August 26th, 2008
Open source extremism lives
What we now call the open source movement started as a reaction to the perceived extremism of folks like Richard Stallman with their demand that everything be free.
The liberation of content, and the defiance of the copyright industries, remains a fault line between the open source business world and what you might call open source extremism.
Such extremism lives on in projects like OpenTape. It’s a system for creating mixtapes, something the RIAA takes a very, very dim view of. (I think they’re like anything else — a few masterpieces and a lot of noise.)
Is extremism in the defense of liberty vice or virtue?OpenTape is essentially a clone of MuxTape, another program for making mix tapes which was shut down by RIAA litigation.
As commenters at Hacker News noted, the whole project is essentially a poke in the eye of the RIAA. It’s the route of defiance.
Open source considers itself a business movement, but the wing which created OpenTape is a political movement. Do the two support one another, or sit in opposition?
The question needs to be asked regularly. Does the zealotry of OpenTape help or hurt the open source movement?
Is extremism in the defense of liberty no vice, or is it true that in extremism there can be no liberty? Is moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue, or is it essential if lasting change is to be achieved?
The paragraph above is, in keeping with the season, a political mix tape whose source lies here. Working with the source file may give you some insight into the issue.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 08/26/08
