Fiasco Press

www.fiascopress.org

Journal of Swarm Scholarship

Open Source and the Library

Eric Arthur Blair

My fellow Collegians,

I know that you have some very strong opinions about this week's topic of interest. I can assure you that I certainly do too. It's an important issue, I will certainly grant you that. Yet the ramifications of said issue do not concern me quite so terribly as does the probability that you, my fellow student, do not yet have much of an opinion regarding what tomorrow's historians will cite as one of the most pivotal decisions human society will make in the 21st century: whether to embrace open source technologies, or whether to outlaw them. It is not so difficult to imagine a day not so far from now when either honest field operatives or experienced publicists will accuse open source operating systems such as Linux of providing material support to terrorism by the simple fact that they are freely available for all the world to use. Before that day and its rhetoric arrives, it is vital that we understand open source for what it actually is, lest we react too rashly or too blindly. We must remember that it is neither a political ideology nor an economic system, or anything so grandiose and dangerous. It is a library, built by volunteers, and open to all humanity. Of course, this is a newer form of library. Its largest collection is of source code a series of instructions which can be reviewed like a blueprint and compiled to create a program. Further, all materials in an open source library have been gifted to the public domain by their authors. This means any person is welcome to copy that code and alter in any way they see fit. They may share it, or they may improve upon it. If one were so inclined, they are even welcome to blatantly plagiarize it for commercial purposes. This is both understood and expected.

Fiasco Press

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

There are many principles attributed to the open source movement, although its community is far from a homogeneous collective. Rather, the values it seems to laud are inescapable byproducts of their founding medium: code. Since all one needs to make a program is source code, these works cannot help but be free. And because the internal workings of these programs are subject to the scrutiny of the global community, they can be checked for malicious content, used by classes or individuals as teaching tools, or be debugged by casual hobbyists. Thus, such programs cannot help but be transparent and reasonably secure. While sources such as the Encyclopedia Dramatica refer ironically to open source platforms like wiki as a form of communism that uses a software program, an important thing to remember is that this methodology is not derived from a manifesto or dictated by an organization, and it makes no assertions regarding the conduct of societies or the distribution of wealth. What is does propose to share is only is own infinitely renewable cache of legally donated information. Although this concept may seem futuristic, open source software (OSS) has been a part of the Internet as far back as the days of ARPANET, and still powers the unseen Apache servers which deliver you the PHP code at the heart of closed-source sites like Facebook and Farmville. These are easily accessed with a free copy of Firefox, whose open source plays a key role in the robust community of programmers which still develop extensions and improvements for the software. Mediawiki too, the platform behind Wikipedia and many others, is free software in the public domain and is almost always used in sites filled with information provided under a community commons license. In the realm of consumer-level robotics, a great deal of recent progress is due primarily to the development and release of the Arduino control chip an open source piece of hardware behind potentially revolutionary projects like the RepRap and Makerbot 3D printers. Even more important than the high profile open source projects we interact with regularly

Fiasco Press

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

is the library's worldwide availability. As William Kamkwamba recently reminded us by building a windmill and water pump for his impoverished village from plans he found in books at a local library, knowledge has a tremendous potential to enrich all of those it reaches. As more of the poor of our world gain access to computers, it will undoubtedly make all difference in the world for them to be able to access operating systems like Linux or FreeBSD rather than having to pay for commercial alternatives just to get their machines working. The open source library does not simply consist of code, however. The practice of freely sharing materials from the arts, humanities, and sciences is growing as well, thanks in large part to the Creative Commons license. Familiar to many from Wikipedia, this is a legal protection which parallels the open source model in that a work may be copied, altered, and distributed by anyone, but prohibits covered material from being utilized in a copyrighted or commercial work beyond the traditional limits of fair use. Offshoots of this program include the Science Commons at MIT and the Open Source Science Foundation, both of which distribute and publish countless scholarly papers for public consumption. One of the most vexing problems with big libraries, however, is that they tend to be particularly flammable, and it does not help that there are already plenty of parties pulling up kindling next door. January 8th's Wall Street Journal reports that FBI Director Robert Mueller recently visited Silicon Valley to ask if any of the software giants there would be interested in helping out law enforcement by including back doors in their programs which cops could use to spy on bad guys. What answer any of them gave is not currently public information, though the news that such a request was ever made hints that eventually OSS may find itself at odds with the interests of the government. What is confounding is that this can not be avoided. Even if the FBI were to ask organizations like Ubuntu to help out in secret, they could not, as any code allowing adding an

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

undocumented entrance for investigators would be plainly visible in the source code. Moreover, if code were added to any open-source software which provided the same functionality as the FBI requested from private companies, there would be no way to keep users from simply removing it from their own versions of the program. Once it becomes the norm for law enforcement to have an easy back door into most computers, eventually they will ask why they are still have to deal with computers they can not crack. The same issue would perturb efforts from organizations like the RIAA and MPAA, since OSS cannot force its patrons to use digital rights management protections on their systems in order to detect and report suspected piracy. Naturally, some interests in the private industry are not big fans of open source either. For example, there is the Association for Competitive Technology, an organization which has lobbied on behalf of Microsoft's interests ever since their creation during the relevant monopoly trial. ACT's president, Jonathan Zuck, was recently invited by the European Union to help write a strategy document which would define their official stance on OSS. Zuck's vision of the future of free software in the EU became public knowledge when Wikileaks published a copy of his proposed changes. These included the deletion of references to discrimination against OSS in patent licensing, the addition of a section dealing with OSS as part of mixed solutions blending open and proprietary code, and substantially weakened a declaration of the EU's policy that it is fundamental to ensure that open source/free software developers and distributors enjoy adequate protection by adding the words according to some at the beginning. Fortunately, these small incidents serve more as heralds of things to come than as direct threats to open source libraries now. It is nonetheless plain to see the inevitability that an enemy of our country will someday benefit from this library, just as others before have gained the knowledge they needed to do stupid things from the brick and mortar libraries of old. Yet just as the right to use cryptography proved to be no more dangerous than the right of citizens to use

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Journal of Swarm Scholarship

metal safes, our right to share and access code will prove just as essential to liberty in the coming age as our right to keep and share the manner of books which helped William Kamkwamba bring electricity to his community. There is a reason that authoritarians burn books, and few would stand for such behavior in our country. The danger we are in is that the destruction of digital data is vastly cleaner, quieter, and much less dramatic. This is why it is up to us, as a nation, to make no distinction between libraries filled with paper and those written on cobalt platters. If volumes may be erased from one, they can be taken from the other, and if we can be told what we are permitted write in mathematical languages, it follows that we can be told what we are permitted to say in the rest of them. The corpus of open source stands to be one of the most important libraries of our age, capable of providing every citizen of the world access to more knowledge than has ever been put together in one place by our species. It has served us well, and will continue to, just so long as we treat this one better than we did those in Alexandria, Baghdad, or the Yucatn.