Second Life residents have seen that Linden Lab responds to petitions/open letters, so there's another one starting to do the rounds. This one addresses the radical shift in Linden Lab's Second Life governance policies.

Will Linden Lab keep hopping with responses every time an open letter reaches any kind of critical mass? Or will they choose to try to shut that door again?

Either way, read on for the full text of the letter.

Linden Lab is pressured from all sides. They are being sued (along with ten Internet Service Providers) by French parent-teacher group Familles de France. Their Terms of Service have been found to be legally unenforceable by Judge Eduardo Robreno. German TV News Magazine Report Mainz has raised a scandal about Second Life and child pornography.

Linden Lab is on the back-foot, and struggling to find a place where it can meet these varied legal and media challenges. In positioning itself to meet these potential threats, fresh conflict has broken out on a new front, Second Life's own resident population.

In a fourth generation virtual world like Second Life, Linden Lab have a number of choices as to overall governance. The one that they've chosen is generally known as The Internet Rule of the Sandbox. You might not know it by name, but you've experienced it. The public Internet runs under that rule.

When you connect to a web-site, an IRC server, a web-forum, a blog, or any other Internet service, the operator(s) of that service make the rules, and may choose to exclude any person for (as they put it in legal terms) "any reason or no reason".