Open Source in 2300Introduction
Many social trends that are flourishing in our own timeline were interrupted by 2300AD's Twilight War of the late 1990s. In 2300AD, these trends are being revived by nostalgia for pre-Twilight culture in the face of hyper-accelerated technological and cultural change. Some are also proving useful as ways of resisting corporate domination of Core society. One such trend is Open Source, currently being applied to software, design, law and many other areas of human activity. The Twilight War destroyed the networks, databases and document stores of most of Earth's high technology infrastructure, but the principles and licenses of Open Source were written down and published in books and magazines by its proponents well before that. It is the rediscovery of these writings and surviving pre-Twilight electronic records that has led to Open Source flourishing again at the beginning of the twenty-fourth century.The Twenty-Fourth Century
In the early twenty-fourth century, continuing the twentieth century's interrupted culture provides a line of resistance for alternative culture and a line of revenue for its mainstream exploiters. The megacorporations own the Core, and its citizens cannot breathe without using branded, licensed, pre-owned intellectual property. There is no shared public space to walk, speak or think in in most cities. Open Source and Open Content is an attempt to build value by sharing rather than competing. Open Source shares software code, allowing anyone to use or modify it. Open Content shares media such as writing, art, video or music, allowing anyone to use or modify it. This is anathema to the megacorps. But, ironically, Open Source is based on the corporations' lifeblood: copyright and licensing law. The stronger the megacorps' make copyright protection for their own products, the stronger they make the protection for Open Source. Corporate propaganda may claim that the Open Source movement is anti-copyright or anti-law. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is the corporations who wish to break contracts and flout the law to steal value for themselves from each other and from Open Source projects.
Open projects do have money. They need to pay for the technology that supports them and for publicity or legal costs. Open Software and Open Content can be sold, support for it can be sold, users can make donations or enlightened organisations can sponsor development. But the independence of projects should not be undermined by where any money comes from.The Kafer Invasion
During the Kafer Invasion, billions of terabytes of data was lost. Science, the media, the arts and individuals have lost an irreplaceable wealth of information. If this information had been open, it could have been copied freely before and during the Invasion, alleviating this. Rubbished by the megacorps as the "licenses don't bounce bullets" argument, the legal case over the data recovered from the computer cores of Hochbaden has highlighted this debate recently.The Sung
The Sung have recently begun operating stutterwarp drives, but they could have started a lot sooner with more shared information. There are other technologies that they feel humanity is hiding from them because various corporations hold patents and npn-disclosure agreements on them. Open Source would smooth the flow of information not just between Earth and Stark, but back from the Sung to Humanity. In the case of medical and biological research, this could have been very beneficial (not to mention profitable) for the Humans.Scenarios
Open Source projects can serve as patron organisations, social groups for PCs or NPCs, sites of intrigue or sites in cyberspace. They tend to be global, with only a computer server or occsional face-to-face-meetings as a focus. As with any large group of individuals, there can be personality clashes and disagreements about how things are done. And as with any large project, not everyone may be interested in adding as much value as they take or acting with the best interests of the community as a whole.
Successful Open Source projects are well-structured with strong leadership that is used to handling these issues. But in a science-fiction role-palying game, this is not as interestign as the possibility that things might go wrong. Whether a player character is a mamber of an Open Source project or the group are hired by a project to complete a task may affect how they are treated by the project's members, but if they get the job done they will earn respect in either case.
The PCs may be hired to track down stolen code, to track code placed into an open source project illegally by a corporate mole, to stop a worm or back-door palced into a project by criminals, to catch an escaped Open Source AI that has gone rogue (or to ensure its freedom), to find out who is hacking a project's server or to find out what has happened to a high-profile meber of a project who has defected to a corporation or been killed.
Open Content projects may pay for PCs to produce guides to worlds, to record their exploits, to investigate a corporation or government (for Open legal projects) or to field test equipment and even weaponry.
The most extreme possibility, not yet realised in our own timeline, is that a new kind of Open cultural projects could design and fund direct political or even military interventions to achieve their shared aims. Such projects might be popular with shared Human/Sung groups or with citizens on the French Arm dissatisfied with their governments' failure to defend them from the Kafers and the hardships that have followed the Invasion.Conclusion
Cyberpunks, Media workers and Core citizens are bound to encounter Open culture, hackers are bound to encounter open source programs and the (usually distributed) social groups that produce them. They are a useful and realistic addition to 2300AD's range of organisations, and open up new possibilities for scenarios, especially at the Core.
Useful links
The Free Software Foundation
Creative Commons
Groklaw, an Open legal project