Open Source and the Relationship between Technology and Democracy by risa
While I was growing up I remember a moment of realization I had where I understood that technology and software were our species’ way of accomplishing, over time, complex acts of coordination and accumulation.
This realization comes with two memories: one, of driving from Waterloo to my mum’s mother’s house in Toronto, and the light is getting dim because it gets dark in the afternoon here once we’ve past November, and I am looking into the windows of the other cars and thinking, for the first time, that there are other people in those other moving machines. They are not just driving like we are, but thinking different thoughts, and aiming different places, and going to different jobs tomorrow, and worrying about different things, and they all have mom’s and dads and ideas and plans and misconceptions. And all their cars were made by other people too.
And in the second memory, one year later, we have arrived in Los Angeles where my new step dad has a job at UCLA and there is an election going on and I have lots of questions and I watch all the debates and ads- and then I realize that people will vote, and that this wave of small, and more or less informed choices is what moves this whole huge place forward. This is a metaphor for the extraordinary acts of collaboration unfolding over time that built the systems I saw all around me- schools and social security and public transport. And I knew about computers from my mother’s master’s thesis-writing days (when I had wandered the basement of the University of Waterloo while she typed,) and so I just assumed that every system I could imagine to enable this crazy complexity was already contained in code and already interconnected.
So to think that at that time Windows was not yet on the radar; and the Internet had no public face, no World Wide Web; that electronic databases were not really used in libraries or local government; that Torvalds was just a student starting to come up with big ideas, gives me a strange great sense of hope. Because I can’t believe that all this is new. But it is, and so we only now begin to really see what people have imagined we could do with what we’ve made.
Linus Torvalds wrote a functioning operating system- literally thousands and, by now, millions of lines of code, in a few months.
“Torvalds had no love for DOS. He strongly preferred the technical approach of the UNIX-style operating systems that he was learning about in school. But he did not like waiting on long lines for access to a limited number of university machines that ran Unix for student use. And it simply wasn’t practical to run a commercial version of Unix on his PC- the available software was too expensive and also too complicated for the hardware.
In late 1990 Torvalds had heard about Minix, a simplified Unix clone that Professor Andrew Tannenbaum at Vrije University in Amsterdam had written as a teaching tool. Minix ran on PC’s, and the source code was available on floppy disks for less than 100$. Torvalds installed the system on his PC. He soon went to work building the kernel of his own Unix-like operating system, using Minix as scaffolding.” (Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, p54)
The labour of many hundreds of people had been compiled, so Torvalds didn’t have to invent packet switching, or the Internet, or the idea of writing layers of instructions that would pull the pieces of hardware into a suddenly-functioning whole machine. He clambered up the Minix architecture, defined himself against the DOS way, and between what was already known he was able to imagine something new and good.
“Coverity, maker of software auditing tools, recently found that the than a typical commercial software package.” (Vaughan-Nichols, EWeek 2005) and studies by the independent Internet Storm Center have shown that while Microsoft Win32 has been cracked within a matter of hours, or within half an hour of being on the Internet, the Linux ones will stand for months, and be cracked, in general, by the cracker guessing simple user passwords.
If Torvalds’ system had been used to compete among monopolies for a monopoly position then I wouldn’t be excited, but Torvalds and many others, saw a possible tweak in business logic, inherent, I think, in the logic of the Internet, that was a way to take this architecture-climbing farther.
(read more about Torvalds’ tactics in “Things I learned from Linus Torvalds”)
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