austraLasia 1499
Open Source Don Bosco Part II - forking the PS!
ROME: 22nd March 2006 -- Names like Linus Torvalds or
Ward
Cunningham don't roll off the tongue quite like Don Bosco, but they
have something in common: each is 'The Father' of something. No
need
to repeat the mantra for the last-named
of the group, but LT is known as The Father
of Linux (his first name plus the Unix
operating system) and WC as The Father of Wiki, a clever code web
surfers to add their own material. His Wikipedia
is the world's largest encyclopedia. It's when you hear
them speaking that you begin to make connections, and when we know how
keen DB was to use any means at his disposal for the salvation of
the young, we sense intuitively that he would have embraced the
best in 'Open Source', which is really what those other two have been
developing.
Only today, at a conference where he is keynote
speaker, Ward
Cunningham described software in the open source mode as 'a work
where people see an area that's weak and they make it stronger'.
He describes the code base (of software) as 'a point of strength,
not a burden to be ignored', and revels in 'the way large groups
of people can communicate'. If you see the world of poor
youngsters as 'an area that's weak' (not too far from some of DB's
descriptions) and maybe the constitutions as the 'code base', DB's
explicit willingness to harness the best energies of anybody for the
cause as part of 'the
way large groups can communicate' you begin to see that the Open Source
movement and Don Bosco are at least fellow travellers.
Open Source as a movement (a loosely applied term)
has some
interesting secular virtues: transparency, ease of engagement,
structure, leadership, common standards, peer review, shared goals, an
incrementalist approach and powerful
non-monetary incentives - as for
this final point, the first question one often hears from the layman is
'why would anybody want to build software for free?' and it kind of
requires the same answer as 'why would anybody want to live as a
Salesian Religious?' Obviously it is not money which makes the
world
go round.
Is structure a virtue? OS, just like DB,
realises that magical
bubbly
creativity doesn't get you far. There's also a need for formal
hierarchical government. Try writing a piece of magical bubbly
code in
Python and you soon see the need for
structure! I leave you to look for 'religious' equivalents to
transparency, ease of engagement...if you think you need them.
Why not
simply accept secular virtues as God-given anyway?
We have our own terminology, and there is no real
need to be moving
away from that. 'Preventive System' would lose out if we changed its
name, I think. But that should not hinder a little
cross-fertilisation. DB accepted 'Oratory' as a term, but
he certainly gave it a new direction, as he did for 'College' and not a
few other terms. He would not be adverse to adding the adjective
'open' to many of his enterprises. Oratory as open space within
boundaries? He was certainly interested in open knowledge (freely
provided, freely used), open team working (communities),
open conversations (friendly chats) backed up by a firm 'code base'
with solid principles but not closed forever to
development.
Open Source might even offer us some new religious
language: it talks about 'forking' - and only
yesterday I read a piece on how Leonardo Murialdo 'forked' the
Preventive System...well, to be honest, the author didn't say 'forked'
but that's what he meant. Murialdo could have joined the
Salesians, so
enamoured was he of Don Bosco personally and of the preventive system,
and actually ran the St. Aloysius Oratory for him. But he didn't
join
up - as the author puts it 'he breathed the preventive system,
incarnated it and then applied it in his own educational
institution'.
That's forking. In fact Unix, which gave us the term, explains
forking
as a parent-child relationship. A 'parent' process forks to
produce a
'child' process which may well become a parent in its own right.
That
sounds very much like the kind of life Don Bosco gave his youngsters,
but also like the growth of the Salesian Family. Cunningham
speaks of 'agile development', quite a rich term, actually, implying a
vibrant ecosystem where practitioners move around from community to
community spreading good ideas....hmmm, something like the endless
visits of Regional and other General Councillors!
It's not only terms that OS can offer us but some
models as well. Take Firefox, a classic example of OS at
work. Why is it so successful as a browser? Now this begins
to sound almost biblical, but the Mozilla Foundation behind it has 12,
that's right, 12 core developers, their 'animating nucleus', then
somewhere around 400 people allowed to fiddle with the code, about
1,000 others who freely offer patches to fix problems, 10,000 plus who
freely scrutinise the code and offer their ideas, another 500,000 who
download the Beta form and send in their comments. The old
'pebble in the pond' trick.
If Open Source sits somewhere between the
corporation and the
commune, so do Don Bosco and the Salesian Society. OS says it is
open enough to learn from anyone, including us - in theory. Could
we
also learn from them - in practice? I think so.
GLOSSARY
mantra: as used here, a repeated phrase,
e.g. 'the father of..' (probably more appropriate to a certain passage
from Genesis!)
Unix: Please, not to be confused with
Asterix and Obelix! Stands for 'uniplexed information and
computer
system' whatever that means. In real terms it is so important that
without it the internet would stop, phone calls could not be made,
electronic commerce would cease and we'd be in Jurassic Park.
incrementalist: small changes rather than
radical innovation all the time.
Python: named, funnily enough, after Monty
Python's Flying Circus! Computer programmers have a sense of humour.
Python is the best way for a beginner to learn
programming; an Object Oriented Interpreter language - sorry,
you'll have to look that up separately. Can't keep looping the
glossary ad infinitum!
___________________________________
AustraLasia
is an
email
service for
the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific. It also functions as an
agency
for ANS based in Rome. For RSS feeds, subscribe to www.bosconet.aust.com/rssala.xml
