Notational

The difference for why open source became a beacon of inspiration was that there was a coherent ethical philosophy that went along with the practice. There’s a belief there should be some limits on what should be property—things like software, or water. And with software in particular it often makes sense to keep it open for the sake of innovation. But what made the open-source movement so influential is that it never got stuck with any traditional political associations. That’s especially significant in the United States, where it’s easy to disable politics once they’re labeled leftist or rightist. Developers are actually quite diverse in their political commitments, and the reluctance to code the philosophy in this political language has allowed it to be adopted by many actors. In terms of the practice, the proof was in pudding. It’s hard to argue against hundreds of thousands of people creating open-source projects like Debian—the largest free software project in the world, which has more than a thousand developers working on it free.