creations and advocating to go open source, which both is
huge.
What I do notice, is that in
an older publication (Jan. 2006) Cory is
vice president for product development . In May 2006 however we find a
press release which names Joe Miller as new
vice president of platform and technology development. I don't fully understand the pecking order of American corporate titles, but the current
Linden website lists Cory somewhere in the middle for some time now, so probably he already either withdrew or was shoved to back more than a year ago (have a look at the
internet archive to see how the management page changed).
If Hamlet Au
and Tateru Nino with their Linden connections do not have an idea about why it happened and what it means, I am sure that my speculations would be doomed to be futile from the beginning, so I will not even try. But looking at Cory's bio, I'd say he does not look like someone who can live in middle management for long. Given the management changes indicated above, I'd say that whatever led to this event was predictable to insiders already and whatever it was, it merely put the last nail into the coffin.
I've recently read an older
post about Linden communication on Hamlet's NWN. Lem Skall made a
comment there, which I found quite insightful. In the last paragraph he says: "
My feeling is that people in LL are divided themselves on what this relationship [between LL and users] should be. The ambiguousness is making our relationship so much harder."He was speaking about communication issues of course, but I have the impression for some time now, that the Lindens need to (re)define their own ideas about who they are and what they are doing. I think Lem Skall is right about the ambiguousness and probably Philip's
new mission statement and Cory's demise is part of a process to resolve it.
I have zero idea if it is good or bad that Cory leaves, because I do not know over which ideas they were in disagreement and who's side I would have taken.
But I want to say, that if it resolves ambiguity and if it leads to less pushing and shoving inside Linden Lab, and if it results in more clarity about their directions and actions, it will be good for the company as a whole. And if it's good for the company, it will very likely be good for the users, because nothing is more annoying to a user, than a company which acts erratic and unpredictable.
