On February 5, 1998, a small gathering was held at the VA Research Center in California, USA. Attendees included Eric Raymond, Larry Augustin, and Jon “maddog” Hall participating by phone. At this meeting, everyone agreed to use the term “Open Source” proposed by Christine Peterson to replace the ambiguous term “Free Software” for English speakers, expressing the same software and meaning, but being easier to understand and more likely to gain support. From that day on, “Open Source” was officially born, and this February marks the 20th anniversary of the open source movement!
In recent years, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of the open source movement, and many people have shared their thoughts with me. Between 2012 and 2014, I wrote many articles about my understanding of open source, such as Thoughts on Commercial Participation in Open Source Communities, Reviewing China’s Open Source Wave, and this one. Reading them now, they still feel quite naive. I thought I’d take this opportunity of the 20th anniversary of open source to combine others’ thoughts with my own recent reflections here. This article cannot be described as “for readers’ enjoyment,” and any errors or omissions are welcome to be pointed out.
Community—The Connection of the Common People
The success of open source (undoubtedly successful!) is due to the success of the free software movement, and even more so to the success of the longer-standing cyber community culture. Before this, the free software movement initiated by Richard Stallman succeeded largely because of the inheritance of this community culture.
Technological progress and development, especially the application of network technology, have connected people around the world, allowing any ordinary person to express and transmit freely, thereby largely dissolving the control and suppression of individuals by unified centralized institutions (such as governments, political parties, or enterprises). After all, atomized individuals are easier to rule, but connected people will burst with enormous energy. This freedom has influenced the software development field, making software no longer just a cold productivity tool; it has also become a tool for people to express and defend freedom, a weapon against the infringement of personal freedom by unified centralized institutions. When ordinary people connect through cyberspace, they form communities. Communities are not only new social relationships but also shape new production relations. RMS’s innovation was, in a sense, discovering and utilizing this social trend and the existing community foundation, and naming this movement “free software.”
However, communities have an inherent flaw. When participants become fewer or after a certain internal cultural atmosphere forms (such as elitism), they have strong exclusivity and create an “echo chamber effect.” This leads to increasingly extreme community culture, making it harder to hear new viewpoints or attract newcomers, and even dictators emerge. Originally free expression is suppressed by powerful community culture, which can be considered “tyranny of the majority.” This reminds me of the historical “Death of Caesar.” I believe that if it weren’t for the elitism of that time (the cathedral model), the GNU Hurd kernel wouldn’t have consistently lagged behind the Linux kernel, to the point where GNU Hurd now can only support 32-bit architecture and hardware from over a decade ago.
When the Linux kernel began development, it was exactly when the free software movement was surging and growing in influence (even reaching Finland), and precisely at the time node when elitism was just beginning to emerge. Linux’s initial success was largely due to abandoning the existing elitism, breaking down barriers to let more people participate in the development process. So now many open source projects attach great importance to cultivating and introducing newcomers, lowering the threshold for new members to join. Breaking down the barriers of elitism is not only the success of the “bazaar model,” but also the key to the healthy development of an open source project community.
The Push and Constraints of Commercial Forces
The term “Open Source” was proposed largely to solve the ambiguity of the word “Free,” and the benefit is that it’s more business-friendly. A major benefit of business entering the free software community is that it greatly offsets the existing elitism and some degree of anti-commercialization, making it easier to break down barriers. But there’s a risk: it could completely destroy the community, because business naturally tends toward monopoly and centralization, which is incompatible with the community’s free will.
For the open source movement, the initial addition of business had a strong driving effect, but later it became a constraint on open source development. This is like installing an airplane’s jet engine on a family sedan; this engine consumes a lot of fuel and is hard to control. In the starting phase, it does accelerate quickly, but on curves, it can cause loss of control. From the current perspective, business’s role in promoting open source is still obvious, especially the driving force of large companies, which is still a huge driving force for open source development. But I pessimistically believe that in the foreseeable future, the destructive effect of large companies on open source culture (mainly referring to open source communities) will begin to appear and will greatly affect community freedom, thereby harming the open source movement. So how to balance business’s promoting role in open source with the obstacles it brings, and reasonably avoid risks, is still something that needs research and practice.
A popular saying is “open source business model.” Some people admire Red Hat’s subscription service model, some admire the direct software sales model, others admire the after-sales service model, or service fees for applying open source software (such as installation, training, or legal affairs), and so on. I think discussing “open source business model” is a pseudo-proposition, because open source only introduced a new development model, not a new business model; so as long as it doesn’t violate open source licenses, any business model that promotes business development—in short, any business model that can make money—can be used. Over-pursuing “open source business model” may not only fail to make money but may even lead down some inexplicable wrong paths, such as the flourishing “domestic operating systems” from a couple of years ago. I think rather than labeling something as “domestic,” it’s better to honestly make good products and sell products directly or make money from services around the products. When business no longer promotes open source, or even goes astray, then it’s better to have none at all.
When we distort “open source” into a business model, we’re actually evading moral responsibility and only focusing on software visibility and commercial interests. This is exactly one of the points in RMS’s article Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software attacking the open source movement. When open source becomes a business model, it begins to enter elitism or even dictatorship that only focuses on results, which runs counter to community culture.
Integration Rather Than Exclusion, Decentralization Rather Than Centralization
Many people will claim that what they like is “free software,” not “open source software,” and even call those who promote open source “open source faction” (not Pie, you can’t eat it!), treating them with disdainful and opposing expressions and attitudes. I think this model of dividing enemies and friends is no different from the Cultural Revolution! After practice, I believe that in any community, the most important thing is integration, not exclusion. Only full integration can avoid elitism within the community and avoid the “echo chamber effect”; full integration means strengthening full connections between people, and more connections can produce more results, which has a positive effect on overall social development. At the same time, I also agree with cross-community integration; only more cross-community or even cross-technology integration can faster transform technology products into products beneficial to people’s social lives, into forces that promote social progress. The core here is still promoting connections! Integration doesn’t mean blind tolerance; behaviors that affect community development and community freedom should be firmly stopped, and some potential dictatorial behaviors and elitism should be nipped in the bud.
At the same time, we should see that precisely because of more integration, power becomes more balanced, ideally inhibiting the emergence of centralized dictatorship. This achieves the goal of decentralization and checks and balances, promoting social decentralization, which I think is also an important achievement of the open source movement over these 20 years.
Freedom, Decentralization—The Driving Engine of Innovation
Looking back at 20 years of the open source movement, countless people have contributed one after another, producing a large number of open source products and contributing huge strength to overall social innovation. When we say “open source is the driving engine of innovation,” we’re actually hiding an affirmation of the essence of the open source movement. The essence of the open source movement, in short, is “Freedom · Collaboration · Innovation”. These three words are not my original creation; these three words appeared in 1998, which happened to be when the open source movement was proposed, and “Freedom, Collaboration, Creation” were actually the slogan of Tsinghua University’s AKA Group. The Tsinghua AKA Group once promoted and spread free software on campus and in society, and can be said to be the true inheritors of early open source spirit in China! I think “Freedom, Collaboration, Creation” already very accurately reflects the essence of the open source movement. For reading comfort, I changed the last word to “Innovation”:
- Freedom means the core of community culture. As mentioned above, because of people’s inner desire for freedom, communities are produced and developed;
- Collaboration is the working mode after the community is fully connected (how well this matches the development model on GitHub now). In fact, cross-border collaboration models had already appeared in the US military-industrial-academic complex in the 1960s. The characteristic of this collaboration is decentralization, that is, there is no centralized institution to coordinate work and allocate resources. Through immediately formed flexible organizations (ad-hocracy), people’s talents are fully utilized, maximizing human subjective initiative to burst with maximum productivity.
- Innovation is the result after collaboration. These results in turn promote the integration of freedom, improve collaboration models, attract more newcomers to join the community, and promote more connections.
In short: humanistic desire for freedom drives the establishment of communities and gives birth to decentralized collaboration, producing new products. And in turn, it further promotes the development of freedom.
Former MIT professor Nicholas Negroponte believed that technological progress represented by the internet will definitely produce a “technological utopia,” where society becomes flatter, then globalized, and control becomes more decentralized. The 20 years of open source exactly reflect that people are gradually moving toward this technological utopia.
Looking to the Future, Original Intent Unchanged!
Admittedly, utopias don’t exist. From Plato’s “Republic” to George Orwell’s “1984,” utopias are illusory and impossible to achieve. When we talk about “technological utopia,” we often idealize reality, but reality has various problems and uncontrollable factors. The future development of open source still has great uncertainty. Even the freedom that open source already depends on is increasingly being cut by various power institutions or large companies. An article commemorating the 20th anniversary of open source on the Open Source Initiative website has this passage:
In the third decade of open source, we will rediscover software freedom. We allowed ourselves to be divided—the free software and open source communities—and pretended there was a difference between the two, but there is not. They are both expressions of software freedom and we’re going to rediscover that in the next 10 years because we will be forced to solve problems with new models: cloud computing, the Internet of Things, manipulation of Big Data, Blockchain, 5G, etc. As we solve those problems we will discover that it is vital to go back to the Four Freedoms, ensuring software is free to use, that it is open to study, that it may be freely changed, and that it may be equally distributed.
When I saw this passage, I was really encouraged. Open source for 20 years, although the term “open source” was proposed just to avoid the ambiguity of the English word “free,” its fundamental intention is still to defend human freedom rights. The people who participated in that small gathering 20 years ago have been fighting on the front line for human digital rights for these 20 years. Many are already white-haired but have no children (yes, I’m talking about Eric Raymond!), yet they still keep writing code and articles.
As this passage says, my prediction for the future development of the open source movement is similar. I hope the open source movement can “find its original intent,” think about the original purpose of proposing open source 20 years ago, think that the fundamental purpose of introducing commercial participation is not just to make money but to promote freedom, think about the role of technological progress in promoting society; I hope open source can benefit more people with computer technology and information network technology, let more people have free expression, and make the world more harmonious and equal.
I hope there will no longer be a distinction between “free software” and “open source software” in the future, and ultimately they can merge together, with everyone collaborating to fight for human freedom rights!
References:
“From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism”, 2013-5, [US] Fred Turner, translated by Zhang Xingzhou et al., Publishing House of Electronics Industry. Many thanks to Bill Gates for recommending this book to me, it was really enlightening!
“The Cathedral and the Bazaar”, 2014-5, [US] Eric S. Raymond, China Machine Press. ESR’s book is basically a must-read, you can check out the Chinese translation review I wrote years ago.
Reposted from: Developer Relations »
