This morning I intended to write a post inspired by an interaction on Mark’s post. When I sat down at the computer I saw this Twitter update from Fred Wilson – which led to an inspiring new project called Diaspora – which also affected my writing. Thank you to Mark, Fred and the guys at Diaspora – for the feeling of connectedness and ensuing hope.
Personal freedom is the greatest achievement and the greatest enemy of society. Society creates limitations which define a struggle for personal freedom. Society also creates an opportunity for individuals to challenge and struggle against those limitations. One possible resolution of these conflicting forces is personal freedom. One inevitable consequence of personal freedom is an attack on the social limitations against which it has fought (hopefully a discriminated attack that doesn’t destory the social fabric upon which it is built).
The current state of the Internet is an echo of this dynamic evolution. On the one hand it promises great personal freedoms, on the other hand it is dominated by companies which are dominated by and are agents of society – which seek to inhibit those freedoms. These companies are essentially enslaving the idea of “personal freedom” for their own ends. These companies have generally won-over the social/public aspect of the internet. They have done so to the point that they are able to threaten the inherent, potential personal freedoms of the Internet. They have done this so elusively that some people & non-profit organizations have dedicated themselves to creating an awareness of the threat.
The greatest challenger to coporate dominance and the greatest protector of internet freedom is open-source software – a social system dominated by developers. The social-system aspect of open-source software is like any other social system – it has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s core quality – the freedom to create – is both it’s greatest strength and it’s greatest weakness.
The strength is demonstrated in things like: (1) the fact that most of the software that drives the internet is open-source; (2) the availability of viable personal computing operating systems such as Ubuntu; (3) the global prevalence of open-source projects such as Mozilla’s Firefox; (4) the emergence of personal online presence applications such as WordPress.
The weakness is demonstrated in the amazing scale of the open-source domain and the relative uselesness of most of it’s end-user products. Most successful & high impact open-source projects are technological – that is technological products used by technological people. I have a feeling that amongst end-user products (products that have intuitive user interfaces) – less then 1% of open-source projects are usable. And of those, most are tolerable products not good ones. This means that most of the effort (99%!) that is put into open-source end-user products is wasted energy. That is a terrible loss.
The ecosystem of WordPress Plugins is both an example of this waste and thankfully an indication of how it can be improved. The Plugin repository supposedly has something on a scale of 10,000 plugins. My generous working assumption is that of those – about 10% are useful plugins (many of which still suffer from poor user experience and poor usability!) which make WordPress such a great and diverse platform. This means that the WordPress ecosystem performs 10 times better then the overall open-source ecosystem (of end-user products). Why?
They are small applications with simple and clear purposes.
They are easy to install and supposedly (still beyond me) easily to develop (complements of the WordPress Plugin infrastructure).
Their developers don’t need to fiddle with design. The WordPress administration user interface sets a reasonable standard which is well known to it’s end-users. If plugin developers simply stick to the standard – they have a relatively good starting point for design. Their front-end aspects are at the mercy of themes and CSS.
Their developers don’t need to market themselves. Good plugins spread virally througout the community.
Their developers are protected from any dellusional aspirations to infringe on the privacy of their end-users. Their software runs within an environment that aspires to and guarantees personal freedom. Any attempt to compromise that will be quickly found-out and pummeled by the community.
I believe there is a lot to learn and emulate from the WordPress model. It’s a great model because (1) it is rooted in values which cherish personal freedom; (2) it is not engineered or planned – so it remains dynamic; (3) it has been given the freedom to evolve within these underlyign values. I have encountered numerous open-source projects that, I believe, could have explosive impact and widespread use if they would surrender their independence to a WordPress-like ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that ANY open-source end-user product that wants to succeed has to either first become a core ecology of it’s own or join one that already exists.
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Freedom
This morning I intended to write a post inspired by an interaction on Mark’s post. When I sat down at the computer I saw this Twitter update from Fred Wilson – which led to an inspiring new project called Diaspora – which also affected my writing. Thank you to Mark, Fred and the guys at Diaspora – for the feeling of connectedness and ensuing hope.
Personal freedom is the greatest achievement and the greatest enemy of society. Society creates limitations which define a struggle for personal freedom. Society also creates an opportunity for individuals to challenge and struggle against those limitations. One possible resolution of these conflicting forces is personal freedom. One inevitable consequence of personal freedom is an attack on the social limitations against which it has fought (hopefully a discriminated attack that doesn’t destory the social fabric upon which it is built).
The current state of the Internet is an echo of this dynamic evolution. On the one hand it promises great personal freedoms, on the other hand it is dominated by companies which are dominated by and are agents of society – which seek to inhibit those freedoms. These companies are essentially enslaving the idea of “personal freedom” for their own ends. These companies have generally won-over the social/public aspect of the internet. They have done so to the point that they are able to threaten the inherent, potential personal freedoms of the Internet. They have done this so elusively that some people & non-profit organizations have dedicated themselves to creating an awareness of the threat.
The greatest challenger to coporate dominance and the greatest protector of internet freedom is open-source software – a social system dominated by developers. The social-system aspect of open-source software is like any other social system – it has its strengths and weaknesses. It’s core quality – the freedom to create – is both it’s greatest strength and it’s greatest weakness.
The strength is demonstrated in things like: (1) the fact that most of the software that drives the internet is open-source; (2) the availability of viable personal computing operating systems such as Ubuntu; (3) the global prevalence of open-source projects such as Mozilla’s Firefox; (4) the emergence of personal online presence applications such as WordPress.
The weakness is demonstrated in the amazing scale of the open-source domain and the relative uselesness of most of it’s end-user products. Most successful & high impact open-source projects are technological – that is technological products used by technological people. I have a feeling that amongst end-user products (products that have intuitive user interfaces) – less then 1% of open-source projects are usable. And of those, most are tolerable products not good ones. This means that most of the effort (99%!) that is put into open-source end-user products is wasted energy. That is a terrible loss.
The ecosystem of WordPress Plugins is both an example of this waste and thankfully an indication of how it can be improved. The Plugin repository supposedly has something on a scale of 10,000 plugins. My generous working assumption is that of those – about 10% are useful plugins (many of which still suffer from poor user experience and poor usability!) which make WordPress such a great and diverse platform. This means that the WordPress ecosystem performs 10 times better then the overall open-source ecosystem (of end-user products). Why?
I believe there is a lot to learn and emulate from the WordPress model. It’s a great model because (1) it is rooted in values which cherish personal freedom; (2) it is not engineered or planned – so it remains dynamic; (3) it has been given the freedom to evolve within these underlyign values. I have encountered numerous open-source projects that, I believe, could have explosive impact and widespread use if they would surrender their independence to a WordPress-like ecosystem. Ultimately, I believe that ANY open-source end-user product that wants to succeed has to either first become a core ecology of it’s own or join one that already exists.