Open Source Hypocrisy

Some of the most appropriate quotes for this website:

“Historically, the most visible and best-organized part of the hacker culture has been both very zealous and very anticommercial. The Free Software Foundation founded by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) supported a great deal of open-source development from the early 1980s forward, including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the forseeable future.”

“For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the hacker culture. They effectively defined the term `free software’, deliberately giving it a confrontational weight (which the newer label `open source’ just as deliberately avoids).”

“Thus, perceptions of the hacker culture from both within and without it tended to identify the culture with the FSF’s zealous attitude and perceived anticommercial aims. RMS himself denies he is anticommercial, but his program has been so read by most people, including many of his most vocal partisans. The FSF’s vigorous and explicit drive to ``Stamp Out Software Hoarding!’’ became the closest thing to a hacker ideology, and RMS the closest thing to a leader of the hacker culture.”

“The FSF’s license terms, the ``General Public License’’ (GPL), expresses the FSF’s attitudes. It is very widely used in the open-source world. North Carolina’s Metalab (formerly Sunsite) is the largest and most popular software archive in the Linux world. In July 1997 about half the Sunsite software packages with explicit license terms used GPL.”

Ok, so that explains the one group. But there is another…

“But the FSF was never the only game in town. There was always a quieter, less confrontational and more market-friendly strain in the hacker culture. The pragmatists were loyal not so much to an ideology as to a group of engineering traditions founded on early open-source efforts which predated the FSF. These traditions included, most importantly, the intertwined technical cultures of Unix and the pre-commercial Internet.”

“The typical pragmatist attitude is only moderately anticommercial, and its major grievance against the corporate world is not `hoarding’ per se. Rather it is that world’s perverse refusal to adopt superior approaches incorporating Unix and open standards and open-source software. If the pragmatist hates anything, it is less likely to be `hoarders’ in general than the current King Log of the software establishment; formerly IBM, now Microsoft.”

“To pragmatists the GPL is important as a tool, rather than as an end in itself. Its main value is not as a weapon against `hoarding’, but as a tool for encouraging software sharing and the growth of bazaar-modebazaar-mode development communities. The pragmatist values having good tools and toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time, his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical quality that very little closed software can meet.”

Excellent reading, as the piece goes on to explain how the pragmatists gained a foothold with the introduction of linux and Linus Torvalds, who has always been a pragmatist and takes occasional potshots at the zealots.

“Increasingly it was the anticommercial purists who found themselves in a minority. How much things had changed would not become apparent until the Netscape announcement in February 1998 that it would distribute Navigator 5.0 in source. This excited more interest in `free software’ within the corporate world. The subsequent call to the hacker culture to exploit this unprecedented opportunity and to re-label its product from `free software’ to `open source’ was met with a level of instant approval that surprised everybody involved.”

“In a reinforcing development, the pragmatist part of the culture was itself becoming polycentric by the mid-1990s. Other semi-independent communities with their own self-consciousness and charismatic leaders began to bud from the Unix/Internet root stock. Of these, the most important after Linux was the Perl culture under Larry Wall. Smaller, but still significant, were the traditions building up around John Osterhout’s Tcl and Guido van Rossum’s Python languages. All three of these communities expressed their ideological independence by devising their own, non-GPL licensing schemes.”

I’ll leave the rest of the reading for you as a literary exercise :-)

Pragmatists, unite!

My name’s Mitch and I’m an open source developer. That means I write code and give it away freely, under an open source license.

I do this because I strive for a common good; and have this romantic notion that there are others out there that would like to share their knowledge with me in a cooperative fashion.

Now on to the impetus behind this website.

While celebrating my birthday, we were walking across the street on the corner by our apartment here in New York City. While crossing, a woman driving a golden-brown SUV (Acura, IIRC) blazed down the street, most likely doing 1.5 times the speed limit. Or maybe more…

She refused to yield, despite us being in the right by crossing at the intersection; and as we pulled our kids back to safety she swerved to get around us, flapping her arms (and mouth) and gesticulating wildly. Her expression was clear, she was horribly put off by the lowly pedestrian scum blocking her path to the diamond store or wherever she was going.

I turned and walked behind her as she drove down the street. I held out both of my arms in confusion, clearly asking “Why?”

I was answered with a gesture involving her middle finger and little else.

So what has this to do with Open Source, or the topic of Open Source Hypocrisy?

Attitude, baby, it’s all about attitude.

This woman’s selfish and arrogant attitude mirrors a disturbing trend in the world of Open Source. People aren’t coming to Open Source because they have things to do and want to share in the effort – they are coming to Open Source so they can get their names up in lights, most likely in a vain attempt at easy money later, mostly due to their celebrity status.

Old School

Back in the day, we had stuff to do. It was much simpler then! Our motivation was driven by that simple need. There were no IPOs, no front page articles in trade magazines, no VCs looking for young studs to make rich on their first effort.

We had deadlines just like everyone else, and we shared our knowledge and code in the hopes that we could help each other, and get helped out in the process. Reciprocation, baby.

New School

Forget about getting work done, that’s for the old-timers. We’re the new school, and we’re here solely for the bling. If we don’t get the bling, then we’ll do whatever it takes to set ourselves up to be in the position to get it.

Consider New School as the software development equivalent of the Me Generation. There’s no reciprocation, it’s all about name recognition.

Clash of the Titans

When you have people that take a socialist perspective with software and inject a few selfish, arrogant types that just want their names all over everything, you have a recipe for disaster.

We’ve seen this happen before on open source projects, and presentations have been written up on how to deal with that personality – the most famous of course was the “How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)” presentation given at Google (video) .

I’ve watched projects with a great mix of talent wither to a handful of contributors due to such attitudes. The real whopper here is that usually these people think they are the true champions of open source, when they are essentially champions of themselves, wrapping their selfish motives in the cloak of the GPL, somehow justifying their somewhat suspect motives.

The Purpose of This Site

I’m not starting this site to bash on particular people or projects – even if some make themselves a constant and consistent target. Some people or projects may get mentioned more often than others, but it is the hopes of such critical mention will at least provide some incentive for the offending parties to consider changing their ways.

What’s important here is to bring the focus back to why we took this route in the first place.