Random thoughts, drawn from reading too much good science fiction on a plane recently, which is always dangerous. (For the record, Kindles on Planes are the best!). I’m not even saying I believe all of this, as it raises some questions, but wanted to do some thinking out loud.
Assumption: We all need to contribute to a long term purpose, well beyond our generations and next ten generations. Just living to live and replicate is nice, but … not enough on the cosmic scale (all animals do this).
Different people need different purposes so we’re not redundant. We all have our skills.
For maximize one’s purpose, you work within the domain that you are best skilled at.
Is the software developer’s purpose merely to advance the future of technology? Software?
But we don’t all work on things that feel world changing. We all can’t. What can we do?
Isn’t a lot of what we work on increasingly arbitrary? Sometimes it feels like features don’t matter.
Is the evolution of technology the goal itself anyway, can we re-evaluate that question?
Are we just in software to acquire funds to use the funds to advance the meaning of life itself? I would expect not.
If so, where is software going in the future? We don’t know. So I don’t think that’s the goal. Not software for the sake of software.
The future we can predict is only an extrapolation of the near now. It is not guided by long term goals that exceed human lifespan. We don’t know.
In the future 1000 years from now, was it more important to have worked on Web App X or Database Engine Y? Neither. Because that can’t be what matters.
Theory: The power of OSS tech is not in technology, it is that it crosses boundaries. It is a system, an ideal. The tech does not matter.
OSS is not about software.
Software is an abstract playing field in which we teach ourselves how to collaborate. One of many such fields. Maybe not even the most efficient.
Computer Science is just about logic anyway. It was never about computers.
Queue Dijkstra’s quote about telescopes.
It’s certaintly not about whether Fiber iLaser 3.0 is going to be better than eCommerce JetPack 7X. Long term, this matters so very little.
In ten years, technology will have surpassed any of those accomplishments many times over, learning from both, most likely.
Business is kind of like a abstract playing field too. It’s also a lot like Feudalism. Which is a lot like Government.
These systems can set up boundardies that impair collaboration.
OSS is about providing even access to /things/ and letting everyone share. The specifics of an individual technology won’t matter in fifty years, it will have evolved.
OSS is not just the things, but in the shaping of the future of those things — by anyone who wants to shape them.
And teaching governments and companies this too.
Technology held in the hands of a few is a differentiator. (An ally with superior weaponry wins the war. If we all have the same weapons do we choose to fight a losing battle or not fight at all?) (Apply fight to anything, war is not what I’m talking about — just conflict).
Once technology is released, it improves, it can never be rescinded. (Contributions yield more technology)
Allowing people to collaborate across feudal boundaries and governmental boundaries lessens the importance of those systems of division.
(Yet currently we impose some barriers where things are too complex — we can’t let barriers to knowledge keep people off of the playing field for too long)
(Queue comments about the educational system)
Back to it — sharing allows for greater productivity, efficiency, and being able to spend time on /other/ goals.
This should be instructive in other things.
(But let’s not get too happy — we could all do it better)
Speculation: Our true purpose is not to write software.
Our purpose is to teach people to work together and ignore the boundaries set up in society to say they cannot work together.
This is necessary, no required, to achieve larger goals.
The world matters more than individual governments.
The universe matters more than the world.
For larger issues to be tackled, we have to know how to collaborate better.
Software is an abstract game space that we play in.
(Yet one that we can also make money from, because we do need to eat! This is important, so those arbitrary features — yeah, they do matter)
Our 1000-year higher purpose (or eventual unaccidentally goal) is not to create SkyNet or even a fully plugged in culture. We don’t even know if that would be a good thing.
That may happen in 1000 years — because that’s the fieldspace we are playing this collaboration exercise in — but that’s not our purpose.
What we are all doing is teaching people how to collaborate and learning what works and what doesn’t.
How to come together.
To eventually become one.
Many people have done this — in many fields — software is just one such space that is more abstract than some others.
Technology is just how we get there for people that happen to prefer Math to Philosophy, but there is still a Philosophy in it.
There is still the question though, how do I choose what feature to work on tomorrow that improves the world the most?
Is the answer that it is not a feature, but instead, the question, how best can I help other people to help other people to help other people?
This feels recursive.
It is.
This may redefine our purpose — to teach, to demonstrate a model, and to share that model.
This has been called religion. In a way, maybe it is.
Individual resources are limited, together what we can accomplish is unlimited.
Improving large scale collaboration across arbitrary boundaries is fundamental to understanding our long term plan and our greater purpose.
We can do better at this than we are doing to. We don’t have all the answers. We don’t even know all of the questions.
I would be interested in thoughts on this and whether things can be accelerated or even on the correct track.
That does the future of OSS lead to in our long distant future, long after we have grown flippers and returned to the oceans? 
[...] Dehaan muses about the future of open source software. “In the future 1000 years from now, was it more important to have [...]
[...] Dehaan muses about the future of open source software. “In the future 1000 years from now, was it more important to have [...]
I wonder what books you’ve read? Two come to my mind, one is the Foundation by Asimov, where he talks about Gaia, the other is Conversations with God by Walsh. Its rather strange to see these ideas to recur so frequently. Is it me or the world is really changing and more and more people get enlightened?
Have read the former (a long while ago — used to be a big Asimov fan and should re-read some of it), haven’t read the later.
Actually lately it’s been Stephenson’s Anathem (a few months ago), Card’s Ender In Exile, re-reading Herbert’s “God Emperor of Dune” (which has some great philosophical parts, worthy of a separate post, which I didn’t really grok when I was a kid) and some totally unrelated and irrelevant Neil Gaiman — most of those dealing with longer term plannings of things on a very large scale, as well as the ability of very small groups of people to cause very large impacts.
That coupled with listening to a lot of product sales pitches in a short interval made me wonder whether much of the work we do, long since strayed from academics (and academics itself straying too far from pragmatism or deep relevance in many circles), has such longstanding contribution and influence. That, and knowing what we think we know about community dynamics and how they might apply to larger systems (i.e. governments), would it be safe to think of us as more interested in the latter problem than the former problem of the short term product lifecycle? I was also struck by a C-level exec’s comment (not my company, of course) I heard recently — “We’re so concerned with 6 month short-term roadmaps we can’t even think about the future”. Sadness. The future I want to think about is the future far past my lifetime, and what we can do today to help shape that future. Capitalism and traditional corporate focus on stock performance (see also: oil) doesn’t seem to like long-term. How to reconcile that?
I’m sure the world is changing — it always is — though I think we lack the data to ensure it’s changing as we like and need to better understand how we can shape it, or rather what we do is ultimately just influence in a microcosm.
(Yet, as I’ve said, we’ve got to eat too).
It might be safe to say though that things are clearly breaking away from small feudal regions of power to larger entities, which does hopefully trend towards globalness and the irrelevance of those barriers if allowed to go the course.
One can hope. That’s our path to enable what science fiction so frequently talks about — if this industry can be the ones to show governments (and other industries) that path, perhaps we have a chance.
If so, this means what we are doing /is/ playing a kind of instructive game about the second derivative of information. If I could insert a pun, perhaps we’re trading futures!
Of course, if this is all B.S., efforts may be better applied elsewhere. Not sure.
“Once technology is released, it improves, it can never be rescinded.”
Not true, at least in the short run. An example–the renunciation of firearms by the Japanese. It seems like the main reason this didn’t last in the long run was that others still had firearms. What would have happened if Japan had been the sole owners of that technology?
Technology can, in fact, be controlled. It’s up to individuals to band together to ensure that it isn’t. There just isn’t any magic.
I think your statement rather proves the point, rather than disagreeing with it — guns are pretty much available to everyone.
A better example might have been the nuke … once the ideas are out there, eventually everyone acquired them.
The only differential is the period at which only the inventor or a select few has them, but the knowledge seeks to be freely dispersed.
[...] story from LWN: Michael Dehaan muses about the future of open source software. “In the future 1000 years from now, was it more important to have [...]