Have fun, kids!

Rebel Scum Rebel Scum is a grungy red, cream and gray theme released with a Creative Commons do whatever you want with it license. It’s for scruffy nerf herders. Right column, widgets, highly textured with lots of shadowing. Looks best on a modern browser that supports HTML5.

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.