[Edu-sig] Thinking about Open Source

[Kirby Urner]

I just read Andy Oram's article about an audience outburst after some guy at
a Linux conference used Windows + PowerPoint to do a presentation:

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/7438

I'll be interested what reactions I get to using a WinXP laptop to present
at OSCON (I used a Linux box last year).  My Toshiba Satellite is my best
laptop by far, and though I *could* run my Python + Pygame presentation on
my daughter's Compaq under Mandrake 9.2, that'd be less satisfying.

Open Source is a layered affair, as Tim O'Reilly likes to point out.  You've
got this LAMP layer that's open, but then groups like Amazon and Google
build these web applications that are not really open, even if they sit atop
LAMP in a big way.  Plus the chips are proprietary.

And even when a layer is open, you *still* need years of training to dive
in, in many cases.  The idea that the OS kernel is free is a good one, but
let's not forget that free means extrinsic barriers of secrecy and property
rights have been addressed -- but there's *still* the intrinsic barrier of
needing to learn how the kernel works, before you mess with it.

The tension is between "information" and "knowledge."  Source code on a hard
drive is information that may turn into knowledge in the mind of someone who
can read and understand it.  FOSS is about making information freely
available.  But that doesn't remove the need for training and expertise.  If
you don't know how to read, Project Gutenberg won't be of such direct help
or relevance.

So Python source code provides this layer in the stack.  I've got this
presentation manager that runs on Linux or Windows or Mac.  The content of
the presentation may be closed, secret or otherwise restricted.  The
platform on which the Python runs may be more or less open (in the case of
WinXP, it's closed).  But in the middle, you've got code that a Python
programmer might read and improve upon -- open source, released under the
GPL.

I think when humans encounter one another, this is a lot how it is:  we'll
be perfectly open about some things, closed about others.  But the stuff
we're open about may not register with others, as they're not prepared to
deal with the information we're sharing.  I talk about some area of math
(open source) and they glaze over.  Or they do, and I do.  Only sometimes,
do I freely communicate on a wavelength that another is equally able to
interpret.  In those times, a meeting of the minds occurs -- a rare enough
event, especially among specialists with a lot of deep knowledge and
divergent interests.

Kirby