Second Life and libsecondlife

Google’s link to libsecondlife says, ‘libsecondlife is an open source project to reverse engineer the Second Life networking protocol.’ How is it ‘your’, i.e. the community of Second Life residents’, protocol if it has to be reverse engineered? A scalable hardware and software infrastructure capable of supporting the Second Life virtual worlds is a very different, though related, problem from implementing a client-side environment for the world. I think Linden Labs would be better off explicitely releasing portions of this problem to the community for help in finding good solutions. The network protocol ought to be a collaborative effort, and it ought to be an ‘open standard’. Interested third parties ought to be able to put in their own pieces – if I have server space and software that conforms to the protocol, I ought to be able to run my own parcel that’s accessible from the Grid, and I ought to be able to write my own client.