Is open the new green?

"Green" is generally thought of as an ideology that, "aims to create an environmentalism, social justice, and grassroots democracy."  That's how wikipedia describes it, as a political movement.

Open Source started off as "a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedom to run the software, to study and change the software, and to redistribute copies with or without changes." according to the wikipedia article on the Free Software Movement.

While there were many people involved in modifying and sharing programs and codes, what we now point to as the beginning of the "hacker culture", one of the most (in)famous individuals pointed to from that time, is Richard Stallman, who has made it his life journey to promote Free Software.

How did we move from Free Software to Open Source everything?  And is this the new green, or is it just a new word for a philosophy that has been around, since the dawn of time?

As some of the previous articles have alluded to, people have been sharing with each other from our earliest existence.  And of course, we have been hacking everything for just as long.  It is just how we work.  If we observe something that seems to be successful, we take our own personal ownership of the idea and, as unique as the individual themselves, we adjust it to fit our own uniqueness.  A hack.

I've used the phrase, "Give someone a fish and they live for a day, teach someone

to fish and they live for a lifetime." in a past article.  It really is the root of all we are.  We are not built to be given things, we are built to learn things.  Sharing, is really not about sharing things, but sharing ideas.  Eventually, around the '60s and '70s, the idea and thus the rally cry of "information wants to be free", formally attributed to Stewart Brand of the Whole Earth Catalog, began to crop up in the hacker space.  It became the calling card for the cyberpunk generation.

Of course, it's not much different than the calling card of the Librarian, "Here's the book, look it up."  Of course, we'd much prefer to grab the low hanging fruit.  And we do, and there's nothing wrong with that.  But once that fruit is gone, we need to figure it out, for ourselves.

So ultimately, this idea began to spread and people began to imagine a world where information was free.  Free of IP Law, which wasn't just in software, but was part of almost everything in our lives.  At least in the things we buy at the store.  And that becomes the primary frustration of the hacker ... and the social libertarian.

Already, in the '80s, organizations like "Engineers Without Borders" were being formed.  By the mid '90s, more groups were forming to help liberate the less fortunate and in 1999, "Architecture for Humanity" was formed.  Whether the less fortunate were under environmental, monetary, or political strain.  But it continued to be obvious that, people were giving fish, rather than the knowledge to fish.  And so, as the new millennium rolled out, more and more people began to look for ways to effectively support others to figure out how to support themselves.  People started looking at the Open Source Software movement and those ideologies, in order to better support people to support themselves.

One of the most difficult things in helping and supporting others, is understanding context.  What that means is, if we don't live in someone's shoes, we are unlikely to understand how to best support them.  There's a phrase being used commonly these days, called "train the trainers".  It is more than just giving people tools, but also stressing that context can be the difference between successful support and a less successful result.

More and more people are trying to learn context and trying to learn and understand what open source really is.  For example, Sam Muirhead, a film maker by profession, took an indepth look at living an open source lifestyle, in a project called "The Year of Open Source."



I think that in many ways, there are common themes within Open Source and Green.  Is Open Source really the new green?  Perhaps it's not fair to make that assessment.  Perhaps, the reality is, while they are similar, perhaps Open Source really is an enabling tool set that can augment what Green, or other movements such as Occupy, are doing.  Supporting those groups, and any others, for their own purposes, to function in the best way possible.

Green is Green.  Open is Open.