Blogs

Many of us are fond of saying that AR is an open source movement. I can't really say that I agree. Instead i would offer that open source doesn't mean you can do what you want with it, it means that your source code is made available for others to use and adapt. Its about standing on the shoulders of giants.

While there are some tenets that have been passed down through the AR lineage of schools, its fair to say that all the knowledge that makes up the bulk of the movement is tied up in various peoples heads. If we are to take open source seriously, that means adopting a spirit of open and generous sharing of things that are most important to us, the things that we learn, the practices we create, the promotional material that we produce, the code we write, all of it.

One of the reasons that the software community was among the first to adopt an ideology of open source was that their industry already had a means to publish their IP, things like revision control systems, and other online publishing know how. Another reason was the desire to break the dominant proprietary monopolys/duopolys without having to spend millions of dollars.

In my view, today AR stands facing a fundamental choice. Does it want to continue being proprietary, or to become a truly open, grassroots movement?