Second Life client under GPL

I've never used Second Life, but I like the idea of people creating hyper-spaces. I used to do work with 3D graphics and have always thought the multi-player online games had poor visuals - the shading (coloring of models) and lighting really need work to be realistic. I'd like to see 'scenes' with near movie quality lighting and shading that you can invite a few friends into, yet hyper-link to other spaces. I've even toyed with the idea of a 'better' markup language for 3D - less modeling and more auto-layout capability.

Anyway, I don't know what it will mean to have their client library freely available, but this post on BoingBoing had a comment that really struck me:

"Customers only ever get to love it or leave it. Citizens get to change it."