Open Source Offers Hope Against Tyranny
I took a break this past weekend. I set my phone down on Friday, and didn’t pick it up again until Monday morning. One of the first things I saw when I logged on was this tweet from Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language:
The revolution apparently will start in Minnesota. I would not have expected that. Yay Minnesotans!
That was the first inkling I had about the second killing of an American citizen this month by ICE agents in Minneapolis. First, Renée Good, now Alex Pretti. As I caught up with the tragic news, I felt increasingly out-of-tune talking about adventures with surfers in Malibu, as fun as that might be.
What could Open Source possibly have to say to a world teetering on the brink of chaos in a thousand different directions?
Last fall I traveled the world in search of an answer to this question. I went to Los Angeles, Denmark, India, and Ukraine. The result is my first documentary, Gift Community:
The documentary does a lot, and I’m okay with it being more evocative than prescriptive. That said, the point I hope it makes is that Open Source does have something to offer the wider world.
If Open Source only makes humanity more efficient through shared technical knowledge, then no, Open Source does nothing related to mainstream news other than distracting from it. I believe it does more. I believe it exhibits political and economic relations that can bring humanity to a better place. I believe its lessons should be widely shared.
Learning From Open Source Leaders
In the documentary, I tried to highlight leaders I really admire in the Open Source community, who concretely show what I want the mainstream future to look like. People like legendary developer Poul-Henning Kamp, who watched a company go public for $2 billion on top of his Open Source work, and felt “not one shred” of resentment. Or Kailash Nadh, the spiritually attuned CTO of India’s largest stock broker. Or Alex Blokh, co-founder of Drizzle: a Russian missile killed his neighbor and blew out 15 windows in his own home, yet from his struggles he has refined an inner strength that I have everything to learn from.
We have our share of demagogues and tyrants in Open Source, and we let them suck up the oxygen in the room sometimes. But we also have many, many wonderful role models—none perfect, but many worth holding up, celebrating, and emulating. We even have examples of leaders exhibiting personal growth over time, Linus himself chief among them.
In a world where tyrants and strongmen increasingly shock us and demand our attention, Open Source suggests that we can focus elsewhere: not as a distraction, but as a decision to invest in the world we want. With Mark Carney, we can take Václav Havel’s proverbial sign out of the window:
The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source.
In the Open Source community around the world, I found people performing as if other realities are true: the reality of community, the reality of liberty, the reality of belonging, the reality of constructive resilience, the reality of humility in leadership, the reality of overcoming resentment, the reality of gratitude and generosity, the reality of inner strength and peace. Tyranny stands no chance against such things. Let’s do more of those!