Why is this? Because there are no competitive open source tools for creating open graphics, audio and video. What is out there is inferior to the crappy freeware editors that come with most operating systems. Artistry for the Web is currently locked in the clutches of prohibitively expensive proprietary software like Photoshop, Premeier, ProTools, and Ableton.

Editing graphics without an expensive tool is a nightmare. The Mac OS, for example, will give you all the tools you need to perform basic editing and manipulation of images, but tools such as resizing, cropping, color adjustment, or adding text are typically segregated between different freeware apps. Windows at least comes with Paint, probably the best freeware editor out there. But it’s only for Windows. Paintbrush, a free app that calls itself a Mac-based clone of MS Paint, has functionality is so limited and its accuracy of brush stroke so vague that I deleted it after one day of use. When cloning, they must have forgotten to copy half the DNA. The only commonly known open source graphics editor out there is GIMP, which is extremely non-spectacular. Its lack of native portability to Mac guarantees its insignificance as an open source visual editor. Until it can compete with PhotoShop, only the desperate will use it.

Ableton is to audio editing today what Internet Explorer was to Web browsing in 1999. It’s a limited, clunky, mess, but nobody knows any better because they haven’t woken up to the idea that they could put a lot more fun and functionality into creation of new music, mashing up existing music, or DJing. Its massive sticker price ($900 for the premium edition), cluttered and intimidating user interface, and lack of self-evident navigation makes this product a massive functionality fail, despite its slick look and powerful capabilities. It’s the best thing out there. Because it’s the only thing out there. And because they don’t operate in an open community environment, there isn’t a way for me to tell them that it’s idiotic that the program’s navigation lacks simple features like click and drag, tabbed browsing, or right click options. Or maybe even just a way to put notes on a blank piece of sheet music.

Until there is an open source project that creates free and open tools that help people create open video and audio, ain’t nobody gonna give two sticks about either of those things. Firefox did something incredible for Web browsers — it rattled IE’s monopoly and showed the Web that you could do more and put the power of technology back in the hands of the users, not funnel them through an expensive and restricting tunnel of technology.

Digital creativity is still locked in that tunnel. Adobe and Ableton’s products are as non-customizable as they are prohibitively expensive. These proprietary options keep the power of creating art and music in the hands of only those who can afford to create it. And there isn’t anybody out there in the Open Source world looking to tackle these dominant monsters the same way Firefox took down IE.

Until an open source project creates free and open tools that give people a way to create open audio, video, and graphics with free, open tools, nobody’s going to care about pushing open audio and video for the Web. Why should they? That would cut into the total industry dominance of artistic creation. The success of WordPress gives me hope that eventually there may be this kind of project, but I still worry that there’s too much of a gap between the sort of people who know what an open source music mixer should look like and the sort of people with the technical known-how to create that software. We need some way to teach music to coders, or to teach musicians to code. But until then, music and video won’t be what it could be.

I think there’s some great ideas in the Independence Party platform, although some of the values are so broad as to be difficult to implement. (There would be a lot of argument, for example, over what exactly is meant by ensuring “an educated citizenry.” How much education? Who pays for it? What kind of people are entitled to that education?) But still — it’s a great step in the right direction. A few really jumped out at me as values that resonate with the open source movement.

A democratic process with integrity and broad citizen participation. Take the words “democratic” and “citizen” and replace them with “software development” and “community” and you have exactly the same principle. And why not? Open source development builds better products, a better Internet, and better social and economic opportunities on the Web. Why can’t we use these same methods to build a better real-world experience? The comparison might be flippant, but I could almost think that it would be useful if we could file a bug to local, regional, and national authorities when something was wrong. Wouldn’t that be great? I can just see it now — I log in to the State of California’s Bugzilla account and file a bug explaining that every time I use the 5 Freeway in Santa Fe Springs, there are massive potholes in the road that may cause the system to experience a crash. The bug is assigned to CalTrans Employees and the whole world can see how long it takes them to change the status to RESOLVED FIXED.

Government that is fiscally responsible: equitable in its collection of taxes, careful in its spending, and honest in its financial reporting. Fiscal irresponsibility and closed-door policies greatly contributed to the current woeful economic condition we are in. But what if Wall Street Fatcats voluntarily converted to a Mozilla-style way of doing business, where anybody can dial in to company meetings and hear what they’re up to? What if they kept their books and actions open for public scrutiny? What if, with very few exceptions to allow for national security, all government meetings were completely open to the public? Closed-door sessions are important when the data being discussed is sensitive. But if there’s no legitimate reason to be non-transparent, then shutting out public scrutiny only allows for temptation to behave in an irresponsible way.

Government that is a good steward: protecting the environment, preserving our public institutions, prudently managing public assets, and leaving for our children a better world. Just as Mozilla and other organizations aggressively protect the Internet as a public resource dedicated to openness and wild creativity, so should the government protect our society, culture, and economic structures as public resources — with public benefit, not money, as the end goal. We can all get rich and fat and happy if we act as good stewards — really. And the success we can encounter will be much more sustainable in the long run if we look out for our collective well-being.

Government that is controlled locally whenever possible. Wow. Fully localized government. Wouldn’t that be nice? Instead of a big box, one size fits all approach, we let community members decide how best to meet their own needs. Just like it makes sense to have community members localize Firefox, community members should localize their own government so that it serves them. It’s important to have a broad platform people can work from and connect through, but it is even more important that the platform is flexible enough to be adapted to each locale it serves.

This weekend I was asked how someone like me could possibly take a professional interest in open source software, when nothing in my training has prepared me for the issues involved. Nothing could be more untrue. In fact, it would probably be helpful for members of the open source community to brush up on their history and see how they are making old ideas new again. Collaborative authorship, a key aspect of open source software, is not a modern concept. Slapping one name on a work and making that the exclusive, official version is the relatively new idea. It’s only been done for about four hundred years, and has only really become enforced since the Industrial Revolution when it became profitable. We’ve become obsessed with labeling literature and music. Publishing house. Author. Date of Publication. Record Label. It’s very satisfying to see all the blanks filled in, with a secure and complete identity assigned to a work. This idea that authorship and ownership need to be clearly defined are rooted in the idea that art is a commodity, rather than a public asset. If there’s no owner, no money can change hands. Nobody can be sued for using it without permission. The folk tradition doesn’t see how exclusionary procedures aid in the creation of music. They only see how adding other voices can make it stronger, which is why all folk songs are in perpetual open beta.

Those who don’t understand folk music or open source software would say that it was an “Anonymous” creation, a term that goes along with the misnomer “Dark Ages.” But “Anonymous” is an unhelpful term that presupposes exclusive authorship as the natural order of things. As a folk musician and open source community member, I know the proper term is “Traditional,” a term that means we’re talking about an active public resource — a living thing, not a closed off artifact on a museum shelf.

If you look at the titles of papers given at medieval conferences, they don’t look that different from papers written on open source. Terms like “Distributive Authorship” and “Collaborative Tradition” are littered everywhere. This is because in the premodern era, individual credit wasn’t that important. You couldn’t get any richer from it, and without publishing and mass distribution it was hard enough to just get the ideas out there. Hang trying to insist on credit for them. Like open source software, texts tended to originate from a specific area, but then the stories would be mashed up and localized. The legend of King Arthur probably originated in Cornwall. They were popularized by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and then the open source legend spread. It went over to France, where poets like Chrétien de Troyes added to the legend. Some of the stories were exported back home to England, taking their most famous form in Le Morte D’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory. The corpus of Arthurian Literature is enormous, highly localized, extremely diverse, and fortunately largely well preserved. Lucky us! Nowadays we’re a little more closed minded. Where in the past an author could take a world and run with it, now work like this is discredited as “fan fiction” and rarely receives critical consideration. I wonder how well off the Web would be if that were how we treated a really amazing and creative hacker.

The only people who worked to keep art open source in the modern era were musicians — specifically Jazz and Folk musicians. I always laugh when friends complain about the difficulties that go with trying to label Golden Age Jazz in iTunes or RealPlayer. “Who is the author of this one? I think Tommy Dorsey wrote it but it’s being performed by Ella Fitzgerald with the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Who should I put as the artist?” Such a question shows how well trained we are to look for the official seal of approval on anything. The best music I’ve ever heard comes from collaboration, not exclusionary, proprietary sources.

For this reason artists like Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan have been hard to classify. Cash isn’t quite country and Dylan isn’t quite rock. That’s because they are both really folk artists, covering other work and being covered by other artists. The stuff they were doing back in the sixties is the same as what we’re doing now in the Mozilla community. Folk music is in perpetual open beta. You can mix it up, mash it up, redo the harmonies, add or subtract voices or instruments, and the value of the music is never diluted. It only increases. It’s the same with code. As you can hear in the many different takes on “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” creations made through collaboration are always greater than the sum of their parts.

Open Source isn’t new or modern. It’s traditional. It’s how we did things for millenia. Nobody needs to take credit for a public resource. That locks it in with one author and sucks all the fun out of taking the source material and doing something with it on your own and makes it about the self and making money. That’s boring and uninspiring. Whether it’s musical notes or code, encouraging collaborative creativity is at the heart of art.