Imagine there was an international conspiracy to help you. imagine it was a shadowy decentralized network, where the individual conspirators might never know each other except through code names, built up through modular cells and freewheeling unfixed heirarchys, kind of like the french resistance. Not tied to any goverment or corporation, although it’s tentacles extended into many of both. No one leader, few official rules. Imagine that despite it’s wildly unorthodox and often paradoxical structure, it was still effective. Imagine that this international conspiracy existed, and was successfully helping you.

It’s true it’s true. It’s probably helping you right now, as you read this.

The open source movement remains a wonder to me. Lots of people in the non-profit and activist community struggle with theories of consensus-versus meritocracy and finding ways to effectivley distribute tasks over loosely connected networks of unpaid people. There are signs of success in “meatspace”, but in the programming world, they are way out ahead, well beyond theory and well into the open meadows and dark forests of implementation. They are having wide-spread success. Linux is the fasting growing operating system in the world. Mozilla is the most critically acclaimed internet browser. OpenOffice.org makes it free to work with MS Office documents. The list of lower profile projects is almost endless. I’ve always fantasized that people could do good work without having to be paid or otherwise coerced into doing it. Anarchists have dreamed of it since the 1800s. Open source software programming efforts are doing the trial and effort work of implementing these possibilities, creating practical tools for them, rejecting them, proving them, making them work. Nobody is making them do it, they do it for free and for freedom and fame and to have someone meet tham at a conference and say “oh… you’re that Daniel Berman? You wrote my video editing program!”

They also wrote apache internet server, which odds are is serving up this webpage right now, and most of the rest you will look at today.

Intentionally or unintentionally, they’re poking holes in the accepted wisdom of ownership and responsibility. In the open source world, having and using something may be free, but it’s the kind of freedom Ursula K Leguin would recognize, freedom via responsibility. If you use it, it’s really yours, meaning you’re part of the development team, the testing team, the implementation team… you may choose to overlook these responsibilities, but then you’re not getting the full benefit or returning it. There are no stickers marked “warranty void if broken” in OSS land. When you use open source software, you are not purchasing a “seat license” giving you temporary and well-defined privileges to interact with a limited portion of the program for a definitley proscribed time frame. What you see is what you get, all of it.

Here are some pictures of people who are doing it and making it. These were taken by Julian Cash at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference #6. They look so damn happy and optomistic and wildly uncynical, and I guess it isn’t suprising. It’s like kindergarten for grown-ups, dedicated to sharing and crafts and filled with your natural friends. On Julian Cash’s own site there are two galleries of event pictures: one is for the Open Source Convention, the other is for Burning Man. I think it’s an appropriate combination. Both are dedicated to subverting the normal order and activley demonstrating alternative possibilities. “No spectators”.

What have you given or would you like to give to the open source community?

Rebecca Hunt – Better gender balance + a media collection module