Reading 08: The Noosphere

In ESR's writings in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, he talks about the customs and cultures that have, whether consciously or unconsciously, guided the open source community. Specifically, in his work on "Homesteading the Noosphere", he compares the customs of the open source community to that of property rights and the Lockean theory of land ownership. I think this is a fascinating comparison to unpack more. He also makes a claim that most open source work is done with the intent of benefiting one's reputation in the hacker community, or to more of an extreme, to benefit one's ego. I think this is probably generally true, but may be an over generalization.

On the first point, the comparison of open source customs to that of land ownership, he discusses the three ways of owning a project. The main way, a "transfer of title", happens when you are passed the project or home from a previous owner. Another way is if the land title is lost or abandoned, or the project untouched for a certain amount of time, it can be claimed by "adverse possession". This way is a lot less clear of how to handle... how much time should a project be left untouched, who is next to pick it up... I ran into a lot of seemingly "dead" projects when searching on github for an open source project to contribute to, but that doesn't mean that person won't want to come back to it because it hasn't been touched in X years. The other way to obtain a project is "homesteading", or "mixing one's labor with the unowned land" where land has not had an owner. This definitely exists in the open source community, and is where ESR got the title "homesteading the noosphere".

ESR discussed this idea of homesteading the noosphere, and I found his discussion of why people do it and how they do it the most interesting. For the topic of how they do it, he discussed how people have tendencies for projects that are either "gap-filling" or "category-killers". GNU Emacs would be an example of a category killer, with no competitors wanting to "homestead" in this category. Whereas for other projects, people will fill gaps that aren't too close to a project, but aren't too far that they are uninteresting. This has made for predictable trends in projects over time. I think the trend right now is of course AI based projects, and there are probably many overlapping ones, but his point is that the success comes when you find the right distance from another popular project.

The other fascinating thing he discusses is intentions in creating the project or contributing to one. He says that this is normal ego based, with a goal of improving your hacker reputation. He follows up on this by saying that is why so many hacker customs exist, from an almost Golden Rule type motivation of not wanting to do to another project what you think could hurt a project of yours' reputation. I think this is interesting and definitely is true. But I do not think this means that all work is to benefit an ego-- I think there can be genuine motivations to contribute to a project as a means of learning, or as a means of putting into motion an idea you had. These intentions could be argued to still contribute to benefitting one's reputation, but my thought is that many people could have that as a side effect, not as the main reason of their work.