Open source

[Steve]

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======================

Heads turned in June when Linus Torvalds's Linux operating system
was awarded first prize by the judges of an international art
festival. How far, one wonders, can the open source model go?

Harvey Blume
Atlantic 8/99


Where open source is concerned, no hyperbole seems too hyper. The
distribution of Linux source code by Linus Torvalds, in 1991, has
been compared to Martin Luther's translating the Bible into the
vernacular. Larry Wall, the inventor of Perl, declares that open
source programming is the expression in software of a fundamental
Christian message: creation is not fixed in advance; free will is
included and collaboration is encouraged. Even the Chinese Communist
Party smiles on open source. China Youth Daily reports that open
source programming has met with resistance from "software companies"
trying to impose the norms of a "traditional market-economy age upon
the new 'age of the information economy.'" Closer to home, but in no
less political a vein, FEED's Steven Johnson compares Eric Raymond's
open source manifesto, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," to the Port
Huron Statement, Tom Hayden's white paper for 1960s student
radicalism.

The Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest once flourished with
their potlatch (or gift) economy, but other Americans have had little
experience with the idea of prospering by giving wealth away instead
of hoarding it. No wonder, then, that we're uncertain about how to
label open source: whether as animal or vegetable, politics or
theology. Open source pits the virtues of collaboration and
participation against the habits of consolidation and control -- and,
as far as the development of software infrastructure goes, it works.
Still, how much cultural significance can be bundled into a software
package?

This past June the jury of the Prix Ars Electronica added yet another
dimension to open source by awarding Linux a Golden Nica for first
prize in the ".net" category. (The 1999 awards will be presented on
September 6 as part of the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz,
Austria.) For twenty years, Ars Electronica has held festivals on the
theme of "cultural transformation from the analog to the digital
era." Its jurors are unimpressed by "recycling conventional art forms
on the Net (e.g. Web galleries)" and unmoved by brilliant home pages.
In Linux they found an alternative form, one that contributes to
global networking even as it foments discussion about whether "code
itself can be an artwork." At first blush this discussion doesn't
seem all that promising. Why shouldn't code be art? From Chartres to
the Brooklyn Bridge, feats of engineering have been appreciated for
their aesthetic properties. Why should software engineering be any
different?

But the Prix Ars Electronica went not only to the content of Linux
(those efficient, bug-free lines of C) but also to the process of
producing them -- in other words, to open source itself. As Eric
Raymond observes in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," "Linus's
cleverest and most consequential hack was not the construction of the
Linux kernel itself, but rather his invention of the Linux
development model." The Golden Nica invites us to detach the code
from the process for the moment and to ask, If open source can lead to
computer code worthy of being called art, can it serve as a
foundation for other kinds of art as well?

Of course, art has been made along open source lines in the past. In
the 1920s, for example, the Surrealists explored a form they called
the "exquisite corpse," in which a drawing or poem in progress was
circulated to a number of artists for elaboration. (Examples are on
display in the Surrealist exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.)
Participants in the project did not get to see the entire work
(unlike in open source software development), only the section or line
to which they would add -- but that shouldn't prevent us from viewing
the exquisite corpse as a way of applying open source to poetry. It's
our notion of open source that should be opened up and made flexible.
The very market success of open source demands this; as it continues
to prove its viability, open source enters into any number of
partnerships with traditional forms, without necessarily abandoning
its original inspiration. More generally, the open source phenomenon
ought to be understood as an electronically networked and rapidly
evolving expression of a long-standing collaborationist dream. As the
Surrealists put it: "Poetry must be made by all and not by one." 

An expanded view of open source sheds new light on one of
twentieth-century art's signature techniques: quotation, or, in the
digital context, sampling. Quotation is a kind of "open-sourcing" of
artistic material. Picasso started by quoting freely from earlier
styles (and wound up quoting freely from himself). Copyright was never
at issue in Picasso's case -- only originality, its unregulated
counterpart. Today, of course, the purview of quotation has expanded
enormously. Sampling almost anyone and anything is just a simple
cut-and-paste operation. From one point of view this is liberating.
>From another it is theft. And neatly separating these two aspects of
the same process may be well beyond our powers while we are in the
midst of it.

Consider the case of John Myatt, described last month in The New York
Times Magazine as being part of an art-forgery scam so profound that
it was said to have "altered art history." Myatt didn't grow ever more
expert in copying one painter, as have forgers before him; he copied
many twentieth-century artists, and (in his own opinion) not very
adeptly: "There was a negligence to everything I did," he confessed.
Your favorite Giacometti could easily be yet another Myatt, and
certainly would be if it had any K-Y Jelly slopped on the canvas (the
use of fast-drying K-Y being one of Myatt's techniques for increasing
his output). Astonishingly, the K-Y almost never tipped off the
experts, many of whom now despair of getting the canon right again,
separating the real Giacomettis, Braques, and Chagalls from the
jellied frauds. But other experts admit that Myatt was doing just
what a modern artist should: quoting like crazy and making us think
about what artistic originality amounts to in the first place. This
is exactly the kind of thing the Ars Electronica jurors like to
ponder. Perhaps next year, if he can get online, Myatt will be
rewarded with a Golden Nica, making him a hero of the open source
underground: the Linus Torvalds of the dark side.

Make no mistake -- there is such a thing as an open source
underground, where the distinctions between literature and software,
not to mention sharing and stealing, get really and truly fouled. This
underground is personified by the legendary figure of Luther Blissett
-- "Luther Blissett" being (according to a site called the "Luther
Blissett Project: a mythopoetic on-line guide") "a multi-use name
that can be adopted by anyone and is used every day and every night
in the rest of Europe and the world." When Blissett hijacked a bus in
Rome -- "with drums, confetti, drinks and ghetto blasters tuned in to
Radio Blissett" -- the hijackers "bought only one ticket, because they
all shared the same open identity, that of Luther Blissett." Blissett
would just as soon crack Web sites as hijack buses. This past spring
he paid a surprise visit to hell.com (an invitation-only portal to
select art sites), downloaded all its files, and copied them to a free
site. As he put it: "What is a computer if not something that
benefits by the free flow of information?"

Blissett is also an open source novelist. Inspired by the papal
encyclical Ut Unum Sint ("That all may be one"), he wrote A Survivor
>From the XVIth Century: Q (not yet in English), announcing that the
process of composition requires "no boss, no mysterious scholar,"
only the contribution of many Blissetts, all of whom would be credited
separately if their names were not identical. "Creative writing,"
Blissett declared, "is an utterly collective operation: concepts can't
be anyone's property, the genius doesn't exist, there's just a Great
Recombination." Clearly Blissett's idea of recombination owes more
than a little to a talent for real and virtual safe cracking. His
slogans might be: "Release early, release often -- or we'll do it for
you!" and "Open source: by any means necessary!"

But we don't need Blissett to point out that open source practices of
one sort or another are more common than might be supposed. There are
signs, for example, that computer-game characters are beginning to
offer themselves up to the great recombination. Phil Hood, an analyst
at the Alliance for Converging Technologies, writes that computer
games are "slowly moving to a model in which users and programmers can
add characters and actions to existing proprietary games." In his
view, game-makers will find it makes good business sense to
collaborate with users "to extend, enhance and enlarge a brand." Hood
explains that "By acknowledging fans and customers as 'co-owners,'
companies open up new opportunities to tap the creative powers of
their fan base." Those powers are, of course, the engine of open
source. The New York Times recently reported on a game in which "the
real action happens in edit mode, where you can customize and
choreograph every facet of a fighting character's movement." And there
have been reports of players fashioning high-powered characters for
existing games, then auctioning them off on eBay.

Perhaps some comparable process will be coming to literature.
Fictional characters have long been reused by writers -- think of how
many authors have helped themselves to Sherlock Holmes, or how
Shakespeare drew on a potpourri of characters as it suited him -- but
characters may soon be snatched from author's galleys. Not plots, not
whole books, but simply characters: literary action figures drafted
into interaction with other such figures. It's relevant that the
Nabokov estate has recently settled with Pia Pera, an Italian writer
who has rewritten Lolita from Lolita's point of view, while the
copyright to the original novel remains in effect. If this deal had
followed open source protocol, the character of Lolita would be
henceforth available for rewriting by any willing writer. One day, she
might encounter Hamlet.

We think of open source as arising on the cutting edge of digital
technology -- certainly Linux and, say, Apache, are inconceivable
without an Internet. And yet the dream of a vast collaborative and
communal enterprise is primal, whether expressed in the dictum that
"Poetry must be made by all and not by one," or in recent allusions to
an electronic noosphere, a region of ideas that encircles and engages
us. Versions of the dream are as likely to turn up in the creation of
comics as in the dissemination of scientific information.

Art Spiegelman, for example, based his last book -- The Narrative
Corpse: A Chain-Story by 69 Artists! (1995) -- on the idea of the
exquisite corpse, with each artist forwarding his contribution to the
story line to the next cartoonist in the chain. And, this past June,
NIH director Dr. Harold E. Varmus proposed to put all scientific
research on what is effectively an open source footing. Under Varmus's
plan, which is still being debated, researchers would skip mediation
by scientific journals and upload their results directly to the
Internet, to be freely examined by anyone. This system would strongly
promote the collaborative side of science, upsetting researchers wed
to the proprietary approach. According to The New York Times,
however, many concede an open source revolution in research is "just a
question of when and how."

The conjunction of old dream and new media gives open source
redoubled force. Its popularity, and its presence in many fields of
intellectual endeavor, make it tempting to look back on the production
of cultural goods in the twentieth century as a halting march toward
some grand collaborative consummation. Of course, the attractions of
this sort of open source utopianism haven't been countered, as yet,
with anything like open source realism. Hence the theorists of open
source theology, open source politics, and open source business
plans. The truth is, we don't know how far the open source model can
go. The Golden Nica awarded to Linux reminds us it can go as far as
art.

Copyright c 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company




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