Open Everything

From the very first systems of weights and measures, open techniques have been useful for making standards and advancing human technology. Today, a new ease of communicating and disseminating information makes open methods even more powerful. Knowledge can be shared over the internet freely with a world-wide audience. In particular, the Open Source Software movement has been innovating and codifying a set of open practices that can be applied to almost any field of endeavour.

In this paper I hope to unify all of the open movements under the umbrella of a new framework called Open Everything. The key concept to Open Everything is that all work, decision making, and results, involves both giving output and taking input from the interested public. The more communication, the better.

Why would anyone take the (seeming) risks involved in Open Everything? Because the methods have proven time and again to be highly effective by those who use them.

I will begin by explaining how Open Source Software development works, because it is arguably the most introspective of the open movements. There is a wealth of discussion, knowledge and perspectives about open source, and what makes it unique. The subject remains a popular and controversial one.

Open Source means you get to read the "source code" or the blueprints for the software. Since software is intangible, anyone with the blueprints can make or modify changes and rebuild the software to their own specifications, for free. This is a powerful motivator for software programmers world wide who want to not only use, but also tinker, with their software.

Each open source project has a common morphology. Typically, an open source project starts with an individual person or a small group effort. If the software achieves a certain maturity, it becomes popular and other people start to use it. At this point, the project follows a certain pattern as it grows. First, it acquires a "halo" of users who submit reports of bugs and feature requests. Next, user-programmers write patches to fix the bugs that bother them personally. These patches can be applied to the source code to make it better. The Apache Web Server actually started as just a set of patches, so it was called "a patchy" web server!

There is an indefinite point where the project reaches critical mass, and some of the selfish contributors turn into core developers implementing features that other people want. The mature project has a core group of programmers, a secondary group who may submit patches to be considered by the core, and a halo of involved, interactive users.

The big idea of open source software is that the so-called "source code" is openly released to public eyes. The source code is the blueprint for the software, and any programmer with the source code can read and understand, and generally modify, the program.

An excellent introduction is The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand the open source model.

Standards are an area where openness has a history going back thousands of years. Generally speaking, standards are agreements between groups that allow them to develop separate systems that will work together. All kinds of products and systems are based on open standards. The groups that put these standards together include the W3C, IETF, IEEE, ITU ... and there are many more. All of these standards bodies provide their standards for free, or at reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) rates to all comers and takers.

Open standards are often driven by and always support the open source community because they create an environment of interoperability. They ensure that different groups, in different countries, with different goals and methods and styles, can produce systems that will work together.

Some of these standards are so popular that you have assuredly used them, if you're not using them right now: the world-wide web, based on HTML (from W3C); email, based on SMTP (IETF); and ethernet networks (IEEE) are just a few.

Hardware is a little more difficult to share freely because it must be built. Nonetheless, Open Hardware standards play a critical role in the computer business. At about the same time in the early 80s that Richard Stallman was first developing open source software, computer makers were introducing open hardware. IBM licensed any company to make PCs that were compatible with their system. The free, open licensing of the PC specification to "clone" makers is in some sense analogous to open source software. The effect is to make it possible for anyone to make a PC. The parts are commodities, and prices are thus generally speaking as low as possible.

Commodity pricing is key to understanding open hardware. A piece of hardware becomes a commodity when interchangeable parts are available from many different vendors. Since there is little difference between their product, the competition between commodity producers drives prices down to the lowest possible level, as they compete to be as efficient as possible. Each manufacturer specializes in certain parts, and other companies assemble them into systems. Thus, with the PC, local shops may buy PC parts from dozens of vendors and put them together locally.

Currently the PC is the only really open hardware platform. By contrast, other types of computers, cell phones are palmtops are mostly proprietary. There are some efforts to create open platforms for handheld computing, for example, the Simputer. In addition, cell phones mostly use Java for their software side.

In some situations, such as with network servers and routers, commodity PC hardware is starting to displace specialty products. The market-share of commodity PC servers running GNU/Linux or BSD has rapidly shot up over the past few years, replacing specialty products by Sun Microsystems. PCs are also being used as routers, often in place of specialized hardware from Cisco or other network vendors. In both cases, open hardware wins for two reasons: first, it's more efficient to produce and thus cheaper; and, second, because it's easier to obtain even in rural areas.

The world wide web is the space for open documents. On the web, documents may be published online for little or no cost, accessible to anyone worldwide with an internet connection. In places where internet access is free or available at accessible cost, the documents may be read and shared freely.

New trends enabled by the open web include a new system called weblogging. A weblog is a personal diary that is shared online. Other important document sharing systems that depend on the open web include email mailing lists with archives, group home pages, online forums, and a collaborative documentation system called Wiki.

Open Content licenses are similar to open source licenses because they allow readers to copy the document, make their own additions and changes, and republish the result. Most of the licenses require the author of the derivative work, to share their version under the same license. In this way, the document can be improved by individuals working collectively around the world. This article, for example, is covered under an Open Content license, and you are encouraged to make copies and changes under those terms.

Releasing content under an open license enriches the digital commons in many ways. For example, it allows others to distribute your work as they see fit to people who want or need to read it. One advantage of the Open Content license is that distributors may reformat the content to fit their needs, such as a web page, a CD-ROM, or a printed book, without expensive license negotiation. Open source-style licenses for written works (and other artistic works) include the Creative Commons License, GNU Free Documentation License, Open Gaming License (for games), and others.

Open Spectrum is the policy that enables the new wireless internet networks such as Wi-Fi. Every wireless technology requires a section of radio spectrum bandwidth be allocated for use by the network operator. Until very recently, spectrum was treated as property and auctioned off by most governments to the highest bidder, generating billions of dollars in revenue and corporate debt. However, governments set aside special sections of spectrum, called Open Spectrum, to be used by anyone. Initially open spectrum was used by garage door openers and by portable phones. Now, a more radical use has been found for the Open Spectrum airwaves. A new family of open spectrum wireless networks are developing worldwide. Mostly they are based on the WiFi (802.11x) family of protocols. This new technology enables spectrum to be used as a commons, shared in a distributed fashion with no need for central control.

A major consideration in the developing world is to ensure that the appropriate regulation is in place. Open Spectrum is a regulatory and policy regime that sets out exactly how powerful a signal the users may broadcast. The products are already designed with these limits in place. However, at this time, in many countries the nascent wireless internet industry is blocked by unclear, obsolete, or absent policies. While Open Spectrum is an ITU (International Telecommunications Union) guideline, countries are free to develop their own versions of it. Coordination is required to allow the same products to be used everywhere. In the United States, Open Spectrum radios are covered under a section of FCC policy called Part 15 (not ISM).

The reason why these models are all so successful is because they encourage distribution and sharing. What goes around, comes around, and the Open Source and Open Content licenses go a long way towards codifying that into a legal model. It is an agreement of sharing: I will give you something if you will give back to the community. The Open Everything community recognizes individuals and groups for the contributions they make, and rewards them with more sharing. Scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. Or, more generally, scratch the community's back, and I'll be more inclined to scratch yours.

Open Everything works well as a meritocracy because all participation is public. This reinforces a cycle of benefits, as new people can build on the works of those who came before them. Openness also encourages a much higher level of interoperability among projects. Projects that fail, can be documented so as to encourage others to try other paths. Documents (such a this one) can be improved by anyone and the best parts reincorporated back into the original.

Finally Open Everything gives unprecendented access to people without financial resources. The whole structure is based on a system, not of money, but of mutual assistance. It encourages people without resources to dive in and learn, and as they develop, to input their own product back into the system.

Here's a checklist to see how open your own project is.