Monday this week, the class presented in groups on the open source projects we created. I enjoyed the presentation on QuoteDaily, because there was a sense of performance to it, like the presentation had some aesthetic value and resonance beyond solely the communication of information. The presenters used rhetorical strategies in a self-aware, ironic-but-not-totally-ironic way that made it entertaining and easy to engage with the work being presented.

Another presentation that I watched was Kelsey Hightower’s Thoughts on Open Software. In this, he makes the point that creation and advancement relies on the innovations of countless others. He discusses HashiCorp creating a clone of his project, confd, and how he saw his influence as a personal success instead of a loss, like something was stolen from him. He intertwines these two points, mentioning how HashiCorp greatly contributed to confd and how he didn’t write the programming language and operating system that confd relies upon. He argues that developers and startups should focus on offering value in an open, collaborative ecosystem instead of building a “moat” around one’s ideas.

For a long time, I’ve held two opposing mindsets in tension with each other, and been trying to reconcile them: I very firmly believe in community and collaboration and transparent, universal access to information, but I also intuitively feel a drive to become totally independent – able to rely solely on myself, own knowledge, my drive to learn, and my own work. I am the type of person who wants to reinvent the wheel. As I have gotten older, I have become more receptive to help and more cognizant of the fact that I’ve always gotten help, just maybe in ways I didn’t understand before. But, that’s all just intellecutalizing my emotions; really, I like doing everything myself and getting to be like “yupppp i did it all myself🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️”.

I bring this up because Hightower’s points reminded me of this internal conflict I have. I mean, like, there really is nothing more gratifying to me than total self-sustainability, even knowing that the instinct irrational and ahistorical. After watching the presentation, I thought about if I am at odds with open source software. I thought about how I like to rely on myself, and how it is important to me that my work is known to be my work, and how I would probably be more bothered than him about the Consul Template thing.

It’s interesting to me how the connection between protecting one’s work and being able to profit from it is so immediate in this presentation. It’s so assumed that it’s almost unspoken. After some reflection, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am, in fact, definitely not at odds with the ethos of open source development, and that I don’t equate these two things as strongly as most working, professional developers probably do. Still being in school, maybe it’s just lower stakes for me. I see the importance of my work, and work in general, as being greater than, if not totally disjoint from, the amount of profit it generates. That’s more the reason open source resonates with me than the collaborative nature of the work.

Side Note: Watching the presentation, I take note of his style of presentation, particularly how he goes on a lot of tangents and sort of rambles on about various stories in the middle of making arguments to support or ground them. It mostly works for me. Similarly, in prose, I have a tendency for tangential, exploratory, wandering writing.

So https://github.com/ossd-s26/MindMelt-Extension is the open source project I helped develop and contribute to. I found this group work experience gratifying, despite all of the stuff about liking to do everything by myself, because the division of labor was pretty clear. I can pretty firmly take credit for the stuff I did. This helped reconcile my mindsets I hold in tension with each other. Also, I enjoyed that this project was less serious and more humorous in nature. I think aesthetic value is just as “useful” as useful things, and I think that it’s useful to deconstruct the notion of usefulness under capitalism :) It made me very happy to hear everybody laugh while my group and I presented this! That’s the success to me. I also now am even more sure that I really don’t want to do a web related project, and that I would much prefer contributing to an open source project in C.