Le Guin and open source

This was the college entrance essay I wrote for the Common App. Its content stems from genuine belief on my part, but it is phrased with something of an excess of sentiment.

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, — this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin

As I read these, the anarchist prophetess Odo's words from The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin, I cannot help but be reminded of the real-world "open source" movement. This is a movement, part philosophical, part practical, that radically challenges traditional concepts of "ownership" of intellectual property, particularly software. Its key claim is that anyone who uses a piece of software has the right to modify and distribute its source code freely.

One might think following this philosophy disastrous: if anyone can distribute a product freely, without paying the original creator, where's the incentive to create? If anyone can copy or modify it, can use the methods employed in it, then what's the use of innovating? Yet, even while refusing "economic competition" as a motive, even renouncing intellectual ownership of software, this movement has produced GNU/Linux, an operating system that is on par with, or perhaps better than, commercial operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X.

Consider the people who create this software. Why do they do it? Because they want to; because they enjoy it; because they are "doing needed work and doing it well". Despite this apparently idealistic pursuit, they and the work they create both survive in the real world, dominated as it is by a competitive economy. How can they do this? Some make money from what they do - just because no-one is required to pay for open-source software doesn't mean that no-one does; or perhaps the software they write is used in a way that is itself profitable. Mostly, though, they also write non-open-source software for their "real" job. Ultimately, the end is the same: they are doing what they wish to do.

These people are the "skilful makers" of Odo's vision. They combine the creation of utility with the joy of creation; and this, I too will do. This is my calling, from which I derive joy: the creation of beauty on a computer, to freely share with the world. Am I then an anarchist? I know only this: I want to do what I enjoy. I believe, as Le Guin qua Odo says, that "it is useless work that darkens the heart", and the fact that there are people doing what they love and creating something both useful and - in their ideology and in mine - necessary, and doing so in a world whose precepts are so solidly set against them, gives me hope for my own future.