Linden Lab has destroyed credibility with its latest surprise announcement to "jack-up" the prices on more than 50% of the grid's monthly fees. They claim their own incompetence in setting the void sim ("openspaces") features and their own mis-management as justification to bring monthly tier fees from $USD75 to $USD125. This poorly considered annoucement will send the hardcore SLers into panic. New landowners will feel very betrayed.  Frankly this step looks like suicide for Second Life.

IBM is making a virtual world for design research for Fashion Research Institute (FRI) using a combo of Second Life and OpenSim:

This first-of-a-kind system will allow fashion and consumer packaging designers to access and use 3-D tools with the Second Life client interface. In addition it will also connect to the OpenSim virtual world platform to create packaging and fashion products, provide efficient workflow queues, and allow groups with an interest in the product to collaborate and modify designs.