Opening Up
In November 2003, Wired magazine published
an article on the rise of the open source movement, claiming that 'We are at a
convergent moment, when a philosophy, a strategy, and a technology have aligned
to unleash great innovation. Open source is powerful...'. While this might be typical of Wired's
breathless enthusiasm and utopian dreams of a technological future, it does
contain a vital grain of truth. Open source ideology has now moved beyond the
coding and programming to inform the broader fields of information and content
distribution. At this level it acquired the power to fundamentally change the
way in which society is organised.
The
term 'open source' originally referred to the development of computer software.
Rather than a propriety piece of software that a customer would buy but could
not then modify, open source software is developed collaboratively by many
programmers and the source code is shared freely in the public realm thereby
allowing anyone to modify or improve it. Often the programmers developing this
software are volunteers, part of a larger collective enterprise producing
reliable products that are then in competition with those sold by corporations.
The
most obvious success story in open source must be the development of the Linux
operating system. In 1991, a Finnish student called Linus Torvalds began
writing a new computer program and solicited help via the internet from other
volunteer programmers or hackers. Within a few years their exchange of
information had spawned a global network of participants who had created a new operating system that was
more reliable than many commercial alternatives. And it was free.
As
Thomas Goetz points out in his Wired article, this use of collective
intelligence has spread far beyond the basics of computing:
Software is just the beginning. Open
source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal
arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics,
building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab
research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission,
calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters
and help draw a map of the Red Planet. There is open source publishing: With
Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall
is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or
redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions.
There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized
more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page,
classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project,
Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the
Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and
religion. There's even an open source cookbook.
Roots and
sources
Open source ideology
is closely bound up with the right to free speech and it is argued that there
are links between the rise of the free speech movement in Berkeley in the early
1960s and the later developments in software in the same locality. Ironically,
it is an attack on machinery that lies at the heart of the most celebrated
moment of the free speech movement. Concluding a speech on the Berkeley campus
in December 1964, activist Mario Savio declared
There is a time when the operation of the
machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take
part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies
upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus,
and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who
run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be
prevented from working at all!
In his history of
free software, Andrew Leonard cites a graduate student from Berkeley at that
period who was familiar with both the free speech movement and knew the
developing Unix software scene in the area:
Gage grins. Berkeley Unix, he proposes,
offered a different way forward from the painful agony of hurling oneself into
the operation of a demonic crankshaft. Berkeley Unix, with its source code
available to all who wanted it, was
the "gears and levers" of the machine. By promoting access to the
source code, to the inner workings of that machine, the
free-software/open-source movement empowered people to place their hands on the
gears and levers, to take control of their computers, their Internet, their
entire technological infrastructure.
"The open-source movement is a free
speech movement," says Gage. "Source code looks like poetry, but it's
also a machine -- words that do.
Unix opens up the discourse in the machinery because the words in Unix
literally cause action, and those actions will cause other actions."
It wasn't just the
free speech movement however that provided the context for the development of
free software in Berkeley. As the hippie culture evolved in San Francisco it
also spawned groups that began to formulate ideas and practical solutions that
would provide a framework for an 'alternative' society. One of the most
important of these groups were the Diggers, activists who tried to create an
infrastructure for the burgeoning Haight-Ashbury scene. Their work ranged from
radical street theatre to more practical support for the communities appearing
across the city, setting up free clinics and soup kitchens. Like Mario Savio,
they vilified an industrial culture that folded man into machine though they
identify computers as a means to free people from this relationship. In 'Trip
Without a Ticket', they state that
Industrialization was a battle with
19th-century ecology to win breakfast at the cost of smog and insanity. Wars
against ecology are suicidal. The U.S. standard of living is a bourgeois baby
blanket for executives who scream in their sleep. No Pleistocene swamp could
match the pestilential horror of modern urban sewage. No children of White
Western Progress will escape the dues of peoples forced to haul their raw
materials.
But the tools (that's all factories are)
remain innocent and the ethics of greed aren't necessary. Computers render the
principles of wage-labor obsolete by incorporating them. We are being freed
from mechanistic consciousness. We could evacuate the factories, turn them over
to androids, clean up our pollution. North Americans could give up
self-righteousness to expand their being.
This vision grows
into a declaration of a free economy that is linked to a freedom of human
impulses:
The Diggers are hip to property.
Everything is free, do your own thing. Human beings are the means of exchange.
Food, machines, clothing, materials, shelter and props are simply there. Stuff.
A perfect dispenser would be an open Automat on the street. Locks are
time-consuming. Combinations are clocks.
So a store of goods or clinic or
restaurant that is free becomes a social art form. Ticketless theater. Out of
money and control.
"First you gotta pin down what's
wrong with the West. Distrust of human nature, which means distrust of Nature.
Distrust of wildness in oneself literally means distrust of Wilderness."
--Gary Snyder
Diggers assume free stores to liberate
human nature. First free the space, goods and services. Let theories of
economics follow social facts. Once a free store is assumed, human wanting and
giving, needing and taking, become wide open to improvisation.
Written in 1968,
these statements provided a utopian blueprint for the communes and alternative
cultures that followed. The practical realities of such schemes often meant
they crashed quickly or descended into the same power struggles and petty greed
of the society they were supposed to replace. Some practitioners though found
practical applications of these ideas in a limited form which worked and
revealed alternative economic models which were viable. One remarkable example
was the archetypal hippie band, The Grateful Dead, who tacitly permitted the
taping of their concert by fans. This led to the formation of a tape-swapping
community that bypassed the traditional economics of the recording industry
where music was heavily protected by copyright and taping was perceived as a
threat. One taper, Alexis Muellner, recalls the events that sprang up around
the tapes :
The beauty of it was that we were doing
our part to expand the taping phenomenon by educating more and more people, and
helping to unlock mysteries surrounding the tapes...At the same time, we spread
the magic of the music through our events, which then went beyond just the
music. They became a fertile ground for exploring artistic and creative freedom
through multimedia, dance, and improvisation - some of the same themes the Acid
Tests explored. In doing all of this we were crating a large community of
active Deadheads in western Massachusetts, who in turn were sharing the music
with all of their friends. It was a classic snowball effect.
The tapes not only
spread the word about the Grateful Dead's music but spawned a whole new series
of cultural events. The real economic impact of this phenomenon only became
clear long after the demise of the Haight-Ashbury culture. By the eighties, the
band seldom recorded but toured prodigiously. The tapes in circulation
generated such a reputation for
the group that they consistently expanded their fan base and established
themselves in a secure, and lucrative, position outside the trends of pop or
fashion.
The Free
World
It was within this
radical, utopian context that programmers at Berkeley developed the world's
first standard operating system for computers - Unix. While few of these
programmers were active radicals themselves, the general spirit of the region
at the time certainly seems to have permeated their labs and gelled with a
general academic respect for the sharing of knowledge. As Andrew Leonard points
out, the most striking aspect of the Berkeley coders was their attitude:
Berkeley's most important contribution
was not software; it was the way Berkeley created software. At Berkeley, a
small core group -- never more than four people at any one time -- coordinated
the contributions of an ever-growing network of far-flung, mostly volunteer
programmers into progressive releases of steadily improving software. In so
doing, they codified a template for what is now referred to as the
"open-source software development methodology." Put more simply, the
Berkeley hackers set up a system for creating free software.
BSD itself wasn't
originally free software. Joy sold it, with the University of California's
blessing, at a nominal cost only to people or institutions that had already
purchased licenses permitting them access to the source code of AT&T Unix
(although, in practice, Joy's efforts to verify whether would-be buyers really
did own licenses may not have been overly vigorous). But in spirit, Berkeley
Unix was indeed free: As Dennis Ritchie, Thompson's collaborator in creating
Unix, observes, anyone who wanted to hack on Unix usually had access to the
source code, one way or another. And if those hackers sent their modifications
to Berkeley, and they were deemed good enough, they became part of a code base
maintained by programmers who wanted nothing more than for their software to be
widely used, for as low a cost as possible.
This general spirit
of freedom and cooperation would have consequences that eventually reverberated
far beyond Berkeley. Richard Stallman, a programmer who worked at Harvard in
the '70s, practiced a similar philosophy of sharing, establishing an 'informal
rule' that if he distributed free copies of the software he was developing,
hackers would send any improvements they made back to him. When Stallman's lab
community of hackers was eventually drawn into a private company in the '80s,
Stallman retaliated by matching their innovations program by program
(distributing his work freely) in an unprecedented bout of coding that lasted
almost two years. Setting up GNU in 1984, an organisation dedicated to 'free
software', Stallman laid the foundations for the emergence of the open source
movement in the '90s.
At
the same time, the world's media was being transformed by several key
developments. The video recorder was about to become a domestic commonplace,
revolutionising viewing habits for cinema and television as films became
infinitely reproducible. For musicians, the rise of sampling technology
revealed an equally radical future as elements of one song could be lifted and
then dropped into an entirely new musical context. The economics of cultural
property and intellectual copyright began to be challenged in ways in which the
movie industry, the music business and the artworld had not foreseen.
The New
World
In the early 21st
century 'open source' begins to make sense of many of these developments. The
'90s saw traditional media industries flounder as they attempted to come to
terms with a changing world where Napster, video pirates and web publishing
overturned previous certainties for good. Now, recent initiatives in science
and business are beginning to describe a new landscape. Looking at ways in
which open source could benefit his business, for instance, Paul Everitt, of
Digital Creations explains:
Thus, the question was, "Can going
open source increase the value of our company?" Here's what we saw:
* Going
open source will increase our user base by a factor of 100 within three months.
Wider brand and stronger identity leads to more consulting and increased
valuation on our company.
* Open
source gives rock solid, battle-tested, bulletproof software on more platforms
and with more capabilities than closed source, thus increasing the value of our
consulting.
* Fostering
a community creates an army of messengers, which is pretty effective marketing.
* This
is not the last innovation we'll make.
* In
the status quo, the value of packaging the software as a product would approach
zero, as we had zero market penetration. What is the value of a killer product
with few users? The cost to enter the established web application server market
was going to be prohibitive.
* The
investment grows us into a larger, more profitable company, one that can make a
credible push to create a platform via open source. Since our consulting is
only on the platform, a strong platform is imperative.
* Open
source makes the value of our ideas more apparent, thus the perceived value of
the company is apparent.
* Our
architecture is "safer" for consulting customers. With thousands of
people using it, the software is far less marginal. The customer is able to fix
things themselves or reasonably find someone to do it for them. Finally, the
software will "exist forever".
* Dramatically
increasing the base of users and sites using it gives us a tremendous boost in
"legitimacy".
* The
exit plan isn't about the golden eggs (the intellectual property) laid last
year. It is about the golden goose and tomorrow's golden eggs. The shelf life
of eggs these days is shrinking dramatically, and the value of an egg that no
one knows about is tiny. Give the eggs away as a testament to the value of the
goose and a prediction of eggs to come.
* The
community can work with us to dramatically increase the pace of innovation and
responsiveness to new technical trends, such as XML and WebDAV.
* Ride
the coattails of the nascent Open Source community and its established channels
such as RedHat. OSS has a certain buzz that is greater than its real
customer-closing value, but this buzz is getting hot. Moving aggressively
towards Open Source can make us a category killer for the web application
server market segment.
Perhaps the
developments in science have been even more surprising. Interviewing biologist
Michael Eisen, Thomas Goetz discovered that older models for scientific
publishing are in decay:
"The guiding principle of science
has been that freely available material is more useful; it's more likely to
generate better science," Eisen says. But freely available is not the same
as free of charge. Science journals, with their historically narrow readerships,
often charge thousands for a subscription. One of the biggest disseminators is
Elsevier, the science publishing unit of an Anglo-Dutch media conglomerate,
which distributes some 1,700 academic journals, from Advances in Enzyme
Regulation to Veterinary Parasitology.
"The whole premise for that model
just evaporated with the Internet," Eisen continues. "Technology now
makes openness possible; it's maximum openness. The rules of the game have
changed, but the system has failed to respond."
Proof that the
scientific community at large have recognised this failure came in 2003 when
The Wellcome Trust produced a position statement on scientific publishing that
acknowledged the value of open source:
With recent advances in Internet
publishing, the Trust is aware that there are a number of new models for the
publication of research results and will encourage initiatives that broaden the
range of opportunities for quality research to be widely disseminated and
freely accessed.
The Wellcome Trust therefore supports
open and unrestricted access to the published output of research, including the
open access model (defined below), as a fundamental part of its charitable
mission and a public benefit to be encouraged wherever possible.
Specifically, the Trust:
* welcomes
the establishment of free-access, high-quality scientific journals available
via the Internet;
* will
encourage and support the formation of such journals and/or free-access
repositories for research papers;
* will
meet the cost of publication charges including those for online-only journals
for Trust-funded research by permitting Trust researchers to use contingency
funds for this purpose;
* encourages
researchers to maximize the opportunities to make their results available for
free and, where possible, retain their copyright, as recommended by the
Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), and as practiced
by BioMed Central, the Public Library of Science, and similar organizations;
* affirms
the principle that it is the intrinsic merit of the work, and not the title of
the journal in which a researcher's work is published, that should be
considered in funding decisions and awarding grants....
Definition of
open access publication1
An open access publication is one that
meets the following two conditions:
1. The
author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable,
worldwide, perpetual (for the lifetime of the applicable copyright) right of
access to, and a licence to copy, use, distribute, perform and display the work
publicly and to make and distribute derivative works in any digital medium for
any reasonable purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship2, as well as the
right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.
2. A
complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy
of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is
deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online
repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society,
government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable
open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term
archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
Notes:
1. An
open access publication is a property of individual works, not necessarily of
journals or of publishers.
2. Community
standards, rather than copyright law, will continue to provide the mechanism
for enforcement of proper attribution and responsible use of the published
work, as they do now.
The definition of open access publication
used in this position statement is based on the definition arrived at by
delegates who attended a meeting on open access publishing convened by the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute in July 2003.
This statement
returns science to the spirit of the early natural philosophers sharing
discoveries through networks of letters and journals such as the Transactions
of the Royal Society.
With the acceptance of open source ideas in such areas of society it becomes more likely that these concepts will have a lasting impact. The collapse of the dot com bubble proved that older models of entrepreneurship lack the intuitive grasp of the internet as a medium and do not yet comprehend the odd mix of gift economy and commerce that have shaped its development. A more agile approach now seems necessary for any entrepreneur entering this new economy.