Open Source and the Library

8/3/2019 Open Source and the Library

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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.


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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 theEncyclopedia 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


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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 Journalreports 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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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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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.

Open Source and the Library

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