{"id":12250,"date":"2023-04-19T15:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-04-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/2023\/04\/19\/open-source-ensures-code-remains-a-part-of-culture\/"},"modified":"2023-04-19T22:22:58","modified_gmt":"2023-04-19T20:22:58","slug":"open-source-ensures-code-remains-a-part-of-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/2023\/04\/19\/open-source-ensures-code-remains-a-part-of-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Source ensures code remains a part of culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As Lessig observed in his 1999 book\u00a0\u201cCODE, and other laws of cyberspace\u201d, a citizen\u2019s practical experience of the law and of society today is through the software that implements the written law. All the computer code that governs our lives and liberty should be open to public scrutiny in this new era. More than just allowing us to guard our freedoms now, future historians will also need usable source code if they are to fully understand our\u00a0digital present as their\u00a0historic past.<br \/>\nBy popularizing and catalyzing the pre-existing concepts from the\u00a0free software movement,\u00a0Open Source\u00a0has been at the heart of the connected technology revolution for 25 years. Open Source licenses grant all the rights necessary for anyone and everyone to use, improve, share and monetise the software powering modern systems and networks, empowering collaboration with many \u201cknown others\u201d to create results greater than any could alone. Open Source Approved Licenses\u00ae are the hidden power behind Linux, Apache, Mozilla, Android and more.<br \/>\nBut by granting all the rights necessary to evolve the software powering modern systems and networks, Open Source also unreservedly grants permission to \u201cunknown others\u201d to repurpose, rehost, reuse and revolutionize. It also allows digital archivists to store, refactor and renew the means of access over the long term.<br \/>\nAvailability to the \u201cunknown others\u201d \u2014 to society in general, and to our descendants \u2014 is crucial to our future. When software stays locked up inside the corporation or institution, when code created by the state with public funds remains secret, it does not add to our collective knowledge and the innovation it embodies is lost to society when the \u201cowner\u201d moves on. This was the original motivation for previous generations to create temporary intellectual monopolies as an incentive to creators to make their creations public.<br \/>\nAs time has passed, those intellectual monopolies have themselves been regarded as property and the knowledge and culture they embody is increasingly withheld from society using that as a pretext. Open Source allows that new-found wealth to be \u201cspent\u201d in a new way to stimulate collaboration. Collaboration in the community has gone on to amplify innovation and accelerate adoption. It\u2019s thus especially important that software funded with public money finds its way into Software Heritage.<br \/>\nSoftware Heritage completes the new social contract enabled by Open Source. It provides the ultimate historical reference for the code behind our culture and comprehensive library of innovation to provide a \u201cmounting block\u201d to the shoulders of the giants before us. We should strive to get all the software that matters into this new internet archive for code.<br \/>\nSoftware is a cultural artifact, a proxy for the law in the lives of every citizen, a tool for control and for freedom depending on the hand that wields it. \u00a0It is imperative that all software is open for scrutiny and preserved for posterity.&#013;<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/04\/b64b9ff5-5bca-4c8e-a824-6af5462517d3_52785907518_17a9fab279_h-1-1024x768-1.jpg\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\">&#013;<br \/>\nSource: opensource.org&#013;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As Lessig observed in his 1999 book\u00a0\u201cCODE, and other laws of cyberspace\u201d, a citizen\u2019s practical experience of the law and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":12251,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/48"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12250"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12250\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12252,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12250\/revisions\/12252"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/plus.maciejpiasecki.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}