Reflections

“The first patent system to protect ownership of inventions was created, almost four centuries ago, by Sir Francis Bacon. Bacon liked to say: «Knowledge is power», and ever since it has been clear that he was not wrong. Universal science has little that is universal about it; it is objectively confined within the borders of the advanced nations. Latin America does not apply the results of scientific research to its own benefit, for the simple reason that it has none, and so it condemns itself to suffer the technology of the powerful, which punishes and displaces natural raw materials. Latin America has so far been unable to create a technology of its own to sustain and defend its own development. The mere transplanting of the technology of the advanced countries not only implies cultural subordination and, ultimately, economic subordination as well, but also, after four and a half centuries of experience in multiplying oases of imported modernism in the middle of the deserts of backwardness and ignorance, it can fairly be said that it does not solve any of the problems of underdevelopment either... It is in the north, of course, where the electronic models are designed and the programming languages are created that Latin America imports”
– Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, 1971, pp. 406-407

When the world was young, when Linus had not yet published his kernel, I read Galeano for the first time, in photocopy, because the book was banned. Years later I bought a copy in Mexico, which is where I took the passage above from. In 1998 that particular passage hit me hard, because I was obsessed with creating a programming language. I had already built one, and managed to sell it, with a virtual machine included (before Java existed), and I believed in the promise of free software, at least as we understood it back then. Free software was the way to achieve technological independence.

But over time I’ve realized that those ideas have been watered down. Free software is no longer about building software, it’s no longer about creating, it’s about importing the code other programmers write up north, and using it, and if it breaks, waiting for someone to fix it, or posting on a forum, or googling for a workaround, while we wait for the next release (at least the cycles seem to be shorter, and since there’s no license to pay for, we’re more patient).

When I was at university we dreamed of developing graphics packages, of emulating Pixar, of writing our own renderers, or 3D morphing tools. Today the kids aspire to learn the Android SDK, or to set up a LUG (Linux Users Group), and what else can they do, when nobody even teaches them how to build a compiler! We failed. We stopped dreaming and developing, and the generations that followed couldn’t overcome our failure.

Users, not developers: that’s what we settle for. I don’t like it. It’s not what I felt when I marked up my copy of Galeano’s book, which I had to dust off yesterday to transcribe the quoted text. That wasn’t the idea. The idea was to create our own technology, our own startups, our own projects, to develop, not to use what others develop.

I don’t want an industry based on technology from abroad, even if it’s open. I want to see developers. Maybe I’m crazy, and I’m too old to keep swallowing Galeano’s rhetoric. Maybe we should give in, and accept that it’s the bearded guys up north, who are smarter than us, who get to write the software... No, I don’t want that! Do you?

It’s time to dust off something more than old books...