Last week at OER13 I presented with Cleo Hanaway on OpenJoyce, a new academic and educational space for researching and learning about James Joyce. One part of OpenJoyce is to look into how “open” is now defined and how it can best be understood and explained; this to me is the key – Open can be understood, but can it be explained?

So how about moving from the “here be dragons” to the “here be klingons” of open source. The same “Open”, well no, it’s Coke and Pepsi time but it’s close enough to confuse people. It can be understood, but can it be explained? The taste challenge ahoy!

So we know open source is mostly boys (see every paper ever) and is defined, like open education because the code is licensed for reuse. So the “open”ness is that you can get at it, like a code trolley dash you can stock up on all the code you’ll ever need. So in the smallest of chronological windows, there is a perfect vision of openness. Rejoice, for we have tasted freedom, and it tastes of 10101100110.

But what of N+1, what of the next second, day, year, hour, lifetime? How open is code that changes? Well if you can change it, or you have control over the changes (most open source code can have patches submitted, but someone still approves them – C I T I Z E N S). Logically the world can decide to take the code some place else, and your code is still open, but you are marooned in some pickled listed building / museum of functionality (and soon you’ll be an UNSUPPORTED VERSION – read ‘primitive culture’ colonialism fans). You’ll be open, open like a stately home is at weekends. Maybe you could add a lovely tea shop to your open code and make a living that way as people pass their weekends admiring the for loops of yesteryear?

So it is open, if you are going where everyone else is going. Which is a sort of Democratic if lucky, Fascist if unlucky world! That sentence is also my favourite line from a National Anthem, but you’ll need to Google which country it is. So the door while opening, is closing from behind you. So it isn’t an opening for you to exploit, or an elevator door opening to help move you to another level, but instead is an escalator – you can go to the next level, but don’t you dare to try to change your mind as this is going one way and this is a current you do not swim against, and there aren’t any lifeguards either. Trunks are committed too, not worn.

But what of those people that stand in the darkness, afraid to step into the light. Those who can use open source code, but not write it? The millions of WordPress blogs to which no one has changed a singe line. A success story, true, but could we instead question how we make code “open”, or at least “more open”. If we write code for other coders, then it will be perfectly engineered, bug free and all the other myths we put on our CVs. But coding is a language, it is a literacy, and so most code is open in the way the third language on the Rosetta Stone is open, you can read it, but it is pretty meaningless unless you want to learn the language. Which sadly in this case you can’t as it is completely forgotten. Well, it is according to researchers.

So can something be unreadable but open? Shall we do a faith example? When Leicester’s finest John Wycliffe translated the bible into English there was pretty much a reformation. Why should Open Source code not be also written in such a way as to understood by the populace, rather than the few. We still code in high Latin, and preach in Latin, and ostracise people whilst claiming openness with the other. If we write for each other, then we are moving from dialect to sociolect and then argot and before you know it we speak a language so weird the only person who understands us is Noam Chomsky and Sting will give us a benefit concert to preserve our ways.

Personally I vote for the reformation, but how do we bring about the literacy? I’d suggest abandoning the idea of code as precise, or perfect, or engineered, and instead craft it, think like an artisan, think of code as an interface. Don’t comment for documentation scripts but to explain the code to people who are reading it to learn. They are simple steps, and they might go about best practice and even logic, but if eulogise the openness, and wear it as a badge of honour, but at the same time realise that the badge really is just a status symbol to differentiate, then we might as well leave all coding to the Masons or some such.