The emergence and development of open source software in diverse branches have a crucial place in our understanding of the Internet. Without open source software, many of the tools that let us access the Internet wouldn’t exist. Furthermore, the open source culture brought with it a plethora of resources for efficient global collaboration, new legal frameworks and a demand for transparency. Why You Should Care about the History of Open Source Everyday, we’re affected by the decisions made by the people and institutions that govern us. We wake up at a certain time because some hundred years ago, workplace owners wanted their employees to start work at a certain time. From there, schools and all the other societal institutions adapted. We wait for the traffic light to turn green before we cross the road. As we get our morning pastries, we can pay with a slim plastic card, or even with an image on our mobile phones. All because people agreed upon some global rules and protocols. Open source culture comes with its clever twists and never-ending, progress-oriented debates on how populous groups of people can and should create rules and protocols that will benefit the whole society. If you care about thoughtful progress in society, you should start to look for ways to contribute. Philosophy of access benefits you, me, and all of us, thanks to Richard Stallman Among the key occurrences that led to the open source movement’s emergence is the donation of a printer to MIT in the 1970s. Staff programmers, including had previously implemented a social hack with the old one they owned. It would send warnings whenever it was jammed. Because the new software development team had signed a non-disclosure agreement with the company producing the printer, Stallman and colleagues couldn’t access the source code to implement this social hack that made their lives easier. Richard M. Stallman The inability to access the donated printer’s source code made Stallman determined to create a complete operating system that granted all its users the freedom to know how it worked and change things. And like this, the was born. Penning the in 1985, Stallman defined a Golden Rule: GNU Project GNU Manifesto [I]f I like a program I must share it with other people who [might] like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. The hacker attitude as a way of life If you share similar views with Stallman, you might want to learn more about becoming a hacker. , a software developer and open-source advocate who also wrote the widely-known essay the in 1997, describes the hacker attitude in . Eric S. Raymond Cathedral and the Bazaar How to Become a Hacker Hackers solve problems and build things. One shouldn’t mix them up with crackers, crackers are the ones that break things possibly because they are not as bright. They believe that the world is full of fascinating problems. Hackers get a kick out of exhausting their learning capacity to create solutions that, bit by bit, solve the problem for good. Out of respect for fellow hackers, they don’t force each other out to reinvent the wheel and share the creative solutions openly. The hacker attitude builds upon the philosophy of access. Open Source Expansion to the Physical Realm The hacker attitude extends to realms that have nothing to do with computers and programming. For example, with the , you can learn to build beds, chairs and tricycles with basic supplies, for free. You can even build yourself a house with common building materials. If you’re searching for the Gutenberg of our era, look no further, there are kind souls on earth that maintain an and have . Also, now that we have , you actually don’t need any other Internet-based messaging application on your phone. Grid Beam building system Hexayurt open-source e-reader project students access textbooks for free Signal State-of-the-Art in Open Source Culture The last decades have let us accumulate learnings from interesting social experiments of co-production, also giving way to the emergence of concepts like , , and . And it doesn’t look like it will stop here. copyleft peer production crowdsourcing user-generated content Community as the Force Multiplier Arguably because things are not as top-down as anywhere else in the corporate world of production, the culture of open source evolved to include not only ideas on how to co-produce software, but also more broadly, to co-produce anything above a technical depth threshold. Many such ideas were widely adapted by the corporate world, especially among the stakeholders in the global start-up and entrepreneurship ecosystem. Further expanded in the works of open source pioneers like by Eric S. Raymond, here are some key ideas that widely impacted teams producing technology all over the world: Cathedral and the Bazaar Release early, and often. Don’t wait for your plan to be perfect. If you share your work and issues with a wide enough pool of co-developers, any difficult problem can be solved. Your co-developers are your best allies: They will point to your weaknesses and celebrate your strengths. Keep them near. democracy++ Open source, in practice, is a social phenomenon where groups of people make decisions online. Possibly, it is the realm where collective decision-making has visibly progressed towards including more democratic, bottom-up practices. Developers of an open source project usually make decisions by consensus. Sometimes, if the problem is intractable or if consensus doesn’t form despite best efforts, communities need some pointing towards the way forward if they intend to work together in the long run. What first started with 's appointment as First-Interim (BDFL) with Python, quickly spread across other projects (like Ubuntu, Linux, OpenStreetMap and WordPress) that wanted the natural leader of the group to make decisions where consensus couldn’t be formed. Django had two BDFLs: and , who in 2015 due to a lack of personal time and trust in the Django community’s ability to function without BDFLs. Guido van Rossum Benevolent Dictator for Life Adrian Holovaty Jacob Kaplan-Moss retired Research has shown, time and again, that teams where each member is attentive to providing other are the best ones, by far. That’s why open source pioneers like are working on projects like to create more harassment-free instances of co-working in open source. diverse psychological safety for each Coraline Ada Ehmke Contributor Covenant Is open source broken? has long been the platform where software developers collaborate, with features in place to help ease virtual co-work on common software projects. GitHub has also been the most popular way open source communities store their progress and share their work. In 2018, the company was by Microsoft to heighten the tech giant’s focus on open source development. GitHub acquired 2018 and 2019 were the years where big tech players’ controversial decision-making caused huge backlash from their employees: , and were the cases that made it to the headlines. Thought leaders called big tech employees with ethical responsibility . Google helping Pentagon to build AI drones Microsoft developing battlefield headsets for the U.S. Military Amazon’s inaction towards climate neutrality to organize for change, or quit their jobs It was also probably not a surprise when it was discovered that GitHub had an agreement with the U.S. Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE). In an to GitHub the corporation, many active members of the open source community pointed at the aspects of ICE’s history that did not align with what they believe are the core values of open source: “[...] inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone”. The company responded with , detailing the nature of their agreement as they interpret it, highlighting that its scope had nothing to do with the goodwill of open source developers, which is the main asset GitHub capitalizes on. open letter another letter In another vein, the legality of is Copilot is a support tool for programmers that offers suggestions to improve their real-time code-writing. It is based on the AI system developed by and licensed to Microsoft. The scrutiny continues at U.S. courts and it stems from Codex utilizing public and open source code repositories on GitHub to train its AI model. Matthew Butterick, an open source advocate among other things, the reasoning behind the unjust as follows: GitHub Copilot under scrutiny. Codex OpenAI summarizes By offering Copilot as an alternative interface to a large body of open-source code, Microsoft is doing more than severing the legal relationship between open-source authors and users. Arguably, Microsoft is creating a new that will inhibit programmers from discovering traditional open-source communities. Or at the very least, remove any incentive to do so. Over time, this process will starve these communities. User attention and engagement will be shifted into the walled garden of Copilot and away from the open-source projects themselves—away from their source repos, their issue trackers, their mailing lists, their discussion boards. This shift in energy will be a painful, permanent loss to open source. walled garden GitHub’s recent actions, of which only a few are mentioned above, stirred up a big debate, marking an important milestone in the history of open source: Should we expect open source maintainers, who sometimes -despite putting in extraordinary creative effort- struggle to make ends meet, watch their contributions be used in gargantuan profit-making constellations they don’t ethically support? According to the , the answer to all these questions above is, yes: Should you restrict access to open source? Open Source Initiative They want to give evil people the freedom to use open source, too. Dan Goodman-Wilson answers with a no in his on the brokenness of open-source, summarizing the root of the problem as follows: in-depth, philosophical take Open source has explicitly rejected regulating access to the pool of open source software, while turning a blind eye to the extensive system of invisible, implicit, yet very real regulations that are woven through the structure of the community. This total abdication of control is toxic, pushing out people we need, and opening the door to those we don't want. The major failings of open source can be explained by a combination of the existing (implicit, covert) regulations governing the open source community at large, or lack thereof. In his account of the post-open source world, Goodman-Wilson underlines the need for thoughtful incentive systems for open source maintainers as well as the need for mechanisms that disincentivizes open source usage for actors that are unwilling to commit to “basic principles of the value of humans”. Projects like , and the are enabling open source communities to implement licenses that take ethical considerations into account and to disincentivize evil. the Hippocratic License Artless Devices Anti-Capitalist Software License Although some bigger fish , others -some even just as big- are still into not being evil. It’s never too late to find out where your interests and abilities fit best. don’t seem interested Want more on this? How’s That Open Source Governance Working for You? - Nathan Schneider A Guide on Finding 🔎 an Open Source Project to Contribute to - Leonardo Montini 6 pivotal moments in open source Open source organizations Lead image: Open source anything and everything. Illustrated by kertburger.
