Communities prior to the advent of coinage didn’t seek to settle their trades on the spot, at least not within those communities. They relied on much more egalitarian long-running concepts of reciprocity.Cognitive views of learning forms much closer to the communist slogans of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” than the quid pro quo paradigm we all take for granted in today’s market-based societies.Cognitive views of learning

The problem, as seen with modern eyes, with early, pre-money egalitarian societies was in part that they didn’t scale. They relied on community bonds to enforce a collective sense of what was good for the group as a whole, backed by the effective corrective measures of family obligations and honor. (getting ostracized was always there in the background.)

cognitive views of learning

That fear remains central to modern societies. Witness the evergreen political appeal of pointing out the excesses of welfare kings and queens, or the danger posed by immigration.Cognitive views of learning this is a fear rooted in freeloader fear, which in turn is based on the notion of scarce resources in need of protection. That there’s just not enough to go around!Cognitive views of learning that the party is full.

The fact that these arch enemies should share some common ideological base really shouldn’t be that much of a surprise.Cognitive views of learning they were both american men born in the 1950s who attended ivy league universities, came of age during the oil crisis, and were around for the birth of personal computing.Cognitive views of learning that’s a lot of shared societal forces and context exerted on both with ties to the concept of scarcity.

Rails has been downloaded some 170 million times from rubygems since it started being hosted there.Cognitive views of learning by one account I read, more than a million applications built with rails have been put online. Neither the first nor the second fact has harmed me in any meaningful way.Cognitive views of learning not missing the opportunity to collect a tax for each use, like gates, not missing the opportunity to extract every extension ever made to rails, like stallman.Cognitive views of learning

If you accept this premise that there is no tragedy of the commons – that open source software cannot be over-grazed by having more people use it – that freeloaders are free, and scarcity is not an applicable concept, then you’re forced to look skeptically at other assumptions we’ve been starting to make lately in the broader open source community.Cognitive views of learning

Now, I’m not saying that there’s something categorically wrong with developing open source on market-based terms. What I’m saying is that it isn’t a necessary condition of sustainability.Cognitive views of learning that there are large, successful projects, like ruby on rails, that have thrived on rejecting the market-based approach, and is showing no signs of an impending malthusian doom.Cognitive views of learning on the contrary.

You might think that latter release is obvious, but the marketplace norms are hard to escape. They seep into our unconsciousness.Cognitive views of learning there are plenty of open source users who think themselves less as a recipient of a gift and more like customers with warranty claims. That they’ve done the makers of said open source software a great honor by merely choosing to use their thing.Cognitive views of learning

I used to think that this was unequivocally a win for open source. That to fight for attention with the commercial alternatives, we had to adopt the commercial playbook.Cognitive views of learning now I think it’s at the very least a mixed blessing. That if you dress up like a salesman, it’s a little disingenuous to be surprised when people think they’re buying a product.Cognitive views of learning

The MIT license is often just lumped in with other open source licenses because of its compatibility with the likes of GPL or other copyleft licenses.Cognitive views of learning that makes it seem like they’re just really flavors of the same thing, but they’re not. In many ways, I consider the MIT license to be as different from copyleft licenses like the GPL as it is from commercial proprietary software.Cognitive views of learning

It’s kinda funny to analyze the MIT license from this perspective, because I do remember feeling the pull of a primordial debt to the software community when I started rails.Cognitive views of learning A motion to give back now that I had something to give. I was born into the software community through the grace of open source, and now I had the opportunity to participate as a contributor, and it felt wonderful.Cognitive views of learning

When I started working on rails in 2003, jason, my then boss, now business partner at basecamp, was paying me $25/hour. (in itself a princely sum, up from the $15/hour I was getting paid when we started working together in 2001).Cognitive views of learning I was attending the copenhagen business school. I did not have rich parents supporting me, though I did have the backing of a functional welfare state that sees the wisdom in educating its young without trapping them in student debt!Cognitive views of learning anyway, this was my income, and yet I poured a substantial amount of spare time into making rails. Hours that I did not bill jason for!

What’s unique about maslow’s insight is in how the pyramid of needs help us with a road map to making that happen.Cognitive views of learning clarifies why we at times do not feel like we’re either able to win for ourselves or to strive to help others win. Because we’re stuck at the base levels.Cognitive views of learning either in reality, being deprived of security and safety, or in our minds.

One of the ways that the focus on computer science in software development leads us astray is with the notion of objective truths.Cognitive views of learning when you’re comparing two algorithms for sorting, you can mathematically prove which is better, if you set the terms of the competition. Are we optimizing for speed, memory, or some combination?Cognitive views of learning it’s possible to declare a definitive winner that we can all agree upon, because, you know SCIENCE.

Take static vs dynamic typing, as just one example.Cognitive views of learning when I got started in the late 90s, this was a hot topic. Fiercely contested. Now, 20 years later, it is again (or rather it still is)! Just witness the excitement around typescript (and now the inklings of a movement in ruby for the same).Cognitive views of learning both part of the continued litigation over its superior fit for creating fault-free software.

That the conclusion to wrestling with the unknowable is to take a personal leap of faith.Cognitive views of learning to find and commit to a set of personal truths to guide our work and our lives. With the understanding that these truths are our choices, not universal facts.Cognitive views of learning that these choices can never be based on universal facts. The kind of answers you seek when you’ve reached the boundaries of science and rational inquiry.Cognitive views of learning

So many don’t. They try to escape from freedom. Overwhelmed, they want someone else to choose for them. And thus we get the endless jockeying for signs of what we’re supposed to do.Cognitive views of learning that is, what others are doing. What’s the hot new thing? How do we measure hotness? Is it number of google searches? Or most recent release?Cognitive views of learning or something else?

You could say that rails benefitted from this abdication of freedom for years itself, as it was seen as that new hotness. And I, in my lack of understanding from what actually motivated me to do this work, cheered it on.Cognitive views of learning look at that new cool startup using rails! Look at that celebrity-programmer endorsement! Look at those download counts!

In man’s search for meaning, viktor frankl describes life in the german concentration camps during WWII.Cognitive views of learning or rather, he describes the death, and its cause, as he saw it. That humans have an unbelievable resilience and capacity to endure, even in the hardest of circumstances, but only if they can see a purpose.Cognitive views of learning once the purpose is gone, the will to live extinguished, death soon followed.

From this personal and harrowing experience, frankl developed logotherapy.Cognitive views of learning his psychotherapeutic method for helping people dealing with a range of mental illnesses, like depression, anxiety, substance abuse. His key belief was that the root of many of these conditions was to be found in existential angst: A loss of meaning, a loss of purpose.Cognitive views of learning and thus, if meaning and purpose could be rediscovered, you’d be addressing the source of the condition.

There was all this work I could be doing, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.Cognitive views of learning at the time I couldn’t quite put my finger on why. I just knew that the motivation wasn’t there. So I spent a lot of time procrastinating and seeing weeks go by with no progress.Cognitive views of learning partly this was because I simply felt I wasn’t needed. Sure, I could participate, but if I didn’t, things would go on just about as well.

This is the snowball effect of finding meaning at work.Cognitive views of learning you don’t just have a fixed pie of productivity to divide amongst your pursuits, be they commercial or open source. The pie expands and shrinks depending on your motivation and your mood.Cognitive views of learning when one area of your life is contracting, it often shrinks all the other areas along with it. And when one part of your life is expanding, others often follow too.Cognitive views of learning

It’s a testament to the fact that you can indeed cultivate meaning, as frankl discovered with logotherapy, and the existentialists have been preaching.Cognitive views of learning that by either changing your circumstances or your outlook, you can create or even invent meaning, which in turn then becomes self-sustaining because it feeds on itself.Cognitive views of learning doing meaningful work provides for a meaningful life which inspires more meaningful work. It’s recursive!

But if it’s possible for open source to create meaning in your work, it’s certainly also possible to destroy it.Cognitive views of learning turn that which used to give you joy into that which now gives you dread. The open source world is full of examples of maintainers and contributors who ended up turning a labor of love into just that dead end of “free labor”, and hating the work (and sometimes themselves) in the process!Cognitive views of learning

Which has just never seemed like a very appealing temperament to me. I’m not interested in making software together with people or companies who’d rather not.Cognitive views of learning who are extorted into collaboration by a software license. Maybe that worked for linux, but it seems like a pessimistic, angry, and, frankly, counterproductive way to entice, and actually respect, people.Cognitive views of learning

I’ve been a parent for about six years now. We have two kids and a third on the way. And it’s hammered home the reality of just how hard it is to get someone to do a thing they don’t want to do!Cognitive views of learning and not just hard, but counterproductive, and short-term. You might get a temporary level of compliance, but it’s not exactly an enthusiastic or creative one.Cognitive views of learning

It’s a lens that isn’t smudged by the tragedy of the commons. Where we find meaning in our work, and I mean that in the broadest sense, not just as “what you’re employed to do”.Cognitive views of learning to go beyond “getting the job done”, and to connect with other practitioners as other humans, not just as market participants. A way to create bonds free of quid-pro-quo reciprocal expectations.Cognitive views of learning

So. To kick off this mindset, I’d like to borrow an ancient concept from the history of debt. The jubilee. I hereby declare a jubilee for all imagined debt or obligations you think you might owe me or owe the rails community as a whole.Cognitive views of learning let no one call upon you to ever feel obligated to repay this vanquished debt. Contribute to the rails community because it brings meaning to your life.Cognitive views of learning because writing ruby sparks joy. Don’t participate if it doesn’t.