Open Source Values

[Monty J. Harder]

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 00:05:07 -0600, Jim Herrmann <kclug at itdepends.com> wrote:

> What I would like to know from some of you guys is, which of your values
> are best served by OSS?  Please let me know either directly in
> confidence, or publicly to the list, where you consider yourself on the
> conservative/moderate/progressive political spectrum, and what it is
> about OSS that appeals to you.

  Well, first of all, the whole linear left-right thing is bogus. 
(See http://www.self-gov.org/quiz.html for details.) By buying into
the idea that you have to sign up for a whole package of ideas, you
concede at the outset that sacrificing liberty in one domain is the
price of preserving it in another.  As you probably know, I'm a
libertarian; to quote Austin Powers, it's about FREEDOM, BABY!  YEAH!

  The original design philosophy of Unix was to make as much of the OS
code as possible platform-independent, and the configuration in plain
text files.  This frees people to write code that can run on any
conformant system with just a recompile for the target architecture,
and build reusable code and data structures that can be recombined in
ways that the original designers never imagined.  The astute observer
will find a parallel in the ways that free markets produce goods and
services that central planners didn't think were important.

  Linux takes that philosophy to its logical conclusion, assuring that
the platform-independent code is in the hands the system's owner (or
whoever he hires to tune it for a specific purpose).  In reality,
'Linux' (or even 'GNU/Linux' for the hard-line Stallmaniacs) is not an
operating system, but a toolkit for building operating systems.  To
the conventional, authoritarian mind, this is 'anarchy, lawlessness,
chaos!'  They can't conceive of a society without government experts
giving the imperial imprimatur to certain endeavours; they are
frightened by the notion that people who aren't even licensed to
practice computing could build systems to do mission-critical work. 
They take it as a given that such things are too important to leave to
'amateurs'.

  And yet, people around the world, citizens of different nations,
with no Five Year Plan from an Office of Operating Systems to describe
in agonizing detail the legal ways to manipulate bits, have built, not
a single system, but a meta-system, generating rock-solid software
that runs most of the Internet, as well as constantly expanding its
share in niche after niche that it enters.