Open Source Philosophy
From OpenSourcePhilosophy
Open Source as a Philosophical Topic
This project emerged with a focus upon the language of “Open Source” for a number of reasons—mostly accidental, but partially deliberate—not least of which is that the language speaks in the most powerful sense of speaking. There are numerous related concepts in the work of Nietzsche, James, Heidegger, Dewey, and Deleuze. While some argue that the language of Open Source evades an important ethical debate concerning terms such as “Free” and “Libre,” the language of “Open” may involve ontological and ethical issues much deeper than are immediately apparent. It is this call to something deeper than is apparent saying more than is readily voiced that draws this project to be and keeps the language of open source present.
While “freedom” and debates concerning it have a long history in the philosophical tradition, the language and impressions surrounding language of “open(ness)” have less of a tradition (most of the small body of work being done since the late-twentieth century). Whereas the language of “liberty” is crucial to understanding the thinking of the Enlightenment in Europe and America (and its sometimes violently ironic impact around the world), its language has lost much of its power. Thinking the open in a deeply engaged way is pressing to the coming century as thinking liberty was to the eighteenth century in Europe and the Americas. Its common use in phrases ranging from “an open mind” to “being open to” is matched by professional and academic language such as “open systems,” “open societies,” “open development models,” and “open access.” In universities, one hears the language of having an “open university” and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now provides its OpenCourseWare to the world. Early incarnations of this work were produced on a word processor that is part of a software office suite called “OpenOffice.” This project seeks to articulate open as a virtuality that is manifesting itself in the world around us, as a present invisible element operating in the world.
Thinking source is pressing in this journey as well. Source is a concept too common to notice and too valuable to ignore. Surprisingly little has been done on the idea of a source. Origin is addressed in a number of locations, perhaps most thoroughly in Heidegger's The Origin of the Work of Art.
Origin here means that from which and by which something is what it is. What
something is, as it is, we call its essence. The origin of something is the
source of its essence.
- Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 143.
But even here, source is left calling for a full treatment. Many thinkers have moved about “beginnings” and “causes,” but source calls for its articulation as the space of the emergent in its emergence. This project seeks to touch open sources with “a hammer as with a tuning fork."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” In The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kauffman (New York: Viking Penguin, 1976), p.466.
To do so, it must open to the open and its source and the open of the source. Open Source Software is a transport mechanism into the processes of sources opening (or perhaps opens sourcing, as the case may be presented). This project seeks to think Open Source in a philosophical way, one method to reach the philosophical is to begin anywhere and begin asking questions in earnest. If the questions generate models predicated on predictive functionality, then one has stopped at the level of theory. If one continues until the questions themselves begin to generate ways of thinking that are open to their own (de)construction, then we begin to approach the philosophical. As the reader will observe, the quiet, pressing import of thinking open presents itself inconspicuously in the common (as in the previous sentence).