The open source value of responsibility

(There remains controversy whether this 1843 daguerreotype, copyright Albert Kaplan, is the young Abraham Lincoln. You belief in the assertion is a choice, which is important in what follows.)

Power, I learned in college, is derived from myths and values, myths being the stories we tell one another to explain the values. It's what makes a figure like Lincoln so important. His story is mythic, it teaches us lessons, and government applies these to its work.

Among the values I identified in the series were visibility, trust, openness, consensus, and transparency. Most are generally accepted, even universal. They represent a shared set of expectations you find in nearly all advocacy on the subject.

But in writing earlier today about the government, another value occurred to me. It is one that is not universally accepted by users, and its very existence is sometimes rejected by those who deride open source.

That value is responsibility.

When an enterprise embraces open source it also starts taking responsibility for its code base. Open source is not entirely a make or buy decision, but in practice it often becomes one.

This may be one reason why open source vendors can find profits elusive. Customers take the code, they take responsibility, and they may find the support bills of their vendor vestigial.

In the proprietary world, where code is hidden and all responsibility falls to the vendor, this income is captured upfront. No tickee, no washee.

Individual users do not always take this responsibility seriously. We see open source software as free, as in beer. Non-programmers might find looking at their code a useless exercise anyway.

Thus there is a split in the user community, between those who understand the code and thus take their own open source responsibility seriously, and those (sometimes derided as freeloaders) who remain passive users.

We may ask users to contribute, to give money to a project or to offer time as beta testers, but we can't press the point. Open source responsibility is a value that is not universally acknowledged, nor universally accepted.

But this does not mean it's not real, and not powerful. Many religious and political values are mainly aspirational. We are all sinners and all, in some ways, intolerant, but we aspire to be better and thus these values remain potent.

So it is with open source responsibility. I suspect many open source users may feel a twinge of guilt on this score. Some advocates want you to feel more of it. And there are small, quiet steps we can all take. As penance, if you will.

Beta testing, cash contributions, even things as simple as keeping your code updated so you won't incubate viruses attached to old code, each is a small contribution we make toward maintaining our responsibility as open source users.

To those who take more, who feel more, the open source priests, rabbis, imams and lamas, I personally want to salute you. By taking this value seriously you drive the movement forward. And you make society better as well.