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Cory Ondrejka, co-founder of the virtual world of Second Life and ex-CTO of Linden Lab has switched roles. No, it's not actually another virtual world, but we're mentioning it anyway, because we know you all love Ondrejka, or love to hate him. Either way.

Ondrejka's moving in with EMI (one of the 'big four' record companies) as their senior vice-president of Digital Strategy. 'It's time to take everything I learned about innovation, community, intangible items, markets, economics, and technology building Second Life and apply it to a much larger arena,' said Ondrejka today, 'There are a million and one difficult problems to solve, but I'm absolutely thrilled about my new role.'

The source code for llMozlib2 (an essential piece of glue library enabling in-world and in-viewer HTML rendering for Second Life) is now available on Linden Lab's public subversion version control system, and is now the single source of the code, rather than having a second (possibly divergent) version tucked away in an internal repository.

Linden Lab so far is continuing to release source code for both viewer and server-side components progressively (a process initially announced in late 2005 and given an expected timeline of several years), despite some fears that the process might suddenly cease after the departure of Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka. While only a few server-side components have so far been released, there is no sign yet that that process will be or is being stemmed.

Yes, we know that technically it's already been beta since 6 February 2006. However, Cory Ondrejka called that a an alpha test, so we're willing to more or less go with that. The Linux Second Life viewer entered closed alpha, and open alpha a mere four days later.

Now, just over two years later, the Linux viewer is finally considered to have entered the beta phase. With the introduction of gstreamer support for media, and 3D voice support, the viewer has finally achieved comparable functionality with the viewers for Mac and for Windows -- only it runs faster and smoother. On average about 15% faster on the same hardware than the Windows version based on our tests.

Four days from closed alpha to open alpha, then 25 months to open beta. How long until production, we wonder.

We headed to the Metaverse U event at Stanford University this weekend to hear a smorgasboard of prominent thinkers and workers in the fields of virtual worlds and online gaming have a meeting of the minds. Below is a recap (caveat: some paraphrasing involved!) of one of our favorite sessions featuring a conversation with Metaplace's Raph Koster, former Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka, and social media and online community guru Howard Rheingold.

Henrik Bennetsen (moderator): (Introduces 3 panelists and asks Raph to kick off with his thoughts on virtual worlds)

Raph: From the beginning, virtual communities has never been about the "virtual." All the oddities come from the mediation, not from human nature. We build trellises, and communities are plants growing on them... you get to shape them a little bit, and sometimes in very bad ways if you're not careful. We tend to think we have more power than we do when architecting these things. I wince at the title "community manager" ("relations" would be better) because it perpetuates the myth that we have power to control what users do. Mediation gives us a window into things that in the real world can be hard to see. Virtual communities are an opportunity to see how people tick.

Cory: Having spent 7 years building Second Life, the interactions and collisions with the real world are what make it interesting. We had only 400 users at launch and we were ecstatic! Can you imagine that today (especially for companies with big name investors)? I think about virtual worlds as communication technology. I agree there's a need for customer service and arguments about the declaration of avatar rights are important but yet I feel there's something off in these arguments... (he's referring to earlier conversation about declarations of avatar rights)

Virtual worlds and online gaming continue to grow in cultural importance, changing the outlook of commerce and entertainment almost daily. To make sense of these changes, Stanford University feels it's high time they convened a group of leading experts in the field to discuss what it all might mean, both today and reaching into the future. To this end, the Stanford University Humanities Lab is hosting the Metaverse U Conference, to take place on campus on February 16th and 17th.

Among the notable names speaking at this event are Raph Koster of Areae's Metaplace; Cory Ondrejka, formerly of Linden Lab; Howard Rheingold, author and critic, credited with coining the term 'virtual community', and many other guests. In fact, those three in particular will be speaking together in conversation on Saturday, an event I expect will be both illuminating and provocative.

I'll be attending with Massively's Barb Dybwad, so look for us and say hi! If you can't make it, however, don't despair -- the organizers have told us that "we are about to announce that the entire conference will be streamed for free into Second Life for anyone who wants to attend there."

It's been no less a tumultuous year for Second Life in 2007 this year than any previous year, frankly. There are a few standout items though.

This isn't the list that anyone else might make - We might completely skip over one of the things you see as standing out as a huge impact, based solely on that we don't actually think it was that big a deal in the scheme of things.

Linden Lab's departed CTO and co-founder will be spending the (USA) Spring as a visiting professor at USC Annenberg, according to New World Notes, and Ondrejka's new personal blog Collapsing Geography.

According to Ondrejka, "I'm now consulting, writing, and speaking about the economic and technological impact of virtual worlds; the interrelation between innovation and learning; and, the requirements of product development across geographically dispersed teams," at least until he figures out what he's going to do next.

One-time Linden Lab insider and virtual worlds/games journalist Hamlet Au (Wagner James Au) gathers comments from recently departed Linden Lab staff about the departure of Linden Lab CTO, Cory Ondrejka, and garners additional feedback from Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale.

Comments are provided from the former Chadrick Linden, and the former Iridium (once Heretic) Linden. Quite what Ondrejka himself thinks is anyone's guess at the moment.

[via New World Notes]

Cory (Ondrejka) Linden's leaving Linden Lab is the most grid-altering event this past year, and arguably of the past 2 years as well. And if I were to play the Nostradamus game, and I'm going to right now, then I'd say that Cory's headed for a life where he will eventually end up forming his own Segway polo pony league.

Cory Ondrejka is Second Life's Steve Wozniak. He's the technology guru/wizard who helped write the code that made the grid what it is today. Many think of Cory and Philip as integral entities of Linden Lab, the same way people used to think of Woz and Steve Jobs for Apple, Inc. Cory is the tech guy with the answers, Philip is the front man with the charisma. And if we follow this line of reasoning, we can envision a future where, without Cory's support, LL will eventually run aground, bogged down by poorly-differentiated versions of its flagship product, causing Philip to leave the company in favor of putting his boyish good looks behind a virtual world competitor, only to return years later to save the beleaguered company like the prophesied King Arthur to Britain.

Cory will be just fine, and will probably be less stressed out, gain a few more pounds, and continue to see his popularity among geeks grow to near-legendary status. Maybe he'll get a tiny avenue named after him someday, or even, if Philip would have its cultural influence, get to star in an exhibit in animatronic form. Cory, good luck with whatever you put your hand to, and we'll miss you.

Ondrejka's leaving Linden Lab at the end of the month. It wouldn't surprise me to see him working for (eg) Google on 2 January. Face it, Ondrejka's hot geek property, any issues of sex-appeal aside.

Recruiters, if you want a piece of Ondrejka, you've probably got very little time to pitch something at him. Whatever Linden Lab's fortunes are, or have been, Ondrejka's the bee's knees right now, both technically and from a PR perspective.

Shortly after we received Philip Rosedale's official statement on Cory Ondrejka's imminent departure from Linden Lab, a source close to Linden Lab passed us a copy of Ondrejka's internal email about the matter.

Trying to sum up 7 years of work at Linden is an impossible task. All nighters at the Linden Street office. Gaining 20 pounds but then losing 70. Flying 350,000 miles on Linden travel. Recruiting and hiring many of you. Creating a programming language that now had 2.5 billion lines of code written in it – note to self, next time spend more than one night designing language. Changing the world.

Linden Lab's CEO, Philp Rosedale has responded with a statement on the departure of Linden Lab CTO Cory Ondrejka.

"I can confirm that Cory Ondrejka, CTO, will be leaving Linden Lab at the end of this year, in order to pursue new professional challenges outside the company. I wanted to take this opportunity to publicly thank Cory for his tremendous contribution to the company and to Second Life, in terms of its original vision and ongoing progress.

I've been hearing rumors about one of Second Life's dear leaders, Cory Linden (aka Cory Ondrejka), Linden Lab's CTO. Apparently he didn't see eye to eye with Philip Linden (aka Philip Rosedale), LL's CEO, about the engineering direction. Either way, he quit, or Philip fired him. Care to clarify, Linden Lab?

Tateru Nino recently did a piece on Philip's mission statement blog entry. It seemed to come out of nowhere and maybe this has something to do with it. We'll keep you updated as we know more!

[8:47pm EST] I have obtained a copy of Philip's email that he sent to his employees, which you can read after the jump ...