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
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, theGNU Project was born. Penning the
[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.
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
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
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
- 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
Research has shown, time and again, that
Is open source broken?
2018 and 2019 were the years where big tech players’ controversial decision-making caused huge backlash from their employees:
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
In another vein, the legality of
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
walled garden 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.
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 you restrict access to 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
Dan Goodman-Wilson answers with a no in his in-depth, philosophical takeon the brokenness of open-source, summarizing the root of the problem as follows:
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 likethe Hippocratic License,
Although some bigger fish
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Lead image: Open source anything and everything. Illustrated by kertburger.