You Can't Make Mistakes.

A few months ago, I was sitting on a delayed plane in Albuquerque reading the Economist magazine to pass the time. It happened to be the quarterly technology feature issue, so there was some decent stuff about recycling technologies and holographic data storage. I flipped the page and lo and behold, there was an article about a South African programmer named Mark Shuttleworth and his Linux-distribution-brainchild, Ubuntu.

This was the first that I had ever heard of Ubuntu Linux. I had been dabbling with Fedora Core—another Linux “flavor” or distribution. I really knew nothing about Linux beyond that it was open source, free—in most situations—and pretty difficult to use. I also knew that Linux came along with a great deal of ideology, having developed in a community-based, collaborative, project-oriented way. I had been using all sorts of open source software on my Windows system—stuff like OpenOffice.org, Firefox, etc.—but I had not really delved into open source OS or anything.

As I read this article though, I really began to identify with the cause. This guy, Mark Shuttleworth, and the company that he set up to develop Ubuntu were dedicated to making highly-functional and user-friendly operating systems which are also free and open source. In the article, the word ubuntu is identified as a Zulu and Xhosa word which means “universal bond of sharing between humans.”¹ The idea behind the development of this particular distribution of Linux is to focus less on the ideology of open source software development and focus more on usability. Shuttleworth wanted to create something for people everywhere, and that could be developed by people everywhere.²

Then, recently, I had the good fortune of being invited to attend a talk by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu at Western Michigan University. In his talk, he discussed ubuntu at length. Not the open source operating system, but the concept. It was the basis of his discussion of why people should work together rather than against each other. He describe ubuntu in two ways: first, by saying that “the humanity in me is the humanity in you,” explaining that there is not humanity without other humans. We are only fully human when we are fully engaged in the community of humans around us. He later described ubuntu as “the art of being human.”

Tutu talked endlessly about forgiveness and its importance for bridging gaps between people, countries, places and in creating peace where there has only been war and violence. It struck me as he was talking that he and Shuttleworth had more in common than their country of birth and their choice of buzzwords. They both seek to empower people by encouraging them to embrace their community, whether local or global. In the development of Ubuntu, software developers from all over the world use technologies which allow them to collaborate virtually. In Tutu’s own efforts over the past 40 years, he has encouraged people from vastly different places and cultures to communicate with one another in order to understand each other. This understanding, he believes, will eventually lead to collaboration, which will lead to a sense of joint or group ownership of the world. Perhaps stewardship would be more apt even that ownership. If we get to know and understand each other a little better, we will be more apt to take care of our brothers and sisters, fathers and grandmothers the world over. It would be like living in an open-source world—if I can extend that as a metaphor to this idea. It is this shared care-taking that will save the humanity from destroy ourselves and the world we live in.

Not so strangely, this sentiment is coming not from a gain-focused, monetary-profit-maximizing worldview, but a non-profit, shared-benefit worldview in which more than money is considered when evaluating what it profitable and what is not. It is my hope that we will all start listening to these folks and—better than listening—help them in our everyday behaviors, actions, and interactions. It is only then that the words of visionaries will actually benefit the world. Until then, it feels as though they fall on lots and lots of deaf ears attached to people only waiting for their turn to talk.

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¹ “Bringing Free Software Down to Earth.” The Economist v 383, no 8532. June 9th-15th, 2007. Permalink to the article.

² Since that time I have been using this operating system on both of my computers. The learning curve was a little steep at first but after a while I got the hang of it. The biggest part of the curve is in learning about how the Linux file system works and why, figuring out how to download and install software. Also, it takes a bit of doing to figure out what the software and file-type cognates are so that I could do cross-platform work. Since installing the OS, I have not gone back. I haven’t booted back into Windows to use familiar software opting instead to use the cognates found in the Linux universe. It has been fantastic. I love the way that it works. I love that it is less resource-intensive for my systems, so that I can use valuable memory and processor speed to do actual work, rather than just running the GUI, like with the newest versions of windows. It’s been great. I suggest trying it out at www.ubuntu.com.