Open Source Story Telling
by Rasputin ("Raspy")

My dears, I must admit I'm going to make a political statement. Not exactly what you expect of old Raspers, eh? Well, it's not that kind of political statement, anyway. It's a different kind of politics altogether that I'm talking about, more fundamental and consequential than what's sold to us as politics today, you know, the thing with parliaments and elections and ministers and wars? Make no mistake, I know that those old-fashioned mainstream politics are deathly serious and kill people. But the politics of taking the world for your own or giving your own to the world, those politics are eventually going to kill -- or save -- a lot more people. And it's that kind of politics I mean.

So, where do I begin?

The Linux penguin.

You know what Linux is, don't you? The free operating system with the cuddly penguin as a mascot? That all the alpha geeks use and that the rest of us gladly don't have to bother with, apart from the fact that the vast majority of medium sized web sites we visit every day run Linux and the free web server software Apache? Heard of that, didn't you?

Well, what do they mean by 'free'? You don't have to pay for it if you want one, first of all; ideally, you can download a distro from the net and then install it on your computer. Free of charge. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. Linux -- and lots of application software written for it -- doesn't belong to anyone; all those fiendishly complicated programs have been developed by thousands of programmers working together over the net, in their spare time, without expecting to be paid for their work. If, as one of them, you discover something that could be better, you make it better. If you miss something that should be there, you write it. There's some kind of informal peer review and loose, virtual groups that determine what's going to be part of the system, and when the new kernel is ready, but if you need a special driver or some new sort of application software -- well, she's all yours.

What do you get for it? Well, considerably more than sweet nothing. You get the recognition of other coders; they use and read your source code. Everyone compiles their own kernel, that is, the very core of the operating system, so, if you can read the language, you can understand what admirable work those that came before you did with it. Some coders have attained an almost godlike status in that community.

Linus Torvalds, original programmer of Linux, which he named after himself.

You've probably heard of Linus Torvalds, the Finn who instigated the whole thing, after whom Linux is named and who still declares new versions of the kernel fit for release? Have you heard of the way a company called Transmeta went by through more than a year of total information blackout while they were developing their chip for mobile computers on the sole fact that Linus Torvalds had deigned to come to work for them? It's that kind of prestige.

The prestige you earn on the field of open source will tremendously help you once you decide to turn pro; let alone the practice you get under the merciless eyes of your peers and elders. If Bill Gates hits upon a problem, he has to hire an expert. Or, more often these days, he has to acquire the company that makes the solution to the problem that's bugging him. That can take a while, because not everyone is immediately willing to sell out to what many feel is the next best thing to an Evil Empire we've got these days. And then, there's the problem of keeping the stuff he bought: if someone else sees the source code, of course they will copy it, twist it, exploit its weaknesses in order to attack - you get the picture.

On the other hand, if an open source project hits upon a problem, someone cries for help in a forum or on a mailing list, and another someone will turn up from out of something like thin air, solve the problem ASAP under general applause, and then go about their business -- unless they've become interested and continue to be involved with that project.

The many minds involved actually make the end result better. If someone's stuck, they'll cry for help so people come and unstick them. On the other hand, in commercial software programming, if you're stuck on your task you think about how to hide it from your boss and avoid calling attention to it until you forced some sort of solution. In a great choir, if one singer is hoarse, they'll just shut up and swallow a bit and then go on. If a soloist is hoarse, that means catastrophe.

"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" online in just about every language and version.

While Linus Torvalds is the practical instigator of that movement, the chief theorist is Eric S. Raymond, a character as colourful as Torvalds is bland. He's a coder, of course, but also a brilliant essayist. His "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is the manifesto of the open source movement. Go and read it, it's here: http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ You can also buy it as a book nowadays, but that's not the same; ESR should be savoured online. What I've been saying so far has been only a very weak rendition of his ideas.

And did those ideas ever spread! Companies started opening the source of their products to the world, as they realised that much more money could be made by offering specialised services to businesses instead of forcing all and sundry to buy your product for money and then call an expensive support line. Netscape, who'd been giving away their browser anyway, threw the source code open and started the Mozilla project. Star Division, a small nobody from somewhere in Europe, opened the source of their office suite Star Office, which went on to become the industry standard office suite on the open source sector. You can get the thing not only for Linux but also for the more common and commercial operating systems and it's just as powerful as anything Redmond ever turned out.

Now, here we have those two kinds of programming evolution, the closed, profit-driven one and then the open, prestige-driven one. If we believe that the second model will be better for our world on the long run, then we will want to contribute, right? So we may be part of it, right? That's where I hit upon my own personal problem. I have to make another admission: although I've been following the whole debate from back when with great fascination and enthusiastic partiality, I couldn't do zilch for the movement, except applaud from the wings, as I am not a coder myself. I'm a database wrangler, which is something completely different. To most, that's 'computer people' anyway, but believe me, it's different worlds. Different universes, even.

Wikipedia Online, open source encylopedia.

So, you can imagine how relived I was when I discovered the existence of the Wikipedia. It's an open source encyclopaedia where everyone who knows anything about anything can write an article about it. Some tireless expert will then come along and correct any mistakes you make; or experts will gather at some article and battle over it until it works out. You can find a http://www.wikipedia.com. I wrote the entry on my favourite cemetery and was deeply happy to be able to contribute at last.

Only recently it dawned on me that I have long been involved with quite another flavour of open source movement: fandoms on the net. You might imagine that Wreaththu isn't my first, but it's by far the best because of it's open nature. Once a story has been published, much like a piece of software that has been released into the world, it will start being used. What is the use of a story? To capture the imagination, to ultimately become part of your own thinking. Just as software lives installed on peoples' computers, so a story lives in peoples' minds, and of course we find fault with or love features about the software we use. The more we use a specific piece of software, the more additions or corrections, the more fine-tuning we'd be able to suggest. In the end, when it is open source, we might contribute, and if it's not, which is mostly the case, we might write a macro to help us with a specific task, or if we're very good, we might write a plug-in.

If we love a book, a movie, something of that nature, we might write a macro or make a plug-in as well: we call that fan art or fan fiction. If we think our plug-in is good and would help others, we'll distribute it over the net, for free, of course, so the original proprietor of the source can't give us grief over exploiting their intellectual property for our own base commercial ends.

Now, as with software companies, the sources of those cultural entities which evoke fandoms will have different ways to deal with the users. For some -- and I'm not naming names, but you know who I mean, my dears, don't you -- every step on their turf, however careful and non-commercial, constitutes an attack and will be repelled by all means. That's the Bill Gates way of doing things; and it is not, on the long run, very effective, as it means cutting the creative effort off from the energy that feeds it: the mental energy, the enthusiasm of the many minds where the creative endeavour will go to live. A book with no readers is no story; a movie without viewers is just that much celluloid.

Tolkien Fan Fiction Archive Just one of dozens of Tolkien fan fiction sites online.

Some know how to harness those tremendous energies generated by their fandoms. The makers of the Lord of the Rings movie, the whole Tolkien fandom, is a good example for a big commercial mainstream fandom that effectively uses the life energy their fans give to them in order to be even more creative, more brilliant. Some time ago, someone posted a link to a long article about just that on our list; I guess it was this one: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.10/lotr.html It's very long, but I found it worth reading; the main thing I got from it is: fans are a force and they're recognised as such by anyone who knows what's good for them. If you're clever, you don't try and keep them out like obnoxious garden gnomes, you use their mental energy to promote and improve your work.

That's where our very own Lady Storm comes in, and that's where my long rambling is finally leading: back when the list was first established (and long, long before I ever joined it), she wrote a general piece about her attitude towards fan fiction, and why she's okay with it: what I call her "tulpa post". It's here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/wraeththu/message/179. Go read it (join the group if you're not already a member) -- it's absolutely seminal for all we're doing and thinking and making as members of the Wraeththu fandom.

In it, she goes further than anyone else: with all that alternative energy work she does, she recognises the mental energies we devote to her creation as an actual force that becomes part and parcel of that creation itself. She compares a story that is written and released into the world with a tulpa, a Tibetan thought-form, that is evoked by practitioners to achieve some magical end and that can sometimes even been seen by someone totally unconnected with it - if its creators have funnelled enough mental energy into it. She sums it all up as follows:

When a writer puts passion and energy into a book, I think they create a kind of tulpa. It has a life of its own, in that it continues to grow in the minds of its readers. I'm not saying that you can look up from the page and find an image of Pell or Cal standing in the room with you (though I'm sure that few of you would object!), but you are tapping into, and feeding, a pool of energy that other readers before you have invested into the story. It is the same for any well-loved fictional world.

She knows that this energy that we raise for her creative work will literally become part of her own creative energy; she knows that the more she involves us, the better she gets with her own creativity.

Forever Home of mucho Wraeththu fan fiction, including those posted to the "Pinkboard."

And we, on the other hand, gain much more than a world we can play in. We get a community of peers that read or draw or ruminate about the world the way we ourselves do. We will exchange ideas with each other, we will sometimes even write stories together (where did those Round Robins go to, by the way?!). The more we contribute, the greater our prestige in that community will be, but we're not just in for the kicks, after all. Here we get to practise. At least two from among us have since had a serious go at turning pro as writers; I feel there's many more that are aiming that way and probably not yet telling just now.

A fandom is open source story telling, that's what I've been telling you all that wandering and knotty stuff for. That's the point. If I hadn't had that new point to arrive at, my dears, I could just as well have posted all those links and be done with it... Open source software may well be the future of computing. There will always be commercial applications, of course, and people who turn professional and make a living out of it, but the basics reside in many minds and don't depend on the whim of some tyrant with bottle-bottom glasses.

Just in the same way, open-source story telling will be an integral part of the future of entertainment: it here to stay and will not go away, no matter how hard She Who Must Not Be Named and her lawyers fight it. Everybody will learn to use its impetus, openly like the makers of the Lord of the Rings movie, or more clandestinely like some others that pretend to ignore what is there and what, ultimately, only feeds the general fascination with their work. The most inspired sources will use the mental energy that flows towards them from the many people that make their work part of themselves in order to feed their own creative process in turn.

Great things are in store for us, my dears. There is no reason for us to be afraid of Bill Gates or You-Know-Who. They will fade away eventually.

Meanwhile, we've found ourselves a wonderful little place here to hide out until that happens, don't you think?