Open Source Redux

I've been awfully busy the past few weeks, which is normal this time of the year. Nevertheless, back to Open Source for a few words.

Programming is a field that is pretty daunting for alot of people, mostly because there aren't too many ways to fake it. Code either compiles or it doesn't. While I don't program as much as I would like, I have strong feelings that this basic fact about programming is one of those things that makes it so satisfying, and Turkle speaks of this as well. When you get something to work and it takes effort you end up feeling good. Easy is not really all that much fun. Work is good.

While I think most educators have a hard time distinguishing between entertainment and fun that isn't really the point here. People who work hard as programmers respect other programmers who work hard, and when you can go beyond making something work to making something clean and elegant that can be really impressive. It isn't just programming either. There is an appeal to craftsmanship that all people can relate to. In Open Source the movement is to a large extent driven by this sense of beauty in something well done that works. What is most interesting is that you don't have this sense of beauty unless you see the code, so this appreciation comes from sharing what commercial software cultures would consider proprietary information. You give something away so it can be appreciated. It's a gift culture.

Gift cultures are interesting in that your status comes from your generosity. Open Source is like that, but so is politics, and probably more than anything else is scholarship. You do not write that paper to get paid or go to that conference for any material profit. You go to share ideas. You write (and read) for the same reason. And the worst thing you can do is not to use an idea, but to not cite it. Ideas are public property, but you have to recognize the person who came up with it. Gift cultures also don't function well with force or compulsion. You can't make someone be brilliant or productive. You have to trust them.

This is where I close the circle on Dialogue as it relates to computers. Open Source is the best example, but if you look at the Internet it didn't come out of Microsoft or IBM or Sun Microsystems; it came out of research labs, academia and the ethics of scientists, librarians and engineers, all people who believe in collaboration, exchange and teamwork. TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, POP and the other protocols that make the darn thing work were developed by people happy to get a rather modest salary in exchange for doing great work. Mosaic, the first multimedia web browser upon which all the others were built, came out of a research grant at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications; the web itself from the CERN pan-European physics research lab. Much wealth created by people who not only couldn't cash in but never even saw that as a goal. When you browse the web, send e-mail or do any of those things just remember Bill Gates had nothing to do with it. Tim Berners-Lee is the hero here, but just one of them. There are many more.

We live in a world where more people will die in large parts of the world from having too much food rather than too little; where many people will see more moving images and hear more sounds in a day that their great grandparents saw in a lifetime; where most of us will be able to say we lived better than our ancestors ever expected and still we are not happy. When you see this I just hope you think of the hackers who figured out things like packet switching and mark-up languages and never thought about getting rich. Think of them, and then think of David Bohm. Maybe they have something there that makes much more sense than, say, being the richest man in the universe.