Louis Suárez-Potts‘ interview with LFY magazines Anannya Nath (conducted on February 08, 2006) was a very gripping conversation as can be seen from the transcript. Anannya Nath is one of my list of most-favorite-journalists. This is one of the most intriguing conversations I have read and so I post it here thanks to Louis Suárez-Potts. Excerpts from the interview:
What is your role as Community Development Manager at OpenOffice.org?
It is a flexible role and the easiest way to think of it is that I represent the community (however defined). In effect, I represent it to developers, businesses, governments, corporations, as well as to the sponsoring companies, especially the primary one, Sun, and hosting company, CollabNet, which employs me. It goes without saying that I also do a lot of writing, project management, admin, and ombudsmanship. Independent of my role as community manager, I’m also on the governing council, the Community Council, and the lead or co-lead of several projects, including Website and Distribution, though for the former, Kay Schenk and Christian Lohmaier do all the work and for the latter, Stefan Taxhet, Mike NIblett, Riccardo Losselli and a fantastic team of volunteer system admins do the work and deserve all the credit for what’s good about the site and distribution of OpenOffice.org. I’m also the lead, along with Erwin Tenhumberg, of the BizDev project, which helps to manage our relation to businesses, and co-lead of the Native-Language Confederation, which Charles Schulz has led now for several years of vigourous growth and activity.
In contrast, a sponsored project will often start with a gift of code to the “open source community” (whatever that means) and then form a community around the gifted code. This is what happened with OpenOffice.org, and the strategy presents some challenges to the formation of an interested community. But: I tend to think that few projects, sponsored or not–indeed, few companies, sponsored, or not–have been quite as successful as OpenOffice.org. Think of it: we have tens and tens of millions of users representing a significant chunk of the office suite user base. Why do they use OOo? Without question it’s because the product is so good and because it is free, as in gratis, as well as in speech. But it’s also because it has been translated to languages like Hindi, Tamil, and many others used in India and elsewhere. And it is also because despite starting from code already written, we have formed a “community” or communities concerned with the making and propagating of the application and ancillary material, such as help files. Community members include not only employees of Sun, Novell, Intel, Propylon, and associates of Debian, Mandriva, and so on, but thousands who are not paid or employed by small and focused companies. Regardless, all have devoted enormous chunks of their daily lives to making and propagating OpenOffice.org. This s remarkable.
Why have people so committed themselves to the project? The reasons vary. For some, their work will ultimately benefit them. For others, the reason is more altruistic or communal: they wish to give back to the project some of the benefit they have received from it. They see quite clearly that OpenOffice.org represents an opening to the future–a future that will include them, as active participants, in a way that proprietary commodities never can. Proprietary products make you, the consumer, at best a user, seldom a producer.
Think too of the places where open source has barely had an impact: games and other aesthetic works. For all these, there is a certain relation to the consumer that makes it difficult to conceive of open source as the solution. I’m not saying it’s impossible; hardly, and there are numerous aesthetic works that are in fact open; as well, one could envision that the content of a game stays closed but the code producing the movement and effects is open. But in the case of content, the nature of our relation to the work has to be calculated and understood: participation as a producer is not always desired. Further, one has to think through the implications of freeing works which are, by Kant’s definition of art, non-utile. How much would society’s wealth be increased if they were open sourced?
How can a country like India benefit by adopting open source solutions?
The adoption of FOSS confers both economic and social benefit. To begin with, FOSS is both a commodity and a resource: something you use and something you develop; usually free as in beer and always free as in speech. As a free commodity, it obviously saves money in licensing fees, which would otherwise be sent abroad. And as a free resource it goes well beyond saving money. It produces wealth, and the wealth it produces is local. Investing in FOSS means investing in local talent; it means encouraging the growth of everything from local support companies to local developers to local school curricula to local distributors. For a country like India–powerful and possessed of vast natural talent–it means taking a lead on the world stage in developing technology, and this will have I believe positive social effects. FOSS is not a political movement but the narrow freedoms granted by the licenses can promote vigourous growth of participant communities, starting with the technical but not ending there. What FOSS ultimately implies is a way for experts and consumers to communicate, share knowledge, information, interests to produce new things and move beyond, around, through the walls created by the decades long and stultifying intellectual property regime we know so well today. And besides innovation, why is this important? Because FOSS promises to bridge the so-called “digital divide,” or the gulf between the elite who have and use computers and thus benefit from the 21st century service and knowledge economy and everyone else, who are effectively barred from taking advantage of this economy and its wealth and locked into a stagnant past. FOSS gives India the future; large-scale proprietary software guarantees the past.
by: anakin
