Open Source Software

I support the open exchange of ideas and believe this to be a necessary foundational principle in any society. The internet, a game-changer in the dissemination and democratization of ideas, has opened tremendous opportunities for us regular folk, and in doing so has made The Powers That Be a very nervous lot indeed. Power perpetuates power, and I have a strong moral need to oppose that process.

To understand this more eloquently than I could ever put it, I’ll save you the historical discussion of Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, and John von Neumann and instead point you to Cory Doctorow’s talk “The Coming War on General Computation”, embedded below. If you’d prefer a shorter textual explanation, the companion article “Lockdown” can be found at BoingBoing.

The gist (“tl;dr” if you prefer) is that computers and networks are, by definition, incompatible with the modes of centralized top-down control that have characterized our modern world since the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, from governments to corporations. In order to keep that status quo in effect, it’s necessary to hobble computers at a fundamental level.

We, as citizens and every day folk, don’t always realize this because we’re so entrenched in the same systems of control. It’s easy to forget, to just go with the crowd and keep our heads down.

As I’m one of those who grew up with computers, who still remembers the archaic days of dial-up BBSs and the most primitive of HTML websites, and who read a whole lot of Neal Stephenson, I have a real problem with that trend of locking up the shiny things. Even if the proprietary goods are useful and pretty and let everyone have a voice, I can’t get behind the movement to lock it all away behind technological barriers that have force of law behind them.

Because of that, I use open-source software whenever possible and support FOSS projects in whatever way I can. This means supporting projects like Richard Stallman’s GNU/Linux. It means supporting less-popular movements like The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks who, for all they’re treated as criminals by the popular press, are at the forefront of a movement that will continue to play out as long as we have a network-driven world.

I refuse to give entrenched powers the benefit of the doubt, no matter how many laws they hide behind or what moral high ground they attempt to take. And I refuse to support them as long as they refuse to engage with the people as anything but customers.

Open Source Software

Further Reading