Why Open Source Makes Us Better Humans

The Art of Sharing In the Digital Age

One of the first things we learn in life from our parents is to share our toys, but our natural instincts fight against it. We want to keep the toys for ourselves to enjoy.

Eventually we realize that when we share our toys, we not only have more toys to play with, but playing with friends is kinda fun. We learn to be creative together.

The playground becomes a better place.

When I entered the workforce, the internet was just becoming a reality, and working for marketing and advertising agencies in NYC taught me about the competitive edge. To succeed, it was important to keep our strategies, our processes, and our workflows as secret as possible. Sharing with other companies in the industry was a risk. The tools we used were closed systems.

When the internet started to mature, I began to hear about this concept of Open Source (Linux, Netscape, MySQL) I could not understand how beneficial or economically stable open source could be? Why would people want to share code or software with their competition?

I had forgotten about the playground

The art of sharing fights against our selfish ambitions, and invites everyone to participate, not just the coders, but the artists, the writers, the innovators, and the teachers.

The open source model teaches us that working together to solve problems not only creates a better product, but makes us better people. Open Source is free for anyone to use, and the purpose is not for company profit or business gains, it is a social model — from people for people.

I was introduced to open source by working with Drupal, a web content management system, and it was a really great experience. There’s something magical about a community of people around the world making software together for anyone to use. I think the same can be said about Wordpress, or Joomla, or countless other open source systems that are used to build products.

Companies have also learned the benefits of using open source, and those companies that participate in open source projects have greater success because they have a larger pool of participants. Of course nobody does this better then Google.

“Companies get the Lego blocks for free, so they can spend their time and resources building what they want in particular.” — Jeffrey Hammond, Forrester

When we stop thinking of people as competition, but as co-laborers in creating products for a better society, the playground becomes a better place. Open source makes this a reality.