Open Source when you boil it down is about choice. When something is free it is a very easy thing to choose. When monetary value is eliminated then true value is placed upon the item for its usefulness to the user. Open Source methodologies stem from a understanding of programming and code. Code has a particular syntax and this syntax has enabled some companies to hold the power over that syntax ie Microsoft. The control of Microsoft’s syntax exists with in the economic model that has made their company successful: make the computers operate for your user for a set price. Open-source subverts the ideas of control over the syntax and offers up a notion that when you allow users to choose their own way to run their computers or even do it themselves, control of the product is shared. The Microsoft proprietary software business model is equivalent to a standard narrative story with a beginning a middle and an end. You pay for the story that you as a user have no control over its narrative. With in literature, initial ideas of giving the users choice is the wildly popular Choose Your Own Adventure Books. Choose Your Own Adventure was one of the most popular children's series during the 1980s and 1990s, selling over 250 million copies between 1979-1998 and has been translated into at least 38 languages. ( Lodge, 2007 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6408126.html.) These simple books with a variety in their story lines allowed options in the narrative that attempted to fit the user. The Choose Your Own Adventure books are in their content attempting to be open-source.
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