After moving from the technical to the strategic type role, dealing with vendors and corporate type in the “Open Source” space I’ve realised an incredibly scary thing. The word mincing running riot is stripping the meaning of what we within the Open Source/Linux world have come to expect. Companies releasing “Open Source” code that offers none of the freedoms we all enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe that “Free Software” is any better a term (“Freedom Software” perhaps, but then you just completely lose people). I hate the fact that many companies are trying to reinvent a monopoly in their own image, and to make it worse they are using our language against us. Anyway, I sat down and thought about what makes Open Source so important. I came up with five “pillars” of Open Source, and realised that if anyone says they have Open Source, and are missing even just one of these pillars, it just isn’t Open Source:
I know that these rehash some of the points of the OSI Open Source Definition, however I feel that they are an easy test of whether something is or is not in fact “Open Source” as the community has come to expect.
I guess that for me, the wonderful thing about “Open Source” is that it is a technology solution to a very real human problem. I see it as being a mechanism to award more equal access to opportunity across the board. This is why I don’t want to see it diluted, and this is why I am so passionate about the whole topic. There are two goals that are extremely important to me:
1) Complete Connectivity – I think that by getting more people online, you offer them a line of communication beyond what they were born into. This develops understanding and empathy of the unknown, hopefully leading to a less fearful and volatile global society. It leads to more opportunities, contacts, participation.
2) Complete Knowledge – By ensuring there is always a free and accessible place to gain and commit information, we would effectively be ensuring that the wonderful resources provided by the internet are not monopolised, and people are able to share and grow together. In the short term future I am hoping to work with some people to create a Free Knowledge project that extends way beyond just IT. I posted about Free Knowledge before so I won’t go too much into it, but just imagine if every person on this earth wrote down one thing they know well. Whether it be how to plough a field, how to maintain good hygiene in places with dirty water, how to teach 6th grade maths to kids, etc. There is already so much information on the web, which is awesome, and some are trying to partition off information for profit, an inevitable step in modern money-obsessed western cultures. I hope to ensure that good quality information is always available to people freely, and that people will always be able to commit information freely. It amuses me how much the monetary priorities of the “western” world don’t take simple human sharing into account. Most people like to share information, to teach others freely. It is part of our nature. We don’t need a price tag on everything we do. We certainly don’t need a price tag on our evolution.