austraLasia
1499
Open Source Don
Bosco Part II - forking the PS!
ROME: 22nd
March 2006 -- Names like Linus Torvalds or Ward Cunningham don't roll
off the tongue quite like Don Bosco, but they have something in common: each is
'The Father' of something. No need to repeat the mantra for the last-named of the group, but LT is known as
The Father of Linux (his first name plus the Unix
operating system) and WC as The Father of Wiki, a clever code web surfers to add
their own material. His Wikipedia is the world's largest encyclopedia.
It's when you hear them speaking that you begin to make connections, and when we
know how keen DB was to use any means at his disposal for the salvation of the
young, we sense intuitively that he would have embraced the best in 'Open
Source', which is really what those other two have been
developing.
Only today, at a conference where he is
keynote speaker, Ward Cunningham described software in the open source mode as
'a work where people see an area that's weak and they make it
stronger'. He describes the code base (of software) as 'a point of
strength, not a burden to be ignored', and revels in 'the way large
groups of people can communicate'. If you see the world of poor
youngsters as 'an area that's weak' (not too far from some of DB's descriptions)
and maybe the constitutions as the 'code base', DB's explicit willingness to
harness the best energies of anybody for the cause as part of 'the way large
groups can communicate' you begin to see that the Open Source movement and Don
Bosco are at least fellow travellers.
Open Source as a
movement (a loosely applied term) has some interesting secular virtues:
transparency, ease of engagement, structure, leadership, common standards, peer
review, shared goals, an incrementalist approach and
powerful non-monetary incentives - as for this final point, the first question
one often hears from the layman is 'why would anybody want to build software for
free?' and it kind of requires the same answer as 'why would anybody want to
live as a Salesian Religious?' Obviously it is not money which makes the
world go round.
Is structure a virtue? OS,
just like DB, realises that magical bubbly creativity doesn't get you far.
There's also a need for formal hierarchical government. Try writing a
piece of magical bubbly code in Python and you soon
see the need for structure! I leave you to look for 'religious'
equivalents to transparency, ease of engagement...if you think you need
them. Why not simply accept secular virtues as God-given anyway?
We have our own terminology, and there is no real need to
be moving away from that. 'Preventive System' would lose out if we changed its
name, I think. But that should not hinder a little
cross-fertilisation. DB accepted 'Oratory' as a term, but he certainly
gave it a new direction, as he did for 'College' and not a few other
terms. He would not be adverse to adding the adjective 'open' to many of
his enterprises. Oratory as open space within boundaries? He was certainly
interested in open knowledge (freely provided, freely used), open team working
(communities), open conversations (friendly chats) backed up by a firm 'code
base' with solid principles but not closed forever to development.
Open Source might even offer us some new religious
language: it talks about 'forking' - and only yesterday I read a piece on how
Leonardo Murialdo 'forked' the Preventive System...well, to be honest, the
author didn't say 'forked' but that's what he meant. Murialdo could have
joined the Salesians, so enamoured was he of Don Bosco personally and of the
preventive system, and actually ran the St. Aloysius Oratory for him. But
he didn't join up - as the author puts it 'he breathed the preventive system,
incarnated it and then applied it in his own educational institution'.
That's forking. In fact Unix, which gave us the term, explains forking as
a parent-child relationship. A 'parent' process forks to produce a 'child'
process which may well become a parent in its own right. That sounds very
much like the kind of life Don Bosco gave his youngsters, but also like the
growth of the Salesian Family. Cunningham speaks of 'agile development',
quite a rich term, actually, implying a vibrant ecosystem where practitioners
move around from community to community spreading good ideas....hmmm, something
like the endless visits of Regional and other General
Councillors!
It's not only terms that OS can offer us but
some models as well. Take Firefox, a classic example of OS at work.
Why is it so successful as a browser? Now this begins to sound almost
biblical, but the Mozilla Foundation behind it has 12, that's right, 12 core
developers, their 'animating nucleus', then somewhere around 400 people allowed
to fiddle with the code, about 1,000 others who freely offer patches to fix
problems, 10,000 plus who freely scrutinise the code and offer their ideas,
another 500,000 who download the Beta form and send in their comments. The
old 'pebble in the pond' trick.
If Open Source sits
somewhere between the corporation and the commune, so do Don Bosco and the
Salesian Society. OS says it is open enough to learn from anyone,
including us - in theory. Could we also learn from them - in
practice? I think so.
GLOSSARY
mantra: as
used here, a repeated phrase, e.g. 'the father of..' (probably more appropriate
to a certain passage from Genesis!)
Unix: Please,
not to be confused with Asterix and Obelix! Stands for 'uniplexed
information and computer system' whatever that means. In real terms it is so
important that without it the internet would stop, phone calls could not be
made, electronic commerce would cease and we'd be in Jurassic Park.
incrementalist: small changes rather than radical
innovation all the time.
Python: named, funnily
enough, after Monty Python's Flying Circus! Computer programmers have a sense of
humour. Python is the best way for a beginner to learn programming; an Object
Oriented Interpreter language - sorry, you'll have to look that up
separately. Can't keep looping the glossary ad
infinitum!
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