[ memo from npym-it-discuss, NPYM's IT Committee listserv ]

I found myself explaining to my class last night, about 20 people, mostly in California, that the difference between open and closed source software might be thought of in terms of board games. 

That gets me thinking about Quakers and their Game Nights.  We have them here at Multnomah.  Friends break out the board games in the social hall and go crazy.  We maybe haven't done that in awhile?  Simeon Hyde was an avid player.

Anyway, some games are just without point or plot if you can't keep secrets, card games notorious for that. 

Maybe some fundamentalists don't like cards because of the gambling but I suspect it's also that authoritarian parents really don't want junior to have any secrets, or at least not from them. 

Closed source software is like card games, or Stratego [tm], a childhood favorite of mine.

Open source is like those games where everything is out in the open, I think of chess especially.  True, Bobby Fischer suspected disruptive devices in Spassky's chair, or was it vice versa [1], but the rules of chess per se do not invite keeping secrets. 

And yet there may be one:  your opponent is in a sense trying to gauge / guess your level of ability.  "How good you are" might be in some sense a secret with chess players, or with Go players, ditto martial arts competitions (Bruce Lee vs... -- except the movie-goers often know who's a champ).

I don't see any teaching in Quakerism against having / keeping secrets, i.e. playing card games is just fine.  Underground Railroad.  We're free to change the subject and divert attention.  No one says a Quaker should shy away from the profession of "stage magician" as long as it's not about lying in the Penn & Teller sense.[2]

However the plain speech "let your nay be nay" ("your neigh be a neigh") teaching does go against what we call "obfuscation" i.e. making communications deliberately too difficult in order to fool and mislead (usually) or to falsely impress. 

Open Source as a practice works against obfuscation as a style because everyone gets to see who's contributing what.  In secret world, turgid text magically appears unsigned, just authoritative.  People love to be anonymous authorities where possible. 

Faceless bureaucracies breed obfuscatory memos as well as dictatorial pronouncements (unattributed usually).  Friends work to avoid Faceless Bureaucracy as a plain speech antithesis.

We also have Right Sharing of World Resources to think about, an actual program (RSWR).  To me, that also points in the direction of Open Source and Free Software. 

[ My class goes on for a few hours so I had ample time to dwell on "Free versus Free" as in "Free Admission versus Free to Leave". ]

In reading a lot of idealistic engineering just after college, I absorbed the view that designers could be ethical agents and that within ten years we could eliminate unnecessary death by starvation.  I took Problems of World Hunger at Woodrow Wilson school (1979) and got all galvanized.

We failed to achieve this milestone, realistic though it might have been from an engineering viewpoint, but I did find many like-minded geeks who believed in the power of Open / Free software, as habits and cultural practices, a kind of Right Sharing.  I see a lot of inter-operability between such geeks and their ways, and the practice of Quakerism.

In Open Source world, people aren't made to pay for the same assets over and over, because with the practice of putting / keeping all one's cards on the table, comes the freedom for others to freely copy those cards (they're  encouraged to do so).  I call this Right Sharing in a world beset with artificially induced scarcities (e.g. secrets that make people starve unnecessarily).

Thanks for listening,

Kirby Urner
IT Committee Clerk
NPYM

PS:  I'm one of several proposal readers for OSCON, Open Source Convention, and these themes are much on my mind.  A consequence of all this being:  I don't see the intersection of Quakerism and IT as casual, but as likely to be of core relevance to our Business going forward.  OSCON will be in Austin, Texas next year.  I'm not sure if I'm going.