################################################################################ # Homesteading the Noosphere Notes # # Anuradha Weeraman, 18 April 2004 # # Adapted from "Homesteading the Noosphere", Eric S. Raymond # # $Id: homesteading-the-noosphere.txt,v 1.1 2004/06/02 21:17:53 anuradha Exp $ # ################################################################################ * One degree of variation is zealotry; whether open source development is regarded merely as a convenient means to an end (good tools and fun toys and an interesting game to play) or as an end in itself. * Another degree of variation is in hostility to commercial software and/or the companies perceived to dominate the commercial software market. * In a reinforcing development, the pragmatist part of the culture was itself becoming polycentric by the mid-1990s. Other semi-independent communities with their own self-consciousness and charismatic leaders began to bud from the Unix/Internet root stock. Of these, the most important after Linux was the Perl culture under Larry Wall. Smaller, but still significant, were the traditions building up around John Osterhout's Tcl and Guido van Rossum's Python languages. All three of these communities expressed their ideological independence by devising their own, non-GPL licensing schemes. * In 1997 these common elements were distilled into the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which became the Open Source Definition . Under the guidelines defined by the OSD, an open-source license must protect an unconditional right of any party to modify (and redistribute modified versions of) open-source software. * Some of the main taboos and ownership customs in open source. o There is strong social pressure against forking projects. It does not happen except under plea of dire necessity, with much public self-justification, and with a renaming. o Distributing changes to a project without the cooperation of the moderators is frowned upon, except in special cases like essentially trivial porting fixes. o Removing a person's name from a project history, credits or maintainer list is absolutely not done without the person's explicit consent. -- IN_PROGRESS --