Second Life founder Philip Rosedale said Tuesday he hopes to see nearly everyone in the real world active in his virtual world within 10 years.

"I hope we can look back 10 years from now and say that we grew Second Life as fast as we could," said Rosedale, CEO of Linden Lab, the company that develops and operates Second Life. Rosedale delivered a keynote address at the Life 2.0 Summit, a conference and trade show about Second Life that's going on in Second Life. The Summit is produced by Dr. Dobb's Journal, which is produced by the same company that produces InformationWeek.

Rosedale's plans are grandiose for a service that's still pretty small. Reliable usage stats are hard to come by, but analysis of Linden Lab's own figures point to the service having significantly fewer than 310,000 unique, active users.

By comparison, the online game World of Warcraft had 8.5 million players in March..

And yet Second Life is booming. The number of individual accounts topped 6 million sometime after 6 p.m. PDT Tuesday. (Users of the game can have multiple accounts.) The monthly growth rate in paid accounts was 13% in March, bringing the total to 75,000 paid accounts. The growth rate in paid accounts was 15% in February.

While Rosedale 's avatar, Philip Linden, stood at a podium on Dr. Dobb's Island, the avatars of attendees sat in the audience, and the actual people represented by those avatars listened to streaming audio of Rosedale speaking, and posed questions over text chat.

This is Rosedale's avatar:

I didn't get a crowd shot at Rosedale's talk, but I did get one yesterday for the talk by Mitch Kapor, Linden Lab's chairman, computing pioneer, and inventor of the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet. Today's crowd looked pretty much the same. This is one section of the auditorium; there are two more like it:

That's my avatar, Ziggy Figaro, in the brown suit and hat in the front row.

Rosedale said the company needs to stop being the central operator and developer of Second Life in order to achieve the level of growth he dreams of. Open-sourcing both the client used for viewing Second Life, and the server software used to run it, is key to that strategy.

"I want us to be the biggest open source project ever," Rosedale said.

Open sourcing Second Life is part of Linden Lab's strategy to grow by allowing other companies to run Second Life software on their own servers and also run "agent services, directed at avatars," Rosedale said. "We believe we won't be successful unless infrastructure can be provided by multiple people and companies, not just us."