Source doesn't stop at code, or blueprints, or processes. Source is everything of value in anything. Life itself is nothing but source. For billions of years the source code of life -- DNA -- has been innovating and sharing (with great gusto!) and bridged vast gulfs that we can only wistfully imitate. Ultimately our own humanity is hackable.
People living in the first half of the twenty-first century knew that what they were doing was not working. It didn't take a genius to see that burning minerals for fuel and filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide was an ongoing, slow-motion disaster, or that the yawning chasm between rich and poor was a social and economic time bomb. On the other hand, what were the alternatives? Mass producing more cheap goods wasn't the answer since none of the plastic doodads were of any use in combating the real problems, and yet that seemed to be the only solution offered by industry. It was also clear that waiting for the free market, or national governments -- which were more and more the same thing -- was simply naive. And yet patience (and buying more cheap goods) was that only council that the financial powers could suggest.
Graham Gregson could not imagine, as a child of his time, a force as revolutionary as the Reawakening, but he was able to sketch its broad outlines. His book, Open Source World: How Free Knowledge can Make us Healthy and Wealthy, is quite favorably quoted by Princeton and his ilk. I don't know what's up with the title; all the books from that period have titles like that. It's interesting to see the relative importance of "health" and "wealth", however. That health is subordinate to wealth -- that readers of the time would reject a solution for global health unless it also allowed for personal wealth -- is just bizarre.
The "source" in the title originally referred to source code, the computer instructions that perform subtle computations, or entertain us with interactive experiences, or just let us store and access our data. There's a lot in common between science and software. They both have correct results which are very hard to find, relying as they do on a combination of inspired ideas tested through long hours of painstaking experimentation. For that reason answers found by one research group can be applied by others, and open sharing of results generates a kind of exponential return. Science figured this out a long time before, which is why for the most part its informational products were open. Software, on the other hand, was a mostly a commercial venture with its source code a closely guarded secret.
The open source movement came out of people frustrated with this state of affairs. Gregson described it as being like city-states before markets. The value in an ancient city was the people and their possessions, so you'd build a wall around the city to keep raiders from stealing them. Inside the wall there was vibrant trade, but between cities there was little. Likewise the massive corporations of the financial age knew that their information was their true value, so they built walls of privacy to keep it away from everyone else. Historically those old cities tore down their walls because they found that trading what they each had made them wealthier, and, Gregson argued, we would all come to realize the same thing about sharing knowledge.
Admittedly his ideas for how to implement this goal were somewhat lacking. He did understand the distinction between primary and secondary value (although under different names), and he did realize that innovation required an incentive structure based on the quality of the innovation itself. That his description of such a system sounded a bit Utopian can be forgiven. We see these things with hindsight and they look obvious to us now. For them, they didn't know another way.
The term "open source" may sound anachronistic, but recall that the venerable series of lifters -- the rockets that took eager generations to space after decades of confinement -- were called Oshavs. We still use the term today. That originally stood for "Open Source Heavy Ascent Vehicle."
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