A question I often ask myself when faced with an unpleasant decision is simply, “What’s the alternative?” This is a deceptively powerful simplifying technique that has served me well over the years. There’s an old saying that tells us that nothing focuses the attention like a hanging, meaning that if the alternative is dying, then pretty much anything else is on the table. So when I find myself struggling to complete, hell, even to begin a task I’ve been putting off, I eventually get around to asking that simple question: What’s the alternative? This invariably coalesces what is often a dizzying array of possibilities into a binary decision: do the task, or accept the consequences of not doing it.

Now sometimes that only gets me part of the way toward completion, but it’s progress, and the same methodology can be applied to every incremental decision point until I’m finished. The point is that it helps get me un-stuck, breaking that cycle of “I don’t want to deal with that right now, I’ll worry about it tomorrow” that rarely solves anything. And there’s an added, almost unexpected side benefit: once I’ve answered the question and moved in the appropriate direction, there’s a very satisfying sense of accomplishment, or at least progress that helps motivate me to continue.

In the context of Open Source, it’s not always a question of action but more often of consequence. What’s the alternative to the disquietingly chaotic array of alternatives we first face when looking for replacements to old standard ways of getting our day-to-day business done? In one instance, it may mean accepting periodic changes in document formats that render last year’s versions unreadable without large-scale (and expensive) upgrades. In another, it could mean reduced choices in what appliances or tools are available to you - I heard the other day that the iPhone and iPod are banned in the household of a certain well-known and recently retired major software company executive.

A well-known tenet of the Open Source movement tell us “There’s more than one way to do it”, often seen in acronym form - TMTOWTDI. I’ve always seen that as a positive thing, despite the added complexity it promises. And more recently I’ve come to realize that it also captures one of my more valuable life lessons by reminding me to ask myself, “What’s the alternative?”

Who owns the legal code?

I’m not talking about computer source code, I’m referring to the words that comprise the laws of the United States. To me this is a good (but certainly not original on my part) analogy for why I think open source should be the de facto (okay, the pun is too pertinent not to use) and de jure approach to handling computer source code.

Although far from perfect, this comparison works on a number of levels. Who writes the legal code? Well, legislators do. Are they paid to do that? Sure. Do they own legal (licensing) rights to their output? Of course not. Bills, some of which become laws, are credited with the names of their initiators, so there is some notoriety if not always fame associated with the process. But in a perfect world the ultimate purpose of new legislation is to benefit society in some way, whether by prohibiting negative behaviors through the criminal code or by legitimizing positive behavior through things like amendments to the Constitution. The point is that the output - the code - is a public resource that everyone has access to. Without that access, the public would be vulnerable to punishments based on violations of unspecified (unpublished) laws.

Yet there is an entire (very lucrative) industry built up around interpreting, re-interpreting, and presenting arguments around the complex body of legal code that governs the behavior of the citizens of the U.S. I’ll refrain from the usual jokes about the profession, but if lawyers can make a living working within this model, why can’t IT companies do the same working with (e.g., writing, enhancing, and/or supporting) source code they don’t “own”?

As computers become more and more an integral and increasingly necessary societal resource, I think it becomes a social imperative that no company or industry segment be given the right to restrict access to how they work. I’ll save a more detailed analogy of this for a future posting, but think for a moment what it would mean if you could only plug certain appliances into the electrical outlets in your house, or if one vendor promised higher or ‘cleaner’ voltages than another? There are analogies that can be drawn at many levels of the open source model, and I’ll be expanding on some of them in the coming days.

But let’s begin at the fundamental level: the original words and symbols that comprise the source code itself. Just as the legal code is public property, I think there is an increasingly compelling argument that computer source code should be viewed in the same way.

Next up: an analogy using public utilities, most notably the electric companies of the last century, and the Internet Service Providers of this one.