Reinventing Discovery - Michael Nielsen [23]
Linux is an example of open source software. Open source software projects have two key attributes. First, the code is made publicly available, so anyone can experiment with and modify the code, not just the original programmer. Second, other people are encouraged to contribute improvements to the code. This might mean sending in a bug report when something goes wrong, or perhaps suggesting a change to a single line of code, or even writing a major code module containing thousands of lines of code. The most successful open source projects recruit large numbers of contributors, who together can develop software far more complex than any individual programmer could develop on their own. To give you some idea of the scale, in 2007 and 2008 Linux developers added an average of 4,300 lines of code per day to the Linux kernel, deleted 1,800 lines, and modified 1,500 lines. That’s an astounding rate of change—on a large software project, an experienced developer will typically write a few thousand lines of code per year.
Of course, most open source projects have fewer contributors than Linux. A popular repository of open source projects called SourceForge houses more than 230,000 open source projects. Nearly all those projects have only one or a few contributors. But a small number of projects have captured the imagination of programmers, drawing in tens, hundreds, or thousands of contributors.
Open source started in the programming world, but it isn’t fundamentally about programming. Rather, open source is a general design methodology that can be applied to any project involving digital information. If you’re an architect, for example, you can do open source architecture: simply share the designs for your buildings freely, and encourage others to contribute improvements. In 2006, an architect named Cameron Sinclair and a journalist named Kate Stohr launched the Open Architecture Network, which is creating an online community for open source architecture—a kind of Source-Forge for architecture. As of early 2010, the site contained more than 4,000 projects, many w floor plans, discussions of building materials, photographs of finished buildings, and so on, all available for reuse and improvement by others. The site focuses especially on designs for use in the developing world, and Sinclair and Stohr hope that it will help the best architectural ideas and innovations spread more quickly. An example is shown in figure 4.1, the design for a primary school built in Gando, a town of 3,000 people in the tiny country of Burkina Faso (previously known as Upper Volta) in West Africa. The design comes complete with floor plans, elevations, and many other design details, as well as photos of the finished school.
Figure 4.1. Top: a primary school in the town of Gando, in the country of Burkina Faso in West Africa. Bottom: one of several design documents for the school, freely available for download from the Open Architecture Network. Other people may use the design documents, and modify them for their own needs. Credit: Siméon Duchaud / Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
It’s not just architecture that can be open source. If you’re a digital artist, you can do open source art: share the files for your digital art freely, and encourage others to contribute improvements. If you’re a biologist you can do open source biology: share DNA designs for living things, and encourage others to contribute improvements. There’s a community of biologists doing exactly that. If you’re writing an encyclopedia, you can share the text of your encyclopedia articles freely, and encourage others to contribute improvements. That’s how Wikipedia is written: Wikipedia is an open source project. The underlying pattern in all these projects is the same: share your digital design, and encourage other people to contribute changes. The Polymath Project doesn’t quite follow this