Zealots in the library

I have been reading (and discussing on the #code4lib IRC channel) Carl Grant’s recent response to Dan Chudnov’s response to Carl’s earlier post. The way I interpret the conversation is a basic disagreement about what it means to be a member of the FLOSS community in general, and the FLOSS community in libraries in specific. I must say, I side with Dan Chudnov on this one. Before I get into why, I want to make it clear that I believe that Carl Grant and his CARE Affiliates company have every right to run their business the way they are, and if they want to sell proprietary solutions like OpenTranslators, that is fine (just don’t tell me that it aligns with the goals of FLOSS). I also have absolutely no problem with them making a profit off of Free and Open Source Software by providing consulting, implementation, support, and other services to libraries. That is well within their rights and I believe it fits into the fabric of the Open Source and Free Software movements. However, if CARE wants to be considered part of the community, they have to understand their marketing decisions and statements have meanings, and will be interpreted by various people and using ambiguous naming of products such as OpenTranslators will be questioned, and rightfully so. This is especially true when the have the motto on their Web site that says “Open source information solutions built for you with CARE.” One would reasonably assuming that OpenTranslators was open source.” When it isn’t, people are going to cry fowl, especially if you don’t make it clear from the get-go.

All that said, I think what disappointed me the most by Carl Grant in these posts is he characterization of people who have been supporting, advocating, and creating the Open Source Software that his company is building their business on. Calling these people “zealots” and categorizing OSS as “an activity practiced in basements in people’s spare time” is just wrong. Dan is right. This is 1998 FUD. Someone must have a big basement to fit IBM or Sun Microsystems in it! Give me a break, while there certainly are people contributing to Open Source projects from their basement or as an “academic practice” there is much more to it then this, and belittling the people who create the software you are basing your business on is just wrong. And you know what, even if it were just ins someones basement, that doesn’t mean it is a bad thing. The people that do this in their spare time do it because they love to do it and they are passionate about what they are doing. And name calling is no way to make friends.

Another thing that stood out to me is Grant’s thoughts on what it means to be part of the FLOSS community. As he rightly noted, his move to the FLOSS community was seen as a positive to members of the community. I was one of them that believed this and in fact I personally think that his company and what they do is still a positive. It is true that some libraries either don’t have the necessary resources to implement Open Source solutions (or proprietary ones for that matter) on their own, and a company founded by someone with Carl Grant’s credentials allows these libraries to implement Open Source solutions. But that is a little different from knowing what the community is all about. Grant coming to the community didn’t offend me, calling me and others who think like me a zealot does. While I’m at it, liking himself to a presidential candidate after a couple of blog posts is a bit over the top.

Another thing that struck me is this part of his blog post:

OpenTranslators [...] when coupled with many open source solutions, libraries can now provide new (and frequently) matching or exceeding levels of functionality as those obtained with pure proprietary solutions. Again, I thought this was in line with the goals of FLOSS (maybe I haven’t been fully assimilated yet?)

While this might jive somewhat with the Open Source movement, it does not with the Free Software movement and by extension doesn’t with the FLOSS movement which, by definition, includes the Free Software movement. The Free Software movement is about ideas, it is about a philosophy. It is about the Freedom of the user to use, share, and improve upon the program. OpenTranslators is not about this, and being able to build Open Source applications on top of it doesn’t change that. No one would say Microsoft Windows is in line with the goals of FLOSS because you can run Apache or some other OSS application on it. Would they? Carl, you are doing good things with your company by giving libraries more options and a means for those without the necessary human resources to use the wonderful Library-related FLOSS applications that zealots built in their basements, but I think you are right that you haven’t been fully assimilated yet.