Fors Clavigera

The art market has created a sad disrespect for old material. Me, coming from folk music & dance, I think the old material is the best; it's been honed and perfected to suit us people very well. But it doesn't create much in the way of record sales, or work for reviewers or culture pundits. For that, you must have the new improved exciting novelty thing.

Thinking about this helps me understand innovation in open source software. I was worried for a while that open source software is often just a re-implementation of commercial software. (Calm down, calm down, I know it's not universally true. But it is mostly true, yes? Linux is a re-implementation of Unix, right?)

But innovation is not the only criterium for goodness. Liberty and community are also good criteria; they may not fuel the stock market, but they might fuel your neighborhood. And it seems to me that only with open source and community-developed software can we achieve the kind of gradualism characteristic of the "folk process". I think at the root of the folk process is the belief that the material belongs to us all. There are some more skilled at changing and adapting it; and there will be people who have special affinity or skills for one part of the material ("Mary's song"), and others who will have the skill and desire to take the visible lead in the work for community. But the ownership rests not with the individual, but with the community.

// posted by R Durham @ 22:46