The Motivation to be Open

Vision is the river, and we who have been changed are the flood.

-The Story of B by Daniel Quinn

Most of the world is not "open" in the way I mean when I write about it here.  That much is simply fact.  Those of us who are aware of openness are almost obsessed by it, though, it becomes our lives, our purpose, and fuels our passion for creation of new alternatives to the prescribed way in which we are taught to think about consumer culture.  It is false to say that those who don't subscribe to Open culture reject it with the same fervor, however.  This is also simply fact.  For the most part, people are unaware of the contributions openness has made to our world, or if they know of its existence, they perceive it with the framing it is generally given by corporate manufacturers as being less reliable, rooted in nonconformist or artsy fartsy culture, or simply not as glamorous as buying a shiny new gadget made with proprietary technology.

It seems then, that we Open-heads--the DIYers and designers and programmers and welders and carpenters and artists and activists and writers alike--have an unusually well-articulated philosophy that captures our desire for freedom and unhindered innovation.  It hearkens back to the spirit of the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, or the heyday of Greek philosophy.  At least, this is how it appears at first glance.  Once you delve into the thick of it, though, nuances start to surface that are indicative of a much more fractured culture than the dedication that seems to exist across the board.

For instance, there is a very clear division between Makers, people who build hardware and repurpose other peoples trash and the Open Source code-hounds who create such works of functional art as GIMP Shop and Mozilla Firefox.  Mostly, it's an age thing.  This isn't true across the board, but the demographic most attracted to hardware hacking tends to be older, more trained in practical skills such a welding, electronics, and carpentry, while those most attracted to writing code tend to be younger, wealthier, and working a day job at a "real" company writing proprietary code.  And, while both hardware and software projects tend to use the contributions of other builders/coders as a matter of course, the practical implications of sourcing parts for hardware designs lends itself to a workflow that emphasizes documentation and instruction over the approach taken by software coders, which tends to focus on easy distribution of applications or modules.

And perhaps more importantly is the way in which we think about licensing in these two situations.  Both Hardware and Software have their own open-source definitions.  These definitions exist because our culture does not recognize openness as a legitimate force in the world and tends to promote closed models as the most profitable.  Thus, we protect our space with definitions.  Software and content creation tend to be licensed using the GPL or Creative Commons licensing systems, which gives coders and artists a legal leg-up when it comes to defending their rights against those who would include their work in proprietary designs.  Hardware is much harder to license by its very nature, and short of patenting a design (a NO NO in the open community!), there is little one can do other than strive to build things better and more uniquely than the competition.

And thus we come to the paradox which seems to drive the movement itself.  On one hand, we are open, promoting collaboration and community for the sake of collective success and innovation.  On the other, we want to exclude our work from proprietary development and secure our place in the world as being separate from the paradigm of copyright and patent currently promoted by our culture.  To accomplish the former, we facilitate meeting spaces, collaborative forums, hold conferences, share designs, and experiment with silly ideas.  For the latter, we license our content, attempt to work faster than the competition, and fight the good fight against restrictive licensing and abusive rights management.  

The latter constitute programs, things we've set in motion in order to help us turn the tide.  These are stopgap solutions, these are incremental changes.  These are in our mind most of the time.  The former constitute a new vision that the world has not seen for many thousands of years.  Open technology has its own motivation and contains within the idea itself a way of propagating the thoughts and attitudes that fuel its wild success.  By participating, by creating something new, we are spreading our concept of freedom and cultural diversity to a world that has long been used to the homogeneous atmosphere of consumer capitalism and taker philosophy.   

Read the quote at the beginning of the post again.  It refers to anyone who has been swept away by a revolution, an individual who is part of an unstoppable deluge of ideas, new ways of being, and self-propagating culture.  In today's world, open culture is that flood.  We are taking back our world bit by bit, slowly now, but the pace is sure to pick up in the weeks, months, and years to come.