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Is Open Source The New Jerusalem?
from the -wrap-up-halfway-through-the-revolution- dept.
"And I saw the Holy City, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God ... its radiance like a most rare jewel, like jasper, clear as crystal ... By its light shall the nations walk; and the kings of the earth shall bring their glory into it." --The Book of Revelations
So the history of revolutions, just like the philosopher said, is in fact sad and strange. They never last long, inevitably grow corrupted by private interests, and often wind up failing the very people who worked so hard to make them. They veer off in unanticipated directions, have unforeseen consequences, cause casualties among the innocent. They can also do incalculable good while they last, advancing noble ideals, improving lives, giving people a powerful sense of freedom and creation. Sometimes, their effects can't be seen or measured for years.
Yet the goals of revolutions often remain unattainable, at least during the lifetimes of their creators.
It's too soon to say for sure, but the state of this revolution, the Net Revolution, can't ultimately be judged by the ups and downs of the stock market, by the fleeting passions of venture capitalists, by the willingness of traditional institutions to embrace it, by the hysterical judgments of the popular media, by the revenue it generates, by the narrow perspectives of techo-elites who created it, or the people who misuse, abuse or exploit it.
Those drawn into this particular revolution for reasons other than gain and profit will have to accept, as others have over the centuries, that they may never get to enjoy watching the rest of society come around. Nor will they necessarily get to rest and enjoy the fruits of their labors. They may get a taste of immortality, by leaving sites, archives, and plenty of code behind. But they may never get to the New Jerusalem.
Once established, free institutions always have to defend and re-assert themselves against the profit motive of capital, the tenacious power of entrenched political elites, and what Hannah Arendt called the "authoritarian" logic of bureaucratic systems. (In our time, she might have added the monopolistic logic of "corporatist" systems as well.)
These are, historically, powerful forces, and they tend to win conflicts, since they have money, law and leaders on their side. Since the Net has no institutions of freedom, only vast, networked collectives of individuals, this particular kind of freedom -- the search for free space beyond conventional media and politics -- may end up a personal choice, even a lonely struggle.
Some of the most powerful ideas coming from any revolution are works-in-progress, beacons, places we want to reach but possibly never will. Perhaps the trip itself, more than the destination, is the point.
For those who believe they are involved in a struggle to liberate and re-distribute information, to create and problem-solve for the joy of it, to learn for the love of it, to share the labors of their work generously with others, the revolution is more than worth its challenges and disappointments. For those whose primary interest is to gather data, play games, chat or amuse themselves, many of these issues are irrelevant. Party on.
This revolution -- a convergence of programming, computing, and coding with the Net and the Web -- isn't over, so much as it's reeling from the harsh realities of contemporary life. Everybody likely has his own nominees for the most enduring ideas and movements of the unfinished Net Revolution. My two are the hacker and the Open Source movement, the two most inherently political, idealistic and powerful ideas, the two most likely to leave marks on the world. Open source software, whose explosive growth grew directly out of the Net, has turned out to be a viral transmitter of openness. It is hard to imagine how it could ever be shut down.
The hackers brought joy, freedom, exploration and enterprise back to work, and more than any other single group, sparked the computer and Net revolutions. They led one of history's great outpourings of freedom and innovation. Someday, there will be statues of Phiber Optic and the like in front of important public buildings.
Open Source and it's offspring, open media and an open society, may well prove the most enduring legacies of the technological revolution still underway. They challenge the rest of society to be more honest, open, autonomous, self-critical and generous -- worthy goals for any social movement. They're both intensely political, and capture the spirit of being free and making something new. These things will ultimately drive enormous change in the way society and culture work. The spirit of Open Source has probably liberated more information for good than any other single ethos, and created an enormous, cohesive, and intrinsically political sub-culture, one of the biggest and most powerful of the Net Revolution. Proprietary instititions, from education to media, will have no choice but to open up the processes by which they operate. From Napster to Freenet, the movement towards open information culture has exposed countless people to culture, information and innovation they would previously have been unable to see.
Last month, a programmer named Andrew Steele e-mailed me a message about the Biblical parable in which Jesus blesses a mere two loaves of bread and five fish and then distributes the food to a large, hungry crowd. After everyone has eaten, a large amount of food remains. Christians know this story well.
"Being one who tries to hold the tension between my faith and my scientific understanding of this world, I have long ago interpreted this passage as one where the generosity of the boy leads others to be generous with the food they had." Still a miracle, wrote Steele, but not one which violates physics. "Is generosity the raw material of miracles?" Steele wondered.
I don't know, but it might be the raw material of revolution. The generous nature of Open Source has advanced technology, humbled the world's most powerful corporation, returned some control of media and information to individual human beings, and established a new kind of freedom beyond censorship; it threatens the very foundations of an intrinsically closed culture. But Open Source may very well mean that the institutions that run the world will have to come out into the sunlight where everybody can see them. Isn't that one of the core ideas?
In the end, Open Source isn't about software code, of course. As author Glyn Moody says in Rebel Code, it's about "creation, beauty and what hackers call 'fun' -- though 'joy' would be nearer the mark. They are about the code within that is at the root of all that is best in us, that rebels against the worst, and that will exist as long as humans endure."
It may be that this revolution is, like the spiritual city, an idea more than a reality. This revolution is another "bubble," writes Bill Bumgarner of Codefab, another revolutionary new technology -- railroads, gold mines, steam engines -- that promised to bring the whole world closer together and unify everyone under one single God, but ultimately burst to some degree because very few people really understand the way technology or markets really work. New techologies are revolutionary, says Bumgarner, just not quite to the degree their adherents sometimes expect.
"Hey! Calm down," urged Amir Karger, a student at Yale. The information revolution is inevitable, he says. "Once the genie's out of the bottle, it won't go back in." Karger says he's confident that in 50 years the world will be a better place because of the Net. "Maybe not in exactly the ways we expect, but better. Spreading information may not be the 100 percent good some people say it is, but in general, it'll be more a force for good than evil."
Richard Akerman wrote that he too was somewhat disappointed by the Net Revolution, but is still optimistic. "What has happened in reality is in line with all of the technological upheavals of the 20th cenbtury -- increased democratization, which I think ultimately has to be good." Many of the early promises of digital empowerment have, in fact, come to pass, says Akerman. Individuals by the millions are now content providers.
Good points, and true.
So the New Jerusalem of this Revolution is still unclear, the crystal city shrouded in fog. But the hackers did in fact, pull off one revolution within another: they saved the Net and the Web from corporate and political domination, and created an energetic, creative and passionately involved community that creates its own corner of the information world.
Mostly true, but... (Score:3)
It depends on how you define "revolution". You could say that taking power away from established authorities is a form of revolution, and that's happening.
Consider the effects of the Internet on a typical office worker. I am a Canadian living in Paris. In a week or so I will start a new job working remotely for a company in Helsinki. No country's tax laws are really designed for this sort of thing. I haven't really figured out who I'm supposed to pay taxes to. Probably France.
But, if the taxes in France are too high I can move anywhere in the world that has an Internet connection and still keep my job.
As more and more people end up with the same arrangement that I have, countries will lose the ability to set tax levels for their own citizens. It used to be that only the very wealthy could leave a country if they didn't like the taxes, soon a large percentage of people will be able to do it. This is a revolution of sorts and who knows what effect it will have.
And that's just one example of old-style governments losing power. As more goods become "intangible" - music, movies, literature, cultural products like magazines - traditional import/export controls break down. Canada likes to limit the ability of foreign (mostly U.S.) magazines to enter the Canadian market. You can't do that on the 'Net. So that's another area where, for all practical purposes, the government has lost control.
There are lots of other examples.
Re:Questionable Taste (Score:3)
Heh. You've never talked with a real open source "zealot" have you?
I think RMS more "religious" about free software than most church-goers are about what they believe.
Re:Open Source a Victory? (Score:3)
All of these apps and architectures can be classified as OSS. And to claim Mozilla as a failure is disingenuous at best since it was crippled for the first year or so of its existence by its dependence on non-free libraries.
Damn. You know you're responding to a troll when you get to the end of a reply and you've just quoted all the facts and figures at the Open Source website [opensource.org] for the fiftieth time.
But I think we ARE talking revolution here (Score:5)
Background: I'm a middle aged CTO of a small software company. A year and a half ago we open sourced (BSD license) some of our core components, partly because we thought we might get some more exposure that way, and partly because we use a lot of open source stuff and it felt like time to give some back.
Recently I needed a basic component [weft.co.uk]. I could get it, but it was proprietary, so we couldn't distribute it with the open source stuff we'd already put out. So I developed it from the start as an open source component, and already I've had patches contributed by half a dozen different people who are using it and finding it useful. By making it open, by inviting collaboration, I've had a lot of the work done for me.
And what that made me think about was artificial scarcity.
During the Irish potato famine, Ireland exported record quantities of wheat. During the Ethiopian famine in the Eighties, Ethiopia was exporting water melons to Europe - you could by them in the supermarkets. Food was not scarce, people just couldn't afford to buy it. The scarcity wasn't real. It was artificial scarcity created by 'market economics'. What's this got to do with software? Hang on...
Glaxo (and other pharmacutical companies) are trying to prevent the South African government from allowing cheaper, 'generic', anti-AIDS drugs. [bbc.co.uk] 10% of the population of South Africa is HIV positive. In other African states the figures are worse. Over one hundred million africans have HIV or AIDS. They don't have drugs to ease their suffering, because they can't afford them. But the drugs are cheap to make. They're only expensive to buy because the industry is using its patents to create an artificial scarcity. A hundred million people are suffering and dying to enhance the profits of the drug companies. What has this to do with software? Hang on...
Classical economic theory says that the price of a good varies inversely with it's scarcity. Goods which are extremely rare - like caviar, or diamonds - are expensive. Goods which are extremely abundant - like farmed salmon, or sand - are cheap. But digital information goods - computer programs, or digital recordings of music or movies - cost nothing to reproduce. Inherently, they are infinitely abundant.
I can make one copy of Apache for every person on the planet, and it costs (almost) nothing.
I can make one copy of Microsoft Office for every person on the planet, and the copying costs (almost) nothing.
The natural price of software goods, according to classical economics, is near zero.
Just now, people pay a lot of money for a copy of Microsoft Office. Microsoft are able to charge that money because of artificial scarcity, just like Glaxo can charge for their AIDS drugs. But Microsoft can't sell IIS for lots of money, because there isn't artificial scaricty in high-quality Web servers.
As projects like KOffice [koffice.org] get better, so there won't be artificial scarcity in quality office software, and Microsoft won't be able to charge so much.
There are real costs in developing software, but the generosity of a community acting together can absorb the costs, and publich the source code for free. Similarly there are real (and larger) costs in developing new drugs. But the principles of common community action and common generosity can, taken over the community with an interest in the cure of diseases, absorb those costs too.
Open Source does not only have to apply to software. It can apply to every product where commercial interests try to create artificial scarcities by controlling access to information. The next revolution may well be open source medicines. Chemists, clinicians and health administrators could collaborate over the net to develop new medicines which anyone could make for no more than the cost of the ingredients.
The point is that many - perhaps most - people are creative. We like to see the things we create being used to help other people. No one individual can afford the time to invent a cure for cancer, any more than any one person can afford the time to create a new operating system. But the net allows people to collaborate and contribute the quanta of time, energy and talent that they can afford to give, and now we've got a free operating system.
Software is an almost pure case of the sorts of things that can be developed by co-operative generosity. It costs relatively little to acquire the tools to co-operate in a software development project. It costs a little more to get into co-operative development of hardware, or medicines, or some kinds of engineering, and so these things will follow more slowly. But the example has been given, and I'm convinced these things will be given.
Taken together, open collaborative projects in different economic areas will inevitably challenge the morality under which it is ethically acceptable to create artificial scarcities which cause suffering. The world will change as a result of what we, as hackers, are doing now, and it will change for the better. We are talking about a revolution here.
Music to my ears.. (Score:5)
Open Source did not grow from the Internet (Score:4)
Hardware Hackers at Homebrew meetings freely exchanged hardware designs and information, as well as neat hacks for the new machines among each other. GNU was started in the early 80's, before the Internet became commercialised.
What the Internet has done, however, is to increase the speed and audience that Open Source code can reach. Instead of paper tapes in drawers hackers post their source to an FTP or CVS site. The ideals and ethics of Open Source software have been spread much farther than a small room in MIT or Berkeley. The Internet didn't start this though.
If anything, hackers had their Utopia long before the corporations took control. There were hackers in the world before there were software companies. All the companies did was to see a market, and sell to people who in many cases, had little knowledge of computers. Open Source and hackers carried on just as they had before.
So are we on our way to a New Jeresulam? Nah, we were already there Jon, it's just that people have only just begun to realise it.
revolution (Score:5)
How about just choice (Score:3)
Open source is another type of competitor. It's better in that MS cannot buy up the IP rights and then jack up the price or kill the project just because it competes with one of their packages. They have to actually play by the best software wins rules and they are not doing a hell of a job of that.
One way or another, let me choose, don't force the choice no matter which side of the house you're on.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
Forgetting History Myself (Score:3)
Another poster back up correctly pointed out that open source did not begin with the Internet. Yep, he's most definitely right. However, the openess of the Internet and the freedom of open systems fed off one and other. Infact, I would argue that the neither would have been possible today without the other. Opensource and the Internet have a very symbiotics relationship.
Re:Open Source a Victory? (Score:3)
I'm not sure the marketplace is the correct measurement for the success of opensource. It is not a traditional product. Who cares if only 2.5% (according to my web logs) of systems use it? (That's still millions of users anyway). To me, opensource is successful because:
- it gives me a choice of tools to use: without OSS (Linux and FreeBSD in particular) my choice would be between a couple of Microsoft operating systems. But now I (and everyone else) can choose to run the right tool for the right job. Even if all that OSS does is to force MS to pull out all the stops to compete and make a better product, it's benefitted everyone.
- I don't judge Mozilla a failure. Sure, it's usage is not as widespread as MSIE (and MSIE is a good browser), but Mozilla works well (certainly on my system at home at least) and helps to give me that choice of tools I (or anyone) can use.
- The point is that Linux and FreeBSD are here to stay. They aren't going to suddenly go away because of the whims or failures of a company: that's the important difference with an established piece of OSS.
Open Source the New Jerusalem? Look at the old (Score:3)
The metaphor carries well into understanding the future of Open Source. Within a few decades of his death, the movement of people who believed in Jesus's 'Open Source for the Soul' ie: a much freer way of interpreting religious rituals & traditions was swarmed with fakers and poseurs, people who were eager to call themselves popes and bishops and use the foundation of freedom to shackle their sheep.
You can expect the same thing to happen with the Open Source movement, although faster because we got fax machines, BBSs, and e-mails. Yes, it is pure and beautiful now, re-interpreting all previous proprietary-information-dissemination-techniques. But it will increasingly be swarmed with people using it for their own selfish ends. Human nature.
Human nature, and the fact that the United States still has a strong Christian ethos driving it: for example, the apocalyptic end-of-the-world nature of the Book of Revelations played a big role in the Y2K scare of only a coupla years ago.
These factors must be considered when you look at whether Open Source is what it says it is, and whether it will still be the same in ten years.
The funny thing is, most programmers/hackers have a Tolkien/Star Wars/and even specifically nonChristian kind of mythology driving their personal end-time worldview, but the generalizations I just made still hold. Why is this funny? Because people who are adamantly nonChristian now PRECISELY BECAUSE of the thick hypocrisies laden in this religion, don't see the parallel that in 50 years, Open Source will be laden with hypocrisies, too, and people will think of it in cynical, jaded terms.
In those days, there will be a few stalwarts who hold to it fiercely, just like there are some fundamentalists now in the Bible Belt, who ain't gonna let you tell them that Jesus ain't God.
Hope you see my point and don't respond to the trollware woven throughout. This is a conversation about Open Source and New Jerusalem, and I think it's a valid question. Well framed by John Katz.
let's be pragmatic (Score:3)
I am a fan of Open Source, in part because of its generous nature (as the article suggests), and in part because it allows peer review and dissemination of ideas.
However, it bears pointing out that revolutions normally corrupt themselves by insisting on a certain dogmatism, rather than embracing practical reality. In the open source literature one sees very little consideration or mention of ideas such as hybrid open source, in which the source code is revealed but the owner still retains some IP control over its use. In fact such an idea is considered heretical by many open-source practitioners, who view anything other than GPL as counter-revolutionary.
Is there any room in the open-source community for licenses that are more friendly to business? I think there are.