What Does “Open Source” Even Mean?

This interview is part of an ongoing investigation into what open source even is.

When I started writing code, I thought “open source” was a description of the freely distributed, publicly accessible situation that is a GitHub repository. One year in, I’m slowly learning that open source is not just about GitHub, is not just a concept, and might not even apply solely to software. It has a specific history, community, and context.

I recently talked to my friend Eitan about that context. Eitan is an activist and software engineer who works on browser accessibility at Mozilla Corporation, a company whose founding was a giant gamble on the possibilities of open source. I’ve edited our exchange for length and clarity.

Jen: You and open source. How did you meet?

Eitan: Linux came out as a free operating system in the early 1990s. Open source was revolutionary then, when Microsoft was starting to consolidate its share on desktop and it was the only thing. I got my start early on. In my pre-teens, I submitted to Linux. Any time I wanted to play a computer game, I had to know Linux.

In my house, open source and the idea of not submitting to corporate hegemony was ingrained. That’s what my dad talked about. He was an open source evangelist. He’d go around to companies and talk about why open source makes sense — not just moral sense, but business sense. The idea is that if you let go and you share your corporate secrets, there are other business models and ways of making money.

J: Do you think that idea is what’s driving the open source community now?

E: Today, open source has been co-opted. Not in a malicious way, but it’s not revolutionary anymore. We’re in this era of GitHub, but before GitHub there were other free ways of hosting projects online and collaborating. What’s happening now is interesting because Microsoft and Google have GitHub accounts. The norms have really changed; everyone is quote-unquote open source, and it’s the default to a large degree. I think they’re technically open source more than ideologically open source. Those are two different things.

J: How does that work? How are Microsoft and Google able to share code and have it not really mean anything?

E: Open source might have become normalized, but intellectual property is still entrenched in the way tech works. Now, companies rely on lawyers and patents instead of on the compiler.

J: What do you mean?

E: My uninformed, non-expert opinion is that, in the old days, companies would rely on compilers to obfuscate their software. Today, in the interpreted language world where the source code is always available by default, companies can’t hide behind compiled binary blobs anymore.

Richard Stallman wrote the Emacs text editor, the compiler, the command line. The whole GNU toolchain — that’s what Stallman worked on in the 1980s. The idea behind that was to open source the code for an entire operating system. Today, a big thing he does through his Free Software Foundation is campaign against software patents. I think, ironically, the reason there’s all this code in the open is because of these horrible software patents. But the truth is that the fight against software patents was lost.

Let’s say that tomorrow I come up with a great idea for a music app — maybe some fancy codec or algorithm for making playlists — and I want to make a full app surrounding my great idea. I may patent the core idea or algorithm. But then Amazon would come and say, “Hey, that’s an awesome app. We want to buy you out.”

“In reality, I infringed on tens of their patents just by creating a generic music app. They have all the leverage in the world and I have none.”

If I refuse, they’re theoretically stuck because they don’t have rights to my patent. In reality, I infringed on tens of their patents just by creating a generic music app. They have all the leverage in the world and I have none.

J: You’re saying they can put up all this code, even under an open license like MIT or BSD, and you’re allowed to use it but if you ever come up against their patent portfolio, you’ll lose.

E: Yeah, and patents don’t actually hold any weight until they are litigated. You can patent almost anything. Amazon might have ten stupid, baseless patents, but they could kill me with expensive litigation and fancy lawyers. I would have no chance.

The original idea of patents was to give an upstart who doesn’t have capital or manufacturing capabilities the time to come up with all that without the incumbents crushing them. My unexpertly observation is that source code is a moot point for large companies with gigantic patent portfolios, who already have capital and established manufacturing relationships. They have a level of security that allows them to share.

Software patents are a new thing. They were only upheld in a relatively recent Supreme Court decision. The debate ten or 15 years ago was: How do you patent a “for” loop? Which is ridiculous. Programmers are free from the physical aspect of engineering and come up with the same ideas all the time. Imagine if we were talking about patenting sentences. Lots of people happen to write the same sentences just by chance. In Amazon’s early days, they patented one-click shopping…

J: [Reads Wikipedia entry on 1-click] Wow, and licensed it to Apple. How gracious.

E: …Right? So if you created an indie bookseller website tomorrow with a streamlined checkout, Amazon could sue you out of existence — not necessarily because their patent is legit, but because they can afford to litigate and you can’t. Back to free software: I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation is right to fight on this, and I think it is an important lens for thinking about big corporate free/open source software.

Proprietary companies have also benefited hugely from open source projects. Look at Apple: Darwin, which OS X is based on, is built on an open source kernel. So much of the maturity of Apple’s tech, the robustness of their products, is due to the fact that they were allowed to incorporate these open projects — BSD, Apache, Samba, and WebKit. They skipped years and years of engineering. WebKit and Safari were built on an open web-rendering project and then became more of a publicly governed project. But Apple is the epitome of a proprietary company. Their hardware and software are not interoperable with anyone else’s.

The Free Software Foundation and the copyleft movement are attempts to fight back. There are all these different types of open source licenses. There’s the GPL, or GNU Public License, which says that if you use the code and you improve it, you have to publish your improvements. You’re not allowed to use it to make something new and then not share the new thing. The MIT and BSD licenses are a little different. I think they just say the code is available for you to do whatever you want with.

There was a big Linksys lawsuit you can look up to see how compliance has been enforced. Basically, routers are all Linux-based. All these router companies have made their modifications and done all this optimization, and then they never published the bundles they used. Linksys was compelled by a judge to share the open source images that were on their routers. In response, they just did the bare minimum. They put a CD in the box and called it open source. There was no concept of stewardship; it was just a code dump with no documentation, no bug reports, no participation on mailing lists. It was practically unusable even though they technically met their legal obligation.

J: Switching gears a little, something I’ve wondered about a lot is the difference between the “tech Left,” which seems mostly concerned with privacy and surveillance and how our data is used, and the “social movement Left,” which works for things like gender justice, prison abolition, and ending deportations. “Web literacy for all” definitely isn’t a demand. Why aren’t these movements more aligned?

It’s true there’s a difference. There’s Riseup, the tech collective that’s about encryption, secure communication, saying no to subpoenas, and giving activists technical tools.

“The ‘technical Left’ wants to divorce itself from these platforms and sees corporate control of our communication as one of the most significant problems we face.”

At the same time, when you look at Black Lives Matter, it’s really hashtag-BlackLivesMatter. This movement exploded on Twitter, a corporate social platform. The “technical Left” wants to divorce itself from these platforms and sees corporate control of our communication as one of the most significant problems we face. It wants list serves and more independent ways of communicating to be the norm, and it’s been creating tools for that.

It’s interesting to think about which movements do and don’t see corporate media as a problem. Maybe some movements are more willing to engage with popular culture?

J: Anything I missed that you want to comment on?

E: Yeah: diversity! The open source community is a self-selecting group, and I think the culture is very self-forming. It’s a culture that’s formed by white men.

The Linux Kernel is a good example. Linus has been unapologetic about his style, the way he says these horrible things. He calls people “stupid” and “idiotic” and makes all these claims about meritocracy. “Code talks” is something you hear a lot in open source. What they mean is that you can talk yourself blue in the face, but submit a code patch and that’s what will really speak for you and your value to the community.

Tech in general is bad when it comes to gender, but open source has a particularly shitty record, which has to do with the hiring pipeline. Actually, traditional proprietary corporations have a better track record. GitHub is doing much better, but RedHat, Mozilla, Collabora where I used to work — they all have a really bad gender gap. This isn’t a coincidence; they have a bad gender gap because they are open source. It’s always been that way because open source is self-selecting and so many projects don’t necessarily adhere to U.S. labor laws or common HR practices.

There have been these words and ideas like “unconference” — this idea of lack of structure being a merit. But there’s also backlash against that now, people saying, “Let’s have a Code of Conduct. Let’s not let an absence of structure, a vacuum, decide who sets the tone.”

Have you heard of Model View Culture? Some of their stuff is great and some is less great, but they have a good critique of the inclusion narrative when it comes to race and gender diversity. A lot of times, people translate the gender gap problem into these “inclusion in tech” initiatives, which annoys me because inclusion isn’t the point. It’s about having equal access to technical skills and opportunities. It’s not about having a few more women CEOs.