Earlier this month, Computerworld reported that 175,000 Parisian high school students will be given free USB memory sticks loaded with open-source software. The school board’s reasons are familiar: closing the Digital Divide, less expensive than MSFT, and legal to copy.

This will be good news to my friend Dave Lane, one of the more evangelical of the open-source supporters. I think, in fact, I’d be hard-pressed to find someone as passionate about what they believe in as he is. And, while I can’t say I get as… exuberant as he does, he has certainly made an impression on me. His arguments about quality and fairness and economics make sense. And yet we can all feel the seemingly overwhelming tide of all things Microsoft pulling us out into the current.

Branton Kenton-Dau, the founder of VortexDNA, is fond of saying that we create our own reality. I’m not sure where he got the concept, but I’ve heard it repeated many times—in books, in seminars, in movies. Don Miguel Ruiz, in ‘The Four Agreements’, refers to the reality that we create for ourselves as a dream.

Humans are dreaming all the time. Before we were born the humans before us created a big outside dream that we will call society’s dream or the dream of the planet. The dream of the planet is the collective dream of billions of smaller, personal dreams, which together create a dream of a family, a dream of a community, a dream of a city, a dream of a country, and finally a dream of the whole humanity. The dream of the planet includes all of society’s rules, its beliefs, its laws, its religions, its different cultures and ways to be, its governments, schools, social events and holidays.

Tying this to the previous post… yes, we create our own reality. We also create an infinesimal part of all reality, and even though our part is such a microfraction of the whole, the whole couldn’t exist without us.

The dream of the planet (the developed part, not the majority that cares more for clean water than for open-source code), can be felt through the tide of Microsoft. Why is it so difficult to get people to change to open source? Dave must hear this over and over again: “I have to use Microsoft because everyone else is and I have to be compatible with them.” Reasonable excuse? Absolutely. Possible to act differently from of the planet? Definitely. Dave’s hope, I think, and that of others like him, is that so many people become willing to choose a different dream that it becomes the new dream of the planet.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 28th, 2007 at 9:54 am and is filed under Open source, Web 3.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.