Open Source
What is “open source”? It depends on who you ask. The most moderate interpretations of open source describe it primarily as a means of keeping specific kernels (core codes of software) open and unrestricted by claims of intellectual property right so that programmers can work on and modify these systems. Thus, open source software is software that evolves, that is continually augmented by those who use it. The Open Source Initiative points out that the open source model of intellectual production “produces better software than the traditional closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.”
But the core idea behind open source, the “kernel” if you will, applies to far more than just the production of software, or merely proving the advantages of decentralized production models to the corporate sphere.
In a wider sense, open source is the radical idea that nobody really owns the tools of collective intellectual creativity. Open source is a recognition of this fact, and an attempt to subvert the legalistic manipulations of capital that continually seek to impose strict boundaries of ownership around increasingly varied bodies of knowledge and intellectual products.
Open source is also a multitude of ongoing projects inspired by this radically democratic perspective - some more coordinated and sophisticated than others - to build new architectures of software, new repositories of information, and new networks of media. Many projects that have very little relationship to software and network technologies also can be thought of as sharing the ethical kernel utilized by projects more clearly characterized as open source. All of this work is designed to function and grow beyond the control of any dominant institution or set of actors within the capitalist market economy. This is the kernel: a refusal to allow human creative capacity and the information it produces to be swallowed up and destroyed by capitalist market structures.
Open source software
The most well known example of an open source project is the Linux Operating System. In fact, Linux, and the programming communities that have built upon this and similar software systems provide the name “open source” to these kinds of intellectual projects precisely because the source code for the Linux system is open; that is to say, it is a kernel open to duplication, modification, and all other kinds of usage in any manner that conforms with the core philosophy of openness. Of course, to conform with the realities of a rational-legal capitalism, this philosophy has been codified into numerous licences (for a summary list of these seehttp://www.opensource.org/licenses/).
There are many more forms of open source software besides the iconographic Linux system. For a better history and explanation of the open source movement within the realm of computing and information technologies check out the following web sites:
http://www.openknowledge.org/writing/open-source/scb/brief-open-source-history.html
http://www.dwheeler.com/secure-programs/Secure-Programs-HOWTO/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/
Open source intellectual projects and products
Moderntiy is not purely about the emergent technologies that have characterized it. The “network society,” “information age,” the “digital era,” whatever we might call it, is not a society defined first and foremost by the new tools of computation and communications that give us our collective sense of newness and identity. The world we live in is in so many important respects the same world that we have always lived in. It is one of real human relationships. And yet it is a new world with new realities and possibilities.
The world remains one characterized by severe inequalities and structures of oppression. The new information technologies have a contradictory relationship to the continuity of inequality and exploitation in our times. Many of the technologies that characterize our age, the internet, wireless communication, databases, geospatial mapping and imagery, high computing, were developed by institutions of power and social order: the military, business corporations, and the state. These institutions have more often thatn not applied the new technologies to dubious goals at best, and violently exploitative goals at worst. And yet, the new technologies have been utilized by other agents, by communities, activists, individuals. and organzations, with names like the Zapatistas, hacktivists, vote swappers, or MoveOn.org. The new information technologies have become just as much a tool of resistance as a tool of oppression. The development of open source software and open source projects has been a major part of this contradictory development. The best example of the utilization of open source technology and spirit is evident in the Indymedia project, an enormous transnational collaboration of activists and communities seeking a method of social documentation, information exchange, and media beyond the control of corporate media, or any centralized power for that matter.
Please support, and let Indymedia support you -
www.indymedia.org
Other projects that utilize open source software, or work in the spirit of open source include:
Wikimedia
Sourceforge
http://www.opensource.org/
