Open Source Bill of Rights, and Beyond

In the powerful new book "Open Sources, Voices from the Open Source Revolution" Bruce Perens of the Open Source Initiative and others describe the process by which they helped create the Open Source movement and established the radical notion that computer users had rights. This was -- is -- a shocking idea for most of the people who buy computers and struggle with expensive equipment, rapidly-obsolete software, and companies that keep their operating systems and other programs secret. The Open Source Bill of Rights is an idea whose time has come. And for the sometimes beleaguered new citizens of the Internet, the notion could be taken even further

(Note: Maybe because I read it in one sitting in a hotel on the edge of San Francisco's Mission district, where many of the Net's architects still live and work and where Hotwired, the first Website I wrote for, is located, I was blown away by Open Sources, Voices from the Open Source Revolution, published by O'Reilly ($24.95). I've been struggling to learn about OS and free software and to acquire and learn Linux on my new box. I'm not there yet, but I'm not inclined to quit, and the voices in this book explain why.

The programmers, hackers and others developing OS are freedom fighters, guerillas of the Information Age; the Open Source and Free Software movements are both radical and unprecedented. There's a lot at stake in whether or not they succeed; whether the Internet remains the freest culture in the world or suffers the fate of off-line media - becoming corporatized, homogenized, mass-marketed and pervasively censored. Open Source Voices is an important document, and this is the first of several columns about it.)

Every significant movement seems to have a book that sparks or defines it, from environmentalism's "Silent Spring" to Mao's little red volume. Open Sources is that kind of ideological book.

It charts the growth of OSS from a hacker's fantasy to a bull-blown technomovement, one that has membership in the millions, gives Microsoft fits, and, potentially at least, alters the laws and structures of media.

When I began reading the voices in Open Sources - including Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, Bruce Perens and Eric Raymond of the Open Source Initiative, and Linus Torvalds (Linux) - I expected to hear a description of a new kind of technology. But what's captured is the birth of a movement.

Almost from the beginning, the political ideas underscoring the creation, design and growth of the Net have had to do with the liberation of information from its many powerful, greedy, sometimes stingy gatekeepers. A generation of digital engineers created a new kind of information architecture: it used to trickle down from the top but increasingly, it moves laterally and rises from the bottom as well.

Linux and other OS systems didn't just happen. Torvalds and other programmers designed and improved the kernel, and Linux spread from there. As contributor Eric Raymond describes a l998 meeting with a number of people involved in Linux and Netscape, the group realized that the idea of free and shared software needed a strategy if it was to grow.

"The real conceptual breakthrough," he writes, "was admitting to ourselves that what we needed to mount was in effect a marketing campaign - and that it would require marketing techniques (spin, image-building, and re-branding) to make it work."

The strategy did work, brilliantly. The Open Source software movement is one of the fastest-growing technological ideas on the Net.

The Open Source Definition, the code that defines the movement, is the computer user's first bill of rights. Apart from Thomas Jefferson's and his pal Thomas Paine's idea that the press be democratic and free, there's never been anything approaching one before. But as the Information Revolution has mushroomed in the Digital Age, the idea seems long overdue.

Conventional media remains top-down and arrogant. As the year-long wallow in the Lewinsky scandal - opposed from the outset by a significant majority of the American public - demonstrates, individual consumers have few media rights. The media considers them too ignorant or wanton to be taken into account. Not only are their wishes and agendas ignored, but the giant corporations that increasingly control computer software and technology actually promote confusion and planned obsolescence.

The Open Source Definition defines certain rights that a software licensor must grant its users in order to be certified as Open Source. In exchange, companies that use OS have the advantage of rapid development, often with a number of collaborating companies, and many of the advances are contributed by individual users.

Open Source users are assured of these rights, write Perens in Open Sources:

* The right to make copies of a program, and distribute them.

* Access to the software's server code, a necessary preliminary to changing it.

* The right to make improvements. ***

The notion of free access to networked computing, the information it leads to, and its other benefits isn't a new computing idea; it may, in fact, be the very earliest one.

In l968, J.C.R. Licklider, a computer pioneer at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, which commissioned the research that led to the Internet, wrote an essay called "The Computer as a Communication Device."

In a few years, Licklider predicted, humanity would be able to communicative more effectively through a machine than face to face. "For the society," he wrote, "the impact will be good or bad, depending mainly on the question: Will ?to be online? be a privilege or a right? If only a favored segment of the population gets a chance to enjoy the advantage of ?intelligence amplification? the network may exaggerate the discontinuity in the spectrum of intellectual opportunity." But if the network should prove to do for education what a few "have envisioned in hope? surely the boon to humankind would be beyond measure," he wrote hopefully.

Although the Net was initially designed, expanded and shaped by hackers, academics and scientists, by the mid 80's corporations - Microsoft foremost among them - moved aggressively to develop and dominate the operating systems that run most personal computers, as well as the soaring information and service markets spawned by the Net.

As a result, few computer users understood how their machines work. The code that ran the systems were kept secret, al the better - and easier - to charge for them. People couldn't communicate with anyone but the manufacturers about their problems, and that was never easy. Technical support became synonymous not with deserved and timely assistance but with a consumer nightmare - remote companies, long waits, confusing information from people who were largely unaccountable. The irony was secret, expensive software that made it possible to use the wide-open culture of the Internet and World Web.

If any other industry operated this way, journalists and politicians would have been up in arms; laws and dicta from regulatory agencies would come showering down. But most Americans know so little about the computers they use that they are unaware of their rights. It was the founders of the Open Source movement who came up with the idea that certain fundamental rights were inherent in the Internet, a new kind of nation.

This is, in fact, a radical idea. Americans never had the computing "rights" that Perens suggests. They didn't think of themselves as having any. They couldn't copy or distribute their software programs or access the software's source code in order to change it; they couldn't improve the programs they'd purchased, only buy expensive updates and replacements..

But that's changed. A a growing number of large corporations, including IBM, have adopted Open Source as a strategy for preventing Microsoft from completely dominating the computer industry. "?The most reliable indication of the future of Open Source," writes Perens, "is its past: in just a few years, we have gone from nothing to a robust body of software that solves many different problems and is reaching the million-user count. There's no reason for us to slow down now."

Open Source is still too complex for most Americans, it's support still too primitive. Many of the amateur programmers working on systems like Linux aren't motivated by the political generousity Perens describes; to them, it's a hobby or a badge. Some are arrogant in their own turn, seeing themselves a closed society increasingly being violated by ignorant, undeserving outsiders.

But they are going to have lots of company, like it or not. Americans and people in other countries love having rights, and have a long history of asserting them. Linux users are growing at the rate of 40 per cent a year. Open Source is an idea whose time has definitely come. Microsoft is being challenged across the board by systems like Linux, Apache and BeOS as well as by the federal lawsuit. Millions of computer-abused people all over the world are itching for their rights; they're ready to learn more about the necessary technologies.

In fact, Perens? list of rights could be longer, extending beyond Open Source. I'd propose a few additions. Computer users have the right to freely access the Internet and the World Wide Web, for instance. The oft-censored young, in particular, ought to have the right of access to new information technologies like the Net and the Web, which increasingly determine cultural literacy, social connectivity, and their economic futures.

Citizens of the Internet, once arrived there, are entitled to speak freely, unencumbered by censorious legislators or abusive flamers. They have the right to a wider range of choices about the computers and software they buy, the software that runs them, the means by which they access information. They have the right to purchase software and computing machines that last longer.. They also have the right to find technical and other support for the software and machinery they buy.

Online and off, there is a growing awareness that the Net isn't just a story about technology, but a fundamental change in culture and society. As the significance of the Net becomes more obvious by the day, the idea of rights of access and use become more important.

And as consciousness about the Internet grows, so do the politics surrounding it. The open source movement echoes one of the deepest and most fundament political traditions in American life. When Thomas Paine wrote his landmark essay "The Rights Of Man" from a French prison in 1791, he presented it to George Washington with this prayer: "That the Rights of Man may become as universal as your benevolence can wish, and that you may enjoy the happiness of seeing the New World regenerate the Old..." Amen.

"Originally, cable television was just meant to improve your picture reception," Bran Ferren, the chief Disney Imagineer is quoted as saying in Richard Rhodes new book ?Visions of Technology. "Theater people used to think that the idea of motion pictures was ridiculous. But the Net, I guarantee you, really is fire. I think it's more important than the invention of movable type." jonkatz@slashdot.org