Aaron Jorbin has been nice enough to organize a book club for WordPress people, especially core contributors. I love a book club and have tried to create and join a few over the years. This one is interesting to me because WordPress and also I like Aaron.
Preface
The first book we are tackling is Producing Open Source Software by Karl Fogel. Its a book that has been around for over 20 years and had an update in 2023. I have not read this book before, and the Preface hooked me immediately:
Everyone has infinite power; everyone has no power.
This week we are covering the Preface and the Intro. The Preface is a call to arms for us all to get involved with Open Source Software. We all use it everyday yet the vast majority of people have no idea. We have no idea that we can participate even just as users giving feedback. Karl talks about “competence at cooperation” as a key skill for participating in open source software. Cooperation is something I can always be better at.
Introduction to Free then Open Source Software
In the Introduction Karl gives us a history of software development. Starting in the early days of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s software was seen as a secondary feature that the hardware allowed to happen. Back then software was given freely by the manufacturers and exchanged between users, mainly academics. It was similar to what we now call open source software.
Naturally this changed as hardware became standardized and suddenly software was the differentiator. Laws were updated to allow copyright of software and the modern close source software movement was cemented. Developers could now copyright their work and license it to users.
Then Richard Stallman had a thought to give software away for free and created GNU (GNU is Not Unix) and the GNU GPL(General Public License). The GPL should be familiar to WordPress people. This license “says that the code may be copied and modified without restriction, and that both copies and derivative works (i.e., modified versions) must, if they are distributed at all, be distributed under the same license as the original, with no additional restrictions.”
This was a big event in the free software movement as it created a legal framework for it to exist. For many this was more than just software and was seen as an ideological movement. Software is words the same as speech and deserves to be freely distributed just like thoughts. For others this was a convenient method for sharing their work and getting others to review it and improve it. They didn’t necessarily see a movement just a practical way to operate.
In the late 1990’s the free software movement was doing well. Linux had been created along with the X Windowing system and many other parts and pieces allowing people to fully own their computer hardware and software.
The problem at this point was marketing. For businesses the word ‘free’ is anathema to just about everything they exist for. An adjustment needed to be made to bring commercial interests into the movement. It was also confusing to think of ‘free’ software that was given away at no cost to the user versus software which you had access to the source code.
The change was made to ‘Open Source’ to alleviate these concerns and today rough estimates put to total economic value at over $9 Trillion.
Today we need to work to create community around our projects to ensure they keep going and improving. We should be aware of each others motivations to be a part of the projects that we work on. We should also work to make everyone feel welcome.