Elf Sternberg

To use DirectX is essentially to tie yourself to Windows. By doing so you make it that much harder for Linux and Mac OS users to access your world. Second Life does indeed have a Mac client I believe. They're also working on open sourcing their client so in effect if someone wished to create a DirectX version they probably could with enough work.

Perhaps more relevantly in a couple generations maybe the iPhone or iPad will have the capability to run a slimmed down Second Life client. That would be an entirely different vector for the virtual world. Maybe some places could even have a specific second life location tied to them, so when you fire up SL on your mobile device the location aware part would take you right to the specific place in the virtual world.