Open Source… Fan Fiction for Geeks?

Here’s the second guest post I mentioned on Sunday, this one by another of my Protagonize friends, Asheyna. I want to extend my thanks to her, both for posting here and for letting me post on her blog. Sounds like the barter system, don’t it?

I was so excited when Faltarego asked for guest posts on his Twitter and for some crazy reason decided to allow me to write something. Then life happened and I wasn’t really able to write, as so often happens. I could have written… but I highly doubt rants on the world’s lack of common sense would have made it past the review. Thankfully Faltarego is a super nice person and hasn’t harassed me at all for my lack of writing ability.

Met Faltarego over on Protagonize, which is a truly awesome website, and if he doesn’t post about it I’m going to sneak back over here and do it myself! He’s the one that really introduced me to the idea of writing fan fiction. I’d read some Harry Potter fanfic which was pretty good but had never thought about it beyond that. Then he harassed me into joining the Fan Fiction group he moderated.

The more I thought about fanfic the more I realized why I liked it. It’s Open Source writing! For those who don’t know what Open Source is, Faltarego wrote an excellent guest post on my blog (shameless plug) that goes into what exactly it is and where it came from.

I realized the reasons I like Open Source are the same reasons I love fan fiction. Both say that the original code (or canon) isn’t the be-all and end-all of masterpieces. It releases the content to be modified, altered, and occasionally destroyed by the public.

Such a task is typically only undertaken by those with a passion for the original and a desire to make it even better, or to add their own ideas. That’s why I think more often than not, it succeeds. In both cases if someone is willing to really put the time, energy and thought into the project something wonderful can happen. Look at Google and everything they’re doing for open source software. And when Wave is released it is really going to be something else. In the writing world, oh where do I start?

RJ Anderson’s Harry Potter fanfic is a great example of building within an existing world but creating new characters and plots. Examples of this sort of Open Source are harder to find however. I would say programming languages themselves such as Python or Ruby would fit in here. Similar to existing languages but entirely their own thing.

A more common type of fanfic is writing using the same characters and creating your own story for them. Two of my favorite examples of this are a James Bond story and a Star Trek fic both on Protag and by some of my favorite authors. By the same token, this is also the most popular sort of Open Source. Namely, Chrome, Mozilla, GTalk, etc etc etc. In both worlds this sort of "redoing" the original creator’s project is really hit or miss. There are some great, and even better than the original, finds out there… and there are some that will make you consider giving up on the idea all together.

In the literary world there’s a lot of debate about why authors won’t allow fan fiction. The general consensus is that these authors are afraid someone will come along and outshine them. In my personal opinion it’s the same in the programming world. And it all comes back to one of my first points.

Open source programmers and fan fiction authors alike share a passion for their projects. There’s no pay out, and rarely is there fame (unless one really does an outstanding job). Why do we do it?

Because we love it.