Occupy Wall Street reminds me of open source software |
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| By: Michael Robinson Monday October 3, 2011 11:38 am | |
The thing in NYC is just a kernel. Ubuntu is a useful concept in this analogy.
“I am what I am because of who we all are.”
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ubuntu
Open source software has no defined “message.” It’s just an amalgam of ideas from everyone who’s willing to contribute. And you’ll note that open source powers most servers, websites, phones, and consumer network hardware.
What happened in software is starting to happen in civilization.
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6 Comments
Good analogy!
Creative Commons Democracy!
If I don’t like an open source product, I can fork and do what I think best; taking either the code of the existing product as a starting point, or a blank sheet of paper and not look at the existing product. How, please, would I fork the USA. Which is sort of what OWS is asking for. And you are right about the process, in most projects it is consensus driven with peer review of the coding.
Interestingly enough, the pure democracy of open source breaks down somewhat because of economic power, just like the pure democracy of the USA breaks down in the face of massive economic power. Commercial organizations like Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat (Fedora) and Intel and some others get to drive what is going on because they have economic power to hire workers.
Letting communities fork and start mini-nations sounds like a great idea. Complicated, but good.
Autonomous regions currently within the US don’t give much hope, but I think we’d see more Liberty Squares than Puerto Ricos if the process were formalized and common.
Help! What does ‘fork’ mean here? ‘Split off’?
If so, I live in New England. May we please fork now?
Forking in open source is when someone takes a project’s code and goes in their own direction. Example: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/LibreOffice