Free Software Development Models in Government, Academia and Beyond

Former hedge-fund manager Andrew Lahde recently published a “goodbye letter” to his investors in which he philosophizes on everything from the financial crisis to marijuana. Interestingly, in advocating reforms to the United States government that would make authorities less susceptible to corruption, Lahde remarks in passing that this new state should be planned by a group “similar to the one used to create the operating system, Linux, which competes with Microsoft’s near monopoly.”

This remark on Linux, although vague, got me thinking about the open-source development model and its extensions beyond the software world.

Socialist Software?

Advocates of proprietary software like to denounce Linux as a sort of socialist project whose delusional developers, precisely because of the transparency and openness of their work, lack the guidance of the invisible hand necessary to create anything of value. In other words, without the promise of personal riches and hierarchical organization, no one can be expected to do serious work.

The millions of Linux deployments on desktops, and the many more on servers, suggest that the open-source development model can, in fact, produce something of high value. The debate on whether a project like Linux can create useful software has been long over, at least among those of us living in reality.

Linux Beyond the Computer

But software is one thing; political institutions are quite another. Is it crazy to imagine that a system built upon collaboration, transparency and sharing could be effective outside the geeky software realm?

In short: no (did you expect me to say yes?).

As a graduate student, I’m struck by the similarities between academia and Linux development. No scholar will be taken seriously working in secret, isolated from colleagues who might criticize her work in an attempt to improve it.

An academic work is worthless without citations and a bibliography, which represent to the scholarly community what source code is to software developers. If I wrote an article without citing any sources and presented my thesis as a point of fact—the equivalent in a sense of releasing a software application in binary-only form—my work would be untrustworthy and useless as a basis for building something better. Software without open source code is similarly ineffective, since no one has the chance to see how it works or improve it.

Perhaps most important, and most shocking to enemies of free software, is the notion of ownership of ideas within academia. In the scholarly community, no one can “own” an idea. You certainly receive credit for your work, but ideas are not proprietary in the sense that one individual or institution can monopolize them and arbitrarily decide the terms upon which others may put them to use.

College Connection

Perhaps it’s not by coincidence, then, that some of the most influential developers and software projects began in academia. Richard Stallman, according to his biography, first conceived of the GNU project out of resentment of the encroachment of closed-source programs in his computer lab at MIT.  Linus Torvalds began writing Linux–and made the decision to share its code with strangers–as a graduate student in order to teach himself the intricacies of the Intel 80386 processor.  BSD, upon which substantial portions of the Linux networking stack are based (not to mention almost all of Apple’s OS X kernel), was developed at U.C. Berkeley.

I can’t pretend to have any experience in government, with which Lahde’s proposal regarding open-source development-models is concerned. And I don’t have the space here to go intelligently into much detail about what precisely that might entail. But based on the effectiveness of transparent, decentralized, non-hierarchical modes of collaboration in academia, I think it’s fair to say that human institutions can work effectively—and, in the case of universities, have for centuries—when organized along the lines adopted by most free-software projects.

And that, I think, helps to answer a lot of the traditional criticisms lodged at Ubuntu and Linux by some of their most virulent opponents.

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WorksWithU Contributing Blogger Christopher Tozzi is a PhD student at a major U.S. university. Tozzi has extensive hands-on experience with Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition. WorksWithU is updated multiple times per week. Don’t miss a single post. Sign up for our RSS and Twitter feeds (available now) and newsletter (launching January 2009).