Power, Authority, Force and the politics of software
Bruce Eckel recently posted “We No Longer Need Power,” and Ian Bicking recently gave a talk “Toward a new self-definition for open source“. Both raise similar points, “power” seems to be handled differently — actually they both say better — in open source communities and open spaces conferences than traditional companies.
I agree, but I think that any discussion power politics is pretty risky, particularly since we use authority, power and force pretty interchangeably in many situations. And it’s hard to nail down exactly what people mean because there’s some confusion even at the level of what the words mean.
So, from my perspective (heavily influenced by Hannah Arendt here’s a reasonable definition of terms:
- Power: group action in service of some goal
- Authority: some kind of status “given” to an individual, which gives her influence over the actions of others.
- Force: the ability to make somebody do something they would not do on their own
- Violence: the act of causing of physical, social, or economic damage to an individual or group.
( * Arednt fans should note that I am using force differently than she does.)
Power and Authority in Open Source
Open Source projects have powerful people, in that they have people who somehow manage to get a group of people to work in common on some larger goal. And there’s often some sort of formal authority which resides in the BDFL or project leaders. Authority often centers around who has commit access and who can flip the commit bit. But there’s very little force or violence involved, and the authority that we give is always tentative and revokable in the case of an “unfriendly” fork of the community.
The fact that there’s often not much money going on reduces the chance of economic violence and removes the main way that developers encounter force. So, nobody can force you to work on stuff you don’t want to, and nobody can force you to stop working on the things you really want to see done.
Open source is Force/Violence free
At least that’s how it often seems. But I there can be significant social pressures to work on one thing rather than another, and many people often feel like they have a right to tell you what you ought to be working on.
None of this counts as force, but it does seem to indicate some imbalances in the system, where there are producers and consumers of open source and the producers seem to often feel like they can never do enough to please all of their consumers.
And because there’s a lack of resources going to the producers, it’s consumers are often frustrated by the slop pace of development. But all of that is another post for another day.
P.S. A Science Fiction book recommendation
Ursula K. LeGuin wrote a great book that I’ve been thinking a lot about when talking to people about the subject of the difference between “commercial” software culture, and the somewhat anarchistic Open Source culture. The book The Dispossessed, is one of my favorite Science Fiction novels, and and though it came long before “Open Source” or even “Free Software” even existed as such, I think it has a lot to say about the strengths and limitations of the “Free Software” culture.