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07/15/2005: "metaphysical ruminations that almost become runny and mystical"
It's summer here in Montreal, the weather is hot, most folks are more concerned with swimming than with the metaphysics of open-source systems....thus the code blog advances slowly like a snail drenched in sweat...
But, since water is in the soothing swimming pools, and is also the root chemical underlying organic lifeforms (here in Montreal at least), I find myself pondering some huge simple fundamental questions: what is the source of life itself? what is open?
My pesky mind keeps thinking: How many humans actually have access to the souce of life? Who doesn't?
Is the source of life analogous to a code? Maybe its a fluid, how do you open a fluid?
Is it possible that the source could be both open and immanent and yet somehow normally (for most of us) inaccessible?
Let me clarify why these questions interests me (and how they might vaguely have anything to do with open source code practises) : if the goal and motivation of open source is arising from a desire to basically give, code as gift, there is in this activity the implicit intention to provide a model for a more equitable economic system based upon giving not profit. This is essentially idealism. I feel most humans could agree they would like to see more equitable forms of economic exchange. Most citizens of privileged nations aare of the enormous suffering in the world live with a sense of persistent complicity.
Why?
Essentially my feeling is the human organism has a very limited sphere of reference and cannot consistently conceive of cosmological scale. Our nature induces in us notions of belonging and ownership. Open source practise is perhaps seeded within us by those rare moments when awareness gliimpses the radical heaving fluid of life source...so I feel the mundane day to day debugging open source begins in what is beyond us...in a recognition which is as sweet as a swim in a pool on a hot day....