There’s an article in the Information Week, citing Mitch Kapor:

But virtual worlds have a long way to go until they become mainstream, Kapor said. They need the equivalent of the Web application server
— building content in virtual worlds is still equivalent to
hand-coding Web pages and code. They need an improved user interface;
Second Life is dificult to use. They need to be decentralized, to
permit creation of private spaces — the equivalents of intranets and
extranets.

Linden Lab is taking steps to decentralize. It open-sourced the client
in January, and plans to allow people to put up their own servers and
attach them to the main Second Life grid. They’re moving to eliminate
proprietary protocols. The company is driven to do this by the
conviction that its biggest threat is not an existing company, but
rather a future virtual world that runs on those principles.

So far nothing new, the server side is going to be opensourced sometimes, nothing new. The people of The Daily Galaxy wrote an own entry about SL, covering this theme, too, also linked back to Information Week and wrote this:

Linden Lab is currently moving towards decentralization. Since January,
they have allowed people to put up their own servers and attach them to
the main Second Life grid. They also want to eliminate proprietary
protocols.

See the difference? Something not in the original article about already connected private servers to the grid, which is not stated at all in the original article. So – this information is false, plain and simple, as a comment states under this entry.

But guess what? This is now making its round in the blogosphere, another blog is now referring to the Daily Galaxy and stating:

Have I missed something? Do any of you know anything about personal servers attached to the Grid?

Nope, you just missed to validate at the source if this news is true or not. Of course, untrue, but this is how rumors come to birth.