Open

Open is an idea that’s important to me.

Open as an idea, open as an approach and open as a principle. As an idea I’ve always liked open since it engenders further exploration, it encourages debate and is non-prescriptive. As an approach open is good too, it does not allow of preconceptions and can be an antidote to misconceptions. All very fine and well so far — but what about open as a principle? For a long time the tagline on my twitter account, @rherron simply read ‘open everything enthusiast’ and by this I meant that I supported the idea of free open source software and believed in open data and also open standards. So that’s what I mean by open as a principle.

After I graduated college with a Diploma in Communications and Development, having previously completed a degree in ologies (Sociology, Philosophy & English Literature), one of my first jobs was in software testing. This was the mid to late nineties and software was becoming a big deal in Ireland, what with this island being the english speaking entrypoint to the european market for large US IT multinationals. So I got this job as a software tester, a digital spot-the-difference contractor and I did that for a year or two while getting an MCSE (Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer) which allowed me to do more complex exercises in digital spot-the-difference and make more money. Running through scripts that said ‘click this menu, does this happen on this machine in english the same as it happens on this one in french?’ — this stuff was demeaning and I remember lamenting to my colleagues that all we’d ever be good at in this job would be navigating menus and remembering settings without ever getting a real feel for what was going on inside. Much as studying for the MCSE gave a bit of a grounding we still weren’t getting our hands dirty with the innards of the thing. I really didn’t know what I was talking about but I worked with people who knew a lot more than me, people who’d suggest things like using a little known search engine called google to more easily find info on the web. And one of these guys suggested using an operating system other than windows — I didn’t even know there were others — he suggested trying linux. So I googled that — crikey.

Linux was free software, one of its four main freedoms was that the source code was open, could be looked at and copied and changed and improved etc. This was exactly what I’d been railling against in the world of windows and it already existed and there was a word for it and a whole movement and community around it, around free software — the source code of which was open.

That was my first experience of open but by no means my last.