The New Stack Podcast

Open Source and Humanity, a Discussion with Mårten Mickos

Episode Summary

Elon Musk and Tesla's open-sourcing of its code is a symbol of a major next phase of transformation for how we perceive ourselves and society. It touches on the truth of open source software as an example that humans can show that really, they love to debate. "I think society has to always look for resilience, and build resilience into society. Things that will survive no matter what happens, and will survive even if nobody's watching, even if the boss is missing, even if there's no decision maker. Open and distributed meritocracies have always provided the strongest resilience. When you say how do we build cars, and IoT, and software in general that can stand the test of time, the best thing is to make it open so that anybody can participate and that the participation is based on merit. Not based on ownership, not based on nationality, not based on politics, it's based on the merits of the software. [...] The more open software is, the more it can become the underpinning of something very large," said Mickos.

Episode Notes

Elon Musk and Tesla's open-sourcing of its code is a symbol of a major next phase of transformation for how we perceive ourselves and society. It touches on the truth of open source software as an example that humans can show that really, they love to debate.

"I think society has to always look for resilience, and build resilience into society. Things that will survive no matter what happens, and will survive even if nobody's watching, even if the boss is missing, even if there's no decision maker. Open and distributed meritocracies have always provided the strongest resilience. When you say how do we build cars, and IoT, and software in general that can stand the test of time, the best thing is to make it open so that anybody can participate and that the participation is based on merit. Not based on ownership, not based on nationality, not based on politics, it's based on the merits of the software. [...] The more open software is, the more it can become the underpinning of something very large," said Mickos.