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(:nl:) '''CATHEDRALS, BAZAARS AND C. 40'''

I have almost finished reading Ken Follet's ''Pillars of the Earth'', a rambling, grandiose novel by a self-proclaimed atheist inspired by mediaeval cathedral building! I like the novel and he, by his own admission, is fascinated by cathedrals, and especially by the intricate processes involved in their building. The novel has its fair share of bazaars or town fairs, too, depending where the main characters find themselves – they become part of the building process, at least the financing process. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is also the title for a foundational essay written by Eric Raymond on what the 'Linux' phenomenon has done for Open Source Software – in it he explores the difference between two processes, one represented by large software companies who develop their product by only releasing it at the end as a finished, supposedly bug-free result (the 'cathedral' in all its intricacy and beauty); the other, pioneered by Linus Torvalds who gave Linux its name, where the technique is to release early and often and leave it to the community to fix the bugs (the 'babbling bazaar' where a strong, coherent system seems to emerge only by miracle).

'''What interests me is the religious language''', the metaphors, that have become common in the discussion – and I don't mean by this the zealotry it sometimes seems to involve. No I mean something more fundamental: there is much about the Open Source discussion that invites us to reflect on our own religious metaphors and circumstances. One of the ways of linking faith and life is to allow what is happening around us to help us reflect on faith – another is to bring faith to the task of interpreting what is going on around us. It is the first of these I am doing here.

'''Our own SDB Constitution 40''', the 'home..parish..school..playground' criterion of the first Oratory, seems to me to be pertinent at this point – especially as the Scriptural quote immediately preceding this Constitution is one of Paul's 'freedom' statements. His 'eleutheros' has inspired the www.eleutheros.it site. It is this section of the Constitutions, too, which contains the article on social communication as 'one of the apostolic priorities of the Salesian mission'. (C. 43). Creating culture, spreading patterns of life, showing originality.. – these are amongst the endeavours which describe who Don Bosco was and how he operated; they are also endeavours which for us, today, involve the world of communications and technology in ways Don Bosco could only dream of and might have taken huge advantage of, knowing what we do about his efforts at publishing.

'''The term ''Open Source'' came out of a conference''' in Palo Alto in 1998. As a result, Netscape made all of its source code available and the Mozilla group came about. OS is about accessibility, but it is also a way of going about things. One only has to listen to the language of people who are prominent in this area to see some religious 'hooks' for us: OS, I read recently, is “the urge to make a meaningful difference in life, listen to a call, become real by participating in a project shared by others with the same values”; or, note Torvalds who said in an interview “the cyberspace 'earnings' I get for Linux come in the format of having a network of people who know me and trust me and that I can depend on in return”. He went on in the same interview to say that “the act of making Linux freely available wasn't some agonising decision that I took from thinking long and hard on it; it was a natural decision within the community that I felt I wanted to be part of”.

'''I immediately see the hooks into our own Salesian style''' of living and working – since we too sense the urge to make a difference, we are listening to a call, participating in a shared project and creating a community where decisions for certain values will seem natural when people want to be part of that community. I also think we have reasons, at times, to talk about what really motivates us, what drives us to be involved, to give of ourselves entirely. Sure, we have easy answers for this in strictly religious terms – but it might be helpful to also have some human answers for it too, or better, to hold both together, because we actually need them to be working together. It should be no surprise that the OS phenomenon has given rise to a number of studies on the motivation of people who want to do things for free, work together in a software developing environment like FOSS and so on. A good place to follow up some of this thinking and research, if it interests you, is an online peer-reviewed journal called ''First Monday'', http://www.firstmonday.org.

'''The aforementioned Eric Raymond''' has an additional essay in ''First Monday'', which he calls 'Homesteading the noosphere'. He has his ideas about copyright law which inspire this essay but again for me, his single comment on the 'home' metaphor on the web, the home page, set me thinking about C: 40 and what a cyber-oratory experience our home pages might be! And at this point I stop, or rather, pause to invite additional reflection – the OS movement seems to have so many directions for deeper reflection in a faith context....its community aspect, the whole question of 'freedom', the ethical underpinnings of F/OSS, collaboration, Christian and Catholic approaches to intellectual property (do they exist...I mean Catholic approaches?), and what it all means for people like us who want to give the poorest youngsters of the world the very best opportunities in life to lead them to being 'good Christians and honest citizens', here and hereafter.(:nl:)