We All Want a Pony!

People in Chapel Hill want lower taxes and better schools.

People in North Carolina want economic development and a cleaner environment.

The US Government wants cheap labor and strong borders.

Software lobbying groups want to protect innovation while supporting the ridiculous notion of software patents.

And open source software developers want strong guarantees of freedom without imposing their views on others.

I have been reviewing and participating in the development of local, state, national, and international policy documents on a wide range of subject (not limited to open source software), and one thing that experience has taught me is that a lot of people want a lot of things. And a lot of those things people say they want are fundamentally inconsistent, pony or no pony.

Jared Diamond looks in detail at the consequences of those inconsistencies in his book Collapse. Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini offers a similar perspective in their writings entitled "Slow Food Nation" (her article his book). In both cases it is clear that when the equations do not balance, the imbalance leads to disaster.

I am very sympathetic to the libertarian leanings of many open source developers who want to be free in a way which does not constrain the freedoms of others. But we do not live in a virtual world, where we can choose the boundaries and limits of our own interactions with others. We live in a real world where freedoms and choices do collide and conflict. Alan's report does strike me as accurate in gaining a sense of the community, but it is not an actionable sense. It is not a practical sense. It represents the kind of dangerous fantasy that leads to collapse.

I see a growing parallel between the growing understanding and acceptance of the open source development model and the growing understanding and alarm concerning the threat of global warming. The strong scientific consensus is that global warming is a direct consequence of a set of behaviors focused on meeting one set of desires without regard for the consequences of those behaviors. Selfish social behavior, acted out on a global scale with industrial efficiency, is not only consuming earth's resources at the rate of 1.2 earths per earth, but it is emitting pollutants that will force the displacement of more than 1 billion people in the next 50-100 years. And while nothing, yet, has changed in the behavior of the major actors in this situation, attitudes are beginning to change, as evidenced by a joint statement issued by 50 major CEOs to the US Congress in March of this year. Similarly, the GPLv3, which seemed radical a year ago, now seems far more reasonable as promoting the necessary protections of the very freedoms that developers claim is so dear to them. Of course these developers don't want to impose their beliefs on others--how anti-libertarian, how anti-freedom, how anti-choice! However, the consequences of not protecting those freedoms makes the developer, their project, and the community susceptible to insideous destruction by forces that have shown no similar respect for the freedoms and choices of others.

So, thank you Alan, for at least showing that Open Source developers are as human as anybody else. We all, secretly, want a pony. And, for your next paper, you might want to analyze how those expressed needs are best met in the real world. You might be surprised to discover that the very thing people say they like least is the only thing that protects what they value most.