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It was reported last weekend that Second Life avatar entrepreneur, Anshe Chung’s virtual property business is now worth $1 million.
Clickable Culture’s Tony Walsh takes the skeptical view, arguing that he doesn’t..

..think much of investments in Second Life, a highly interesting but technically-flawed, insecure virtual world owned and operated by a single company. If Second Life shut down today, how much would Chung be worth tomorrow?

He may well be right that the values mentioned above are dependent on confidence in the stable continuation of Linden Labs but, as anyone investing in the oil business in Russia at the moment knows, rather a lot of the world’s business has its value dependent on authorities with a monopoly on power – and the capacity to pull the plug. As the examples of profit amongst non-system actors grow we can reasonably expect pressure to mount for more politically stable software models in which supporting infrastructure is distributed amongst businesses and/or open source communities.