"Say goodnight, Richard Stallman!" "Goodnight, Richard Stallman!"

Monday, cigarette #3
Back home on the front porch, 5:20pm

Open source software is a lot like vaudeville.

That’s not the opening line of a joke. (I suppose it could be. The Party of the Right had an Algonquin Round Table moment when the Chairman, challenged to come up with a punchline for “Alchemy is like a woman,” shot back with “It’s all been downhill since the Middle Ages?”)

Unlike every other performing arts community, I dunno, ever, American vaudeville was dominated by conservatives. Attempts to unionize vaudeville actors met with failure after failure, not because of tyrants in management but because most of the performers didn’t want to unionize. This from “Types of Actors’ Trade Unions” by Paul Gemmill:

A word may be said as to the difficulty of developing and maintaining effective labor organizations among vaudeville actors. The trouble seems to lie chiefly in the self-sufficiency of vaudeville actors, as contrasted with the interdependence of dramatic players. The average vaudeville bill consists of eight or ten short, disconnected acts, any one of which might easily be omitted without destroying the effectiveness of the others. But the loss of even one or two really important memebers of a theatrical cast could hardly fail to be serious...

When Gemmill talks about substitute acts, he doesn't just mean "a different but equally popular act." He means "the same act performed by different people." Vaudeville etiquette ignored authorship. If your "Salesgirl" was better than George and Gracie's, you'd be the one to get booked. This, combined with the fact that vaudevillians had no pretensions to "high art" status but measured their success by the number of tickets sold, bred a tough and libertarian culture very different from what existed among actors (who, as we know, are communists). Think of the scene in My Darling Clementine where Alan Mowbray stands on top of a table and tries to recite from Hamlet while drunk cowboys fire gunshots at his feet to make him dance. That's a little like theatre and vaudeville.

This is why I am not as surprised as Jaron Lanier and Alan Jacobs seem to be that "even though the open-source movement has a stinging countercultural rhetoric, it has in practice been a conservative force." If the constellation of ideas called "conservatism" includes opposition to unions, zeal for freedom, and an implicit trust that competition yields better results than centralized planning (although not necessarily a special love for capital or capitalism), it makes sense that the open source movement would be conservative in the same way that vaudeville was. Their visions are similar: you can still get paid for logging hours as a hoofer or a programmer, but it isn't enough to originate something. You have to keep on being the best at the thing you originate.

Two parentheticals: I'm not quite an open source true believer, and you could certainly argue that data can be duplicated more easily than a vaudeville act, which might even be true, but that doesn't justify, say, this (hat tip Jack at the Yale Free Press blog).

Also, in the interests of full disclosure: When Richard Stallman came to speak (and get attacked by ninjas) at the Yale Political Union, he stayed at the house I share with people who are (obviously) much more tech-y than I am. He sang, he expounded, he told me not to smoke, and was in every way a charming houseguest, so I should admit a bias in his favor.