WIRED: After two decades of domination, open source software fans are keen to empower computer users, writes DANNY O'BRIEN
I’M AT Open Source Bridge, a conference in Portland, Oregon for those who don’t only write software that’s free, but who care about it enough to plan, organise, and speak at an entirely volunteer-run programming conference. Portland is the second (and perhaps, the denizens here would say, the first) city of free software.
It’s a strange time for this community, caught between their ideals and the business world. Back in the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, then a post-graduate at the University of Helsinki with a strange hobby of building a competitor to Windows in his spare time, would speak jokingly of his plans for “World Domination. Fast!”
Now, 20 years on, the world domination phase of open source software has been and perhaps gone.
Free software is ubiquitous and invisible: it powers Google and Yahoo!, a sizeable chunk of Fortune 500, and most of the internet’s infrastructure. I’ve seen it in use from Beijing to Tajikistan (which has volunteers who convert it to run in their native Tajik language, which Microsoft and Apple won’t deign to).
Now Linus lives here in Portland but the community and range of software built on open source has grown so large that his absence isn’t even noted here. There are plenty more stars than Linus in the open source firmament and plenty of other constellations than just Linux.
But while open source and free software now run the world, the world doesn’t necessarily run along its lines. Richard Stallman, the pioneer of free software, had a vision that freely distributed and distributable code would provide everyone with a degree of autonomy and flexibility that proprietary, closed systems would never be able to provide to their customers. It was a moral crusade, not an assertion that communally developed software would be more efficient, or cheaper, or more bug-free than proprietary software.
As it turned out, it does appear that open source has trumped proprietary code in those values in a number of commercial sectors. Small companies like it because of its zero upfront cost. Big companies prefer it because they can hire their own people to customise it. These corporations bend to their preference, and then offer the results for the rest of us to use, through websites running on Linux and the Apache webserver, or services built using open source languages with names like Perl, Ruby, PHP, and Python.
But Richard Stallman’s dream, and the dream of many people at Open Source Bridge, was not about making things easier and amenable to companies. Free software was, and is, about freedom. And even the most open source-friendly companies don’t necessarily track that wider freedom.
Because so many users no longer download their code and run it on their own machines, but run it on someone else’s servers, they don’t even get the opportunity to see or modify the code.
Despite free software’s lofty goals, its world domination has led, inevitably, to client states, whose citizens could in theory benefit from Stallman’s freedoms, but are in practice, sharecroppers on someone else’s knowledge of how open source can be used and exploited.
Judging from the conversations here, in the heart of the free software community, the next hubristic plan after the last two decades’ world domination will be world liberation. The theme is “open source citizenship”, and the corridors and “hacker lounges” are filled with coders trying to work out how to transmit more than just their bits and bytes to a wider audience.
The talks are rife with not just the practice of creating open source, but how to expand its politics to wider circles.
One speaker talked about “Why Johnny Can’t Code” – how ordinary computer users might pick up and programme their increasing complex systems, in ways as straightforward as the simpler earlier computers of a generation past. Others wrestle with how to encourage and empower people to seize their data back from companies like Facebook, and hold it close on their own machines, under their own control.
When Torvalds planned his global conquest, nobody but the sort of people who fill these rooms knew what “programming freedom” was. Two decades on, everyone takes advantage of that freedom, but few of us know what it feels like for ourselves. Why should we? Why should we care about the freedom to control our own machines? Isn’t it better to hand over that dangerous power to those who are trained and comfortable with it? Facebook can hold our personal data.
Google can manage our private documents. Apple can be in charge of choosing what applications we should (and can) run.
It’s a tempting lullaby. But as we give our machines more power over our lives, and then hand control of those machines to strangers, we should perhaps wonder who exactly we’re allowing to truly dominate our digital world. Right now, it’s not Linus and the Open Source Bridge hackers, because despite the jokey rhetoric, they never asked for that power. Maybe we should be finding out from them how we might take it back.
