Linden Lab open-sourced Second Life's client on January 8th, 2007. In the 15 years since, open source contributions have led to countless new features and bug fixes that have markedly improved the life of our virtual world. Without open source, SL would not be as vibrant, enduring and successful as it is today.

As part of an effort to improve and modernize our tooling and better support the open source community, I'm happy to announce that Second Life's source code is moving to GitHub, the world's most popular version control hosting platform. You can find our open source repositories in their new home at github.com/secondlife.

As the de facto home of many open source projects, GitHub likely needs no introduction to anyone who works with open source software. Its features and market position make it the best option for Second Life going forward.

Improved Developer Experience

While migrating code to GitHub is an important step towards improving Second Life open source contributors' development experience, it is not a complete picture. We will be making several changes to streamline and modernize our engineering processes: 

Simpler Contributor License Agreements

A Contributor License Agreement (CLA) is a commonly used legal contract between an individual or group and an organization accepting contributions. This process has been modernized, adopting simpler, more developer-friendly language and allowing contributors to sign the contract as part of pull requests. No PDF, no fax. 😉

GitHub Actions CI/CD

Second Life will be moving its continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) from a self-hosted TeamCity instance to GitHub Actions. This change, to be completed in 2023, will open up new possibilities for our engineering team and the open source community:

• Our build tooling will be more transparent, allowing OSS contributors to easily fork and build things like autobuild libraries
• Pull requests will feature automated merge checks such as linting and automated testing
• Services can be built using newer technology, such as aarch64 servers

A simple pipeline to test and publish autobuild.

Summary

While these changes will not impact most users, they will make contributing to Second Life easier and allow the platform to evolve faster. Linden Lab is a uniquely open company, holding regular in-world user groups and allowing its residents to contribute in meaningful ways. We are committed to this philosophy and would love to join you in helping make our shared virtual world even better.

Do you want to contribute to Second Life? Attend one of the user groups on our public calendar, submit an idea for a new feature, or, of course, check out our code on GitHub!

Signal Linden
Engineer, Second Life Server