Not Fade Away
Joe Casad, Editor in Chief
Dear Linux Magazine Reader,
People like to talk about "freedom" in open source circles, but freedom is one of those words with many
definitions. One definition is "independence of action." When you're free, you can do whatever you want to
and, as long as you don't hurt anyone, you can keep going. In a political context, the term "freedom" is also
associated with the concept of equality. The streets of Paris echoed with cries of "Égalité!" in 1789, and
thirteen years earlier, a coterie of hyper-intellectual landowners on another continent enshrined within the
United States Declaration of Independence the "self-evident" truth that "all men are created equal."
Open source software certainly offers freedom of action. You can download the code from any GPL software
project and do almost anything you want to with it - as long as you give back the results, and some licenses
don't even require that. You can hack on the kernel anytime you want. You can run your custom version, and
you can even distribute it to others. But you can't force Linus and the kernel developers to accept your
revisions, and you can't expect a guarantee that your proposals will receive a share of attention equal to the
share provided to kernel veterans like Andrew Morton and Alan Cox.
The point is that an open source project is not a government but a community. Communities do not always
operate with the equality principle but are more likely to navigate through a combination of leadership and
consensus that is best described as a meritocracy. People who have proven they know what they're doing get
to be in charge. Ideally, these leaders are open minded and patient about resolving differences, but (also
ideally) disputes are settled decisively, and if you don't like the result, your only option might be to fall back
upon your freedom of action and start a new project.
This fundamental principle gets much more complicated as the open source model spreads from software
development communities with (at most) a few hundred members to global writing projects where everyone
in the world is a potential contributor. The most prominent of these efforts is the famous Wikipedia project
(www.wikipedia.org). This vast, free encyclopedia long ago overflowed its original base and now reaches
everyday users all over the planet - including everyone from school children to corporate CEOs. The
challenge for Wikipedia is to provide the maximum freedom for user input while keeping free of special
interests and preserving some semblance of quality control.
With a global audience and more than 2 million articles in English alone, this challenge is understandably
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illusive at times. Wikipedia has been in the news recently for allegations of self-interested manipulation by
groups such as Fox News and the CIA. The problem is how to react surgically to such events without
unintentionally censuring ideas or inconveniencing the innocent. An example of that dilemma appeared this
month, when The Register reported that Wikipedia banned edits from 1000 homes in an attempt to shut out
one contributor who happened to share the address range. That contributor, it seems, was immersed in an
ideological dispute with another contributor over the propriety of a specific trading practice used in financial
markets.
This event illuminated the immensely difficult task faced by Wikipedia's leaders as they sort through millions
of words from thousands of contributors around the world - many of whom are passionate about helping but
are also passionate about their own point of view. I hope Wikipedia users will keep the faith as the project
perfects its systems of revision, review, and appeal. And I hope Wikipedia's leaders will remain open enough
to feedback to grow and learn from this kind of controversy. Most of all, everyone needs to be patient,
because the Wikipedia project is far too important to let fade away.
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