Culture Has Always Been Open
It is October 5th, 1991. A young software engineer by the name of Linus Torvalds is on the verge of changing the world. About 400 years earlier, in what is now modern Germany, a theologian named Martin Luther was sequestered in a castle, and, as any learned person at the time would do, turned to the Bible — he too was on the verge of changing the world.
Both men had undertaken or were about to undertake a difficult intellectual challenge: Torvalds wanted a Unix-like operating system available freely to anyone anywhere; Luther wanted the Bible — until then mostly written in Ancient Greek/Hebew/Latin (there is academic debate on what the exact language he translated from is) to be available in the German language so that common people could read and understand the word of god.
Of course neither could know how profoundly their actions would shape the world around them.
Today, Christianity is a thriving belief system that is home to countless theological interpretations of the Bible, a diverse and distinct set of philosophical branches and sub-branches. In the same way, Torvald’s belief that the powerful computing afforded by a Unix-like operating system had to be free, open and accessible to those who want to use and adapt it, has led to a proliferation of Linux-based computing systems that can be found in servers, phones, laptops, and everywhere in between.
A cursory glance at the motivations of these two men tells us that they share common principles: that knowledge had to be free and available to anyone, not just a select few.
I would argue it was deeper than that: they understood that for cultures to flourish, cultures must be open and accessible.
And malleable.
Because cultures that weren’t are unfortunately consigned to history.
This openness of knowledge and in ideology that typifies the open source movement finds parallels in other cultures and religions too. For instance, Hinduism — the most decentralized and open of all religions — has a wide and diverse pantheon of Gods and Goddesses, some having cache among a large cross section of Hindus scattered across borders and linguistic lines — while others resonate only to people from a certain area. In its entry under Hinduism, Britannica Encyclopedia notes: “More strikingly than any other major religious community, Hindus accept — and indeed celebrate — the organic, multileveled, and sometimes pluralistic nature of their traditions. Part of that sentence could be adapted to describe the mindset of Linux Desktop users, fragmented as they are over a whole world of Distributions, Desktop Environments, Window Managers, and Display Managers.
In music, DJs have been extracting samples of melodies, drum-beats, chord-progressions to build completely new songs, and, in some cases, complete genres. One of my favourite YouTube channels is run by an elementary school music teacher who creates mashups, bringing together genres and artists that would, at first glance, have nothing to do with one another.
(A note to music aficionados: Bill McClintok’s channel is like listening to a radio station from a parallel universe — you’ve been warned).
The story of an abandoned child found by a kind couple is a recurring one across mythologies. This couple raise this abandoned child on their own, but as he grows older, the couple realizes that there is an inexplicable air to the young man. There is an almost divine presence that draws people to him; as he grows into a man, he becomes a talismanic figure to his people, and eventually his nation. Even after his apparent death, the boy’s legend continues to grow — village to village, town to town, city to city, country to country. Somehow the legend survives the ravages of time, space, and changing tastes.
You are all familiar with this story.
Depending on who you are and where you come from, this is either the story of Krishna, Clarke Kent/Superman, Luke Skywalker. Or Hercules. Or Neo from the Matrix. The pedants among you will point out the differences between those characters’ backstories — and yes, there are plenty of distinct details to each story — but the structure (what Joseph Campbell called ‘The Hero’s Journey’) and the elements are strikingly similar.
Here we see again how an openness of spirit and substance led to rich, distinct stories that adapted to their people, the time, and space. Here too we see parallels between Open Source Software (OSS) and storytelling over the ages. To my (non-expert) eyes, this is no different to the scratch your own itch mentality that has fed the OSS ecosystem — only one is to solve computing problems, the other is to facilitate storytelling.
Seen from this perspective, the ideals of open knowledge and sharing isn’t new, but timeless. OSS has only served to remind us of this fact.
The Intellectual Property (IP) legal landscape that we find now find ourselves in — affecting how and where we consume movies and music, the choices we make on what devices and platforms we perform our computing tasks on, the affordability of text books, even the availability of the technical research and knowledge needed to replicate Covid19 vaccines, and their subsequent equitable worldwide distribution — is a relatively recent phenomenon, a by-product of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution1.
The 21st Century has already shown signs that we as a species need to look at intellectual property in a new light — or, more precisely, rekindle an old lamp that has served as a beacon for cultural progress.
Code, data, course syllabi, creative works, and even manufacturing processes and tools (via 3D printing of open schematics) are gradually being opened up to those who want free and unrestricted access to them.
If we can wield the spirit of cooperation, collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and open access that typifies OSS, to critical problems faced by local communities or the planet as a whole, the future would be an exciting time to live in.
[1] Mokyr, Joel. “Intellectual Property Rights, the Industrial Revolution, and the Beginnings of Modern Economic Growth.” The American Economic Review, vol. 99, no. 2, 2009, pp. 349–355. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25592423. Accessed 7 May 2021.
