Naivete is the heart of open source

Or maybe I should say a lack of guile. But naivete works, too. I just spent an engaging hour talking with Glyn Moody, author of Rebel Code and Digital Code of Life (which I had not heard of but which sounds fascinating – talks, at least in part, about how open source helped to keep bioinformatics from being overrun by patents), and came away feeling even stronger that freedom is the basis of any good business, including open source software. Glyn wrote the very first big article on Linux back in 1997 (“The Greatest OS that Never Was”), and is one of the writers who inspired me back in my early days with open source.

Today, I got to meet him, and loved it. In part, because he’s a terrific person. But also in part because he shared with me some of the background behind the work he’d done.

I found particularly interesting his research for Rebel Code. Glyn got to talk with Linus, Larry Wall, Richard Stallman, etc. All the heavyweights of open source development. Almost to a person, they started their projects (Linux, Perl, Gimp, etc.) on a hunch and some free time. They weren’t looking to change the world. They were naive, thinking that “it wouldn’t be very hard to write an open source Photoshop” and the like.

I suppose much that is excellent in the world is created by people who don’t set off to change the world. They just fall into big, important deeds by initially trying to do little, personal things. Scratching their itches, as it were.

Thank goodness for naivete. What a blessing it is to be ignorant of just how hard some tasks really are, and to have it be too late to turn back once we’re well into them….