A big, open idea

Matt Mullenweg

Most of the time I'm a grumpy old bugger so I'm rarely inspired by a person or an idea. Being inspired by a person with an idea who is younger than me is an extreme rarity. I'm a believer in the crass generalisation that youth is wasted on the young. It certainly was on me.

But this weekend just gone I was inspired by Matt Mullenweg, the 25 year old pictured above who founded what has become the world's most popular blogging software, Wordpress. He espoused an idea that I think could generate the sort of societal shift akin to some of the great movements of the last 200 years. We've seen the growth and death of communism, the growth of multinational corporate capitalism, the birth of feminism and the growth of environmentalism.

I think we're now seeing the birth and growth of an idea that is already affecting most of us, certainly those who use computers.

I'm talking about the open source software movement and I think it's an idea whose time has come, not just for software. We have just witnessed an orgy of capitalistic excess driven by personal greed and a corrupt and delinquent set of regulators and lawmakers. The global explosion in financially engineered debt in the last decade and the fallout we're seeing now is rightly forcing many of us to question the core tenets of how our western societies are organised.

Should every company and organisation be run with the express purpose of making a profit or generating a surplus to be distributed by shareholders and managers. Should ideas and technologies be free and open to anyone who wants them?

Should companies and people be allowed to make super-profits by restricting access to those ideas and technologies? Should we instead give away things and ideas simply because it makes us all happier and wealthier? What's the point of generating wealth if only a few are able to accumulate and spend it while the masses toil under a mountain of debt to buy trinkets that never make them truly happy?

Is there a better way that isn't communism or fascism or socialism or feudalism or a theocracy? It seems like we've tried all of these in the last couple of hundred years and they haven't worked. They often seem to slide into the abyss of dictatorship. Witness the USSR, China, North Korea, Iran and all the others. I'm not sure the bastion of capitalism, the USA, is much better.

As Winston Churchill once said, democracy is the least worst form of government. It is easily shoved around by corporate interests, who can often game or buy the system.

The appalling behaviour of the political and banking elites in America in the last year is extraordinary. Over US$20 trillion of taxpayer money has been essentially handed over to a bunch of bankers in Manhattan, who are now reaping billions of dollars worth of bonuses for themselves.

Meanwhile workers have seen their real wages decline in the last 20 years at the same time as their debt has multiplied. The profit share in the global economy has risen sharply, while the wage share has dropped. Is this sort of multinational mega-corporate capitalism how we really want to organise ourselves?

I've worked for these sorts of corporates for nearly 15 years. They were mostly honourable and looked after their staff. They tried to be nice to their customers, but they believed fundamentally that their role was to create some sort of intellectual or technological capital that they could sell or rent to their customers for the biggest profit possible.

Often nameless and faceless shareholders revert to the lowest common denominator when the pressure is on. It leads to a short-termism and a fundamentally unstable and unsustainable ethos of maximising profits quarter by quarter.

So what was Matt talking about and what is he doing?

Matt was espousing the ideals of the open source software movement that has spawned the Linux operating software, the Apache web server software, the MySQL database software and an increasing amount of software that real consumers can download and use for free. This collection of essentially free software now powers most of the internet.

Matt's Wordpress, which I use at interest.co.nz, is one of the best and most used of these consumer open source softwares. Open source software is built through an essentially cooperative process where developers work together to create and debug software before giving it away. It uses a General Public License (GPL). There's more information on the GPL here.

Essentially, the free software movement was borne in the early 1980s and led by Richard Stallman, a former MIT student and hacker. See more background here. Other devotees include Linus Torvalds (Linux).

Matt has set up a non-profit foundation called Wordpress.org that keeps developing Wordpress and nurtures the community of developers who produce themes and plugins that help bloggers tart up their bog standard blogs. Matt himself has set up a company called Automattic that sells some premium services around Wordpress such as the Akismet spam blocking software. It also runs a free blog hosting service called wordpress.com. It's main aim is to ensure the continued development of Wordpress and any profits seem a happy side effect rather than the main game.

Matt could easily have cashed in on the enormous popularity of Wordpress with a lucrative share float and an attempt to lock down the source code and rent it out Microsoft-style. Instead he realised it was the community of developers and bloggers who actually 'owned' the software and it would die as soon as a corporate tried to control it. So he ensured it stayed free and open source.

And he walks the talk. I heard Matt talk at a WordPress camp in Wellington last weekend and he regularly travels the world to connect with the Wordpress community and spread the message. See more details here .

This movement could easily stop within the software community and may well do. But Matt and others, including Stallman, are increasingly saying the movement's principles of freedom, transparency, cooperation and sharing could be used elsewhere where any form of intellectual property or capital is involved. The obvious place is government, where so much could be gained by 'open sourced' legislation and opening up data to find solutions and keep the bastards honest.

Other areas include the pharmaceutical industry, engineering, media and marketing.

Those are ambitious aims, but there are more tangible ways governments and corporates could go 'open source' and improve their bottom lines as well as their services. Firstly, the government should adopt a principle of using open source software where ever possible. That means ditching the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and others to save a whole lot of money. New Zealand's government is beginning to show some initial signs of going down that track.

It means thinking about new projects and spending in an open source way. Decisions and plans don't always have to be top down. The growth of technology and systems to ask for feedback and 'beta' test ideas and processes before implementation should be used.

One great example of how this open source philosophy is being applied to government is a Barcamp being planned for August 29 in Wellington where people interested in opening up government data for public use will get together and try to come up with some ideas. Here's more detail.

For those wanting more information, here is a video of Matt explaining the open source ethos.

Here is an interview Matt did with Kim Hill on Radio New Zealand National on Saturday morning.

 


Bernard Hickey