Cory Linden Leaves the Lab

Dedric Mauriac knocks over Cory Linden's dominoes on New York island, an unwitting omen of his departure.

moo Money over at massively.com has the scoop of the year in the SLogosphere: Cory Linden quits or is fired from Linden Lab.

Your faithful correspondent predicted exactly a year ago that "one senior Linden of some sort, not like a David Fleck but more basic to the tribe, will flame out and maybe even Tell All in a magazine article or forthcoming book. They will be hired away by some huge competitor". I contacted moo for details about how she got the story, and she said it wasn't really an investigation but the selection of her by a Linden. "The sources for the story are keeping themselves anonymous and have opted to use multiple bloggers from Massively to tell the full story". I'll bet! The Herald is asleep, and it's been 3 lonely years since Cory and Uri gulped gold-fish together and downed shots.

Later, Tateru blogged Philip's confirmation, putting paid to the idea that any outlet but the Blingslider is the state news agency

Although originally I, like many, perceived Philip and Cory as the Cosmos and Damien of Second Life, going about and doing great things with their Science, I came to see them as competing characters at times, perhaps more like Marconi and Tesla or as Fleep Tuque put it, "et tu, Brute?".

My very uneducated but instinctive guess is that this split is ultimately about the Googlization and open-sourcing of Second Life -- that on one or both issues, Cory Ondrejka was more aggressive and wanted a faster and more open time-table than Philip did.

Ziggy Figaro pertinently asked: is Cory's departure a good thing or bad thing for the Lab? It seems a stark question, as if the revolution has to eat its children and such sacrifices have to be made. I would conclude that it was a good thing if what it means is that geek coder extremism is not prevailing. However, perhaps it's really a bad thing because Cory Linden is likely the only person who knows where the ends of the Spaghetti Monster's many strands are actually hidden, such as to disentangle them -- the Spaghetti Monster, of course, being a metaphor for the code of Second Life -- "almost organic," as one of the programmers put it.

Just as it is said about arguing parents that divorce is better than continuing the angst in front of the kids, so it may be that removing profound differences like this might be good for a company's direction. We can't know until we see, until we are told.

My sense is that if the issue is the extremism, then it is a good thing. Philip may be an extremist geek at heart, too, but he apparently has learned how to charm funders and customers more than Cory, and he also seems to know strategically the right moments to take off the rocker dudes with the blingy crotch and don American Apparel slacks and pick up his golf club.

Cory had his way in blessing the reverse-engineering of Second Life, which had tacitly been going on for months before his public annointing, and he gave his sanction to libsecondlife, which I critiqued as unethical and for which I was booted permanently from posting on the blog. In what was apparently his last town hall, of a year ago, he applauded libsecondlife.

No doubt, there will likely be a very geeky amen-corner that will go up now and tell us that Linden Lab is collapsing, that the good people are leaving, that see, even the main coder is quitting, that he wanted to do it X way and the rest of the hippies couldn't get it, etc. etc. Tateru at the Blingsider is spinning his departure as professional and quoting his own e-mail to staff about it as a kind of "creative differences" sort of thing.

But what's more likely is that Philip, who has probably had to learn the hard way to curb his own extremism as a geek-turned-entrepreneur, is making the hard decisions that precede mainstreaming and "normalizing" Second Life. Philip himself will have to go some day to make that process complete. Far from indicating that Second Life is sinking or a failure, I think what this means is that the extreme Spaghetti Monster coder ethic is not prevailing in the counsels of the Lab -- for now anyway -- and that perhaps they are heeding the advice of the IBM blogger who said back in August they shouldn't open source yet.

Funny, how they talk about collectivism and the Tao, and distributive decision-making and the Love Machine (Cory's invention!), but when it gets crunch time, Philip has to make an executive decision about someone who has Gone Against the Company's Interests, which is the cardinal sin of the Tao of Linden as we know.

Most likely on some cosmic enneagram, the personalities or essences of these two men are very different, although they seemed similar in outlook at culture. Cory has a Ph.D; Philip doesn't. Cory publicly made a female avatar and went to events in this avatar; Philip has never down that to my knowledge. Cory was in the Navy; Philip never was in the armed services. Perhaps there are greater differences than meet the eye.

My own experience of Cory Linden in person was pretty stark. At the first SLCC, I went up to Philip and introduced myself. I expected him to glad-hand me, like any busy, famous person, and was surprised when he seemed genuinely pleased and gave me a big hug and then enthusiastically turned and introduced me to Cory -- he looked right through me and didn't shake my hand. He turned away and I saw his earring. Later, when he gave a very proficient and brisk Q&A on technical matters, and seemed to be managing everybody competently, I pitched him a question that was more philosophical, about governance and democracy that was implicit in the tools he was making and deploying so casually. Suddenly, he seemed to stop and become almost helpless and child-like, and said, "Oh, you'll have to ask Robin about that," as if referring someone to a parent. Like, "Robin does that more complicated (or more stupid, depending on how you look at it) social and governance stuff.) He seemed genuinely surprised that his technical work would be conceived in such a political light.

Later, however, he surprised me by blogging about my debate with Raph Koster and seemed to respect my blogging more than indicated at first. Later I heard he had cited my pizza guy article at the Linden lunch table in favour of the reform of the group tools. Sorry to be so self-referential, but this is how you understand great historic cataclysms, through the prism of your own experience.

Cory hasn't been heard from in a long, long time. I don't even know what he was working on, as the last time -- months ago -- I saw him in world he was on some semi-secret island making some kind of HTML-on-a-prim sort of experiment. We were told that he was "kept away from the code".

When it came time to respond to the Open Letter, it was Cory who answered on the blog and then held a town hall.

If it is largely a good thing if coders' extremism is not allowed to prevail in SL (Cory was barely persuaded to put the use of Copybot in the TOS, it seems), it's not a good thing if there is no big counterweight to Philip and his will and ego. A project this awesome definitely needs critical voices from within, and balance of that kind of leadership. Where will it come from now? After all, this is an organization where a staff person can gush to Philip on the Love Machine, "You have too much integrity for one person!".

Last Friday, another well-known Linden and former long-term resident, Chadrick Linden, also left Linden Lab, under unknown circumstances that are likely unrelated to Cory's departure.

Previously, Chadrick, formerly Adam Linden and the resident Crowcatcher Valen, had had his desk moved closer to the door when he was removed from Governance and put on some sort of "user experience" team. Chadrick "Judge Dread" Linden had been involved in drafting the new abuse-report and governance systems and had supported some kind of Ban-Link like control of SL parcels. He is the only Linden to ever have muted me and refused my inventory for a long period, before my complaints finally got a reversal.

Contemplating this news and its ramifications, I almost expect to look up and see a giant boulder splitting in Second Life, or something cracking, breaking, falling, so much did I associate Cory with the formation of the world. I'm going to put out the dominoes he made from the Library in memory.

Comments

[Prokofy Neva]

Hamlet nee Linden Au has a blog up about this where he shows a picture of Cory Linden as the Spaghetti Monster and a trademark from Linden Research, Inc. for the screenshots (?!). He also makes the point that Cory will not likely talk about his departure as he used to work aboard a nuclear submarine in the Navy.

It's true that people who break from cults often retain a loyalty to the secrecy of the cult, and Cory may be no different here. But if he is zealous enough, and angry enough and convinced enough that he is right about some major issue, he might well talk, at least obliquely. So stay tuned.

http://nwn.blogs.com/nwn/2007/12/new-world-new-3.html

[Prokofy Neva]

I think another thing you can reason about Cory's departure is that it was not something he wanted, hence Philip's statement that he had to make a decision to ask him to leave.

If he were lured over by a competitor, he'd be announcing that he was at that competitor already, and knowing how much a part of the Linden cult he was, and a cult leader, I don't think he will be very hasty in winding up at a competitor, it's more likely he will go to some related but not directly competitive field.

So I think logically, since open-sourcing the server code is the single largest technical issue of Second Life (it's not HTML on a prim), that likely Philip and Cory disagreed on the timing, nature, type or whatever of this momentous decision.

Knowing of how aggressive Cory has been on the OS idea, but also knowing that he wrote the LSL and such it could either be that a) he wanted a quicker timetable than Philip or b) conversely, a slower one because he was a perfectionist about his own work and possibly wanted to have some other programming language become compatible with the world? I have no idea how that could work, but all talk of Mono has been on the back burner these days.

Why wouldn't Philip want to OS now? Because there isn't a business model in place. What would put a business model in place? More of those localizing or partner companies like the ones in Brazil and China.

[Naoki Yifu]

We only have to look at, "Long Road Behind, Long Road Ahead" to see that the dynamics are definitely changing.

http://blog.secondlife.com/2007/11/21/long-road-behind-long-road-ahead/

[Nicholaz Beresford]

One thing that probably needs to go into the equation is that he was CTO and thus responsible for the technical operation.

I don't even know on which side of the equation to put it (like favoring slower or faster movement on issues), but having slipped back to a middle management position (down from vice president) probably put him into the awkward position of being responsible for the areas of problems, but not having the leverage to follow the path he thought necessary to deal with them.

[Naoki Yifu]

BBC interviews Phillip where he touches on the recent executive decision to let LL's CTO Cory Linden go.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7144511.stm

[Prokofy Neva]

So they had a fight about the Love Machine?

"Our differences are more about how to run the company and how best we organise ourselves as a company going forward," he said. "We really do not have any differences in strategic direction."