Plagiarism vs Open Source

Something's wrong here.

Originality is the art of concealing your sources.

Nobody Is Original
I often tell myself that I am half Black Nationalist, half Catholic and half Jewish. I was in proximity to the founders of the first set of ideas, but two to five thousand years away from the other two. I could eject any of those values and still be a whole person, but I like the balance. They root me in place; I think it’s a good place. To be honest, I think it is only that fundamental combination plus my current meditative and Stoic discipline that make me unique, but no part of me is original. None of us are; we abbreviate our family histories these days.

Like many people in the IT professions, I was gobsmacked by the revealed genius of Claude Shannon. Hamming codes fascinated me. I have yet to solve a Wordle of Sodoku that gives me as much pleasure as a Karnaugh Map. There is a lot that I owe to people with strange names like Boole, Babbage, Kernigan, Kay, “Matz” and “Captain Crunch”. But the one name more ordinary folk know about IT insiders next to Bill Gates might be Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux (and Git).

The UNIX Wars
I am too old to have had much of the confidence of a younger generation of programmers when I had relatively infinite energy and focus. During that prime, the internet did not much exist and I lived through the period of the UNIX wars, during the 80s and early 90s. During that period there were at least a dozen major corporations & organizations who were offering operating systems products they hoped would win in the marketplace. Xerox, Kodak, DEC, HP, UC Berkeley, IBM, Microsoft, Sun, Unisys, AT&T, Intergraph, Apollo, NCR, Motorola, SCO, Tandem, Silicon Graphics, Minix, Olivetti. All of this plus a promised collaboration between Apple and IBM called Taligent. Don’t forget Steve Jobs’ baby NeXT, IBM’s relatively successful OS/2 and the winner, Microsoft NT.

Along came Torvalds and some extraordinary individuals like Richard Stallman, Tim Berners-Lee, Larry Wall and Eric S. Raymond who, like many of us, wanted our good and even mediocre ideas to survive the clash of the proprietary titans. Remember back in those days, there was very limited interoperability. Something you wrote for Xerox only worked on Xerox computers. Something you wrote for Sun wouldn’t work on Hewlett-Packard, or Compaq computers. So there was a lot of duplicate work going on everywhere. It was a proprietary, standards-free, free for all.

That kind of reminds me of today’s academy, in which I am no expert, but the parallel is clear. In 1982 just putting a ‘window’ on a computer screen ignited a war of attribution that made and destroyed reputations and companies. It took almost three decades before the industry came to recognize what we now use as the standard visual computer interface, the browser. The most successful of these are all free and behave very similarly and are in use worldwide. But we all know about browsers, well except for my parents in their late 80s. Then again, they have trouble finding their car keys. How the mighty have fallen over a few borrowed words.

I am impressed by the parallel with regard to what I presume to be the insider understanding of academic publishing. Nobody actually reads the guts of those papers except a few at the same postdoc level where the lingua franca of their specialty is all well-understood to hinge on the genius of people completely obscure to the public. Surely in the world of proprietary software, only a few deep insiders at say, HP, are going to review the new code for an upgrade to a data compression algorithm.

In fact, there are obscure little pieces of code in so many key places that they comprise chokepoints that make hundreds of millions of computers vulnerable. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide secure communication over a computer network. Between 2008 and 2018, a number of exploits were found that crippled TLS 1.2 before TLS 1.3 was released. They had names like CRIME, Heartbleed, POODLE, LogJam and FREAK. Ten years. And TLS 1.2 had holes that made it fallback to an even older standard known as SSL 3.0.

Academia Doxxed
Eric S. Raymond, known to us as ESR, since we computer geeks love our TLAs (three letter acronyms) famously wrote. “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” [Note my proper attribution], not that I think ESR would mind. This is a fundamental principle of the transparent process of open source software, whose crafting and oversight like the governance of fancy colleges is an enormously complex undertaking. What academics will be finding out in the short term is that millions of eyeballs will be directed at the pedigrees of their degrees, and believe me, a lot of the bugs of plagiarism will be discovered in the content that made them. This is to be expected. Computer hackers, now abetted by complex search tools and powerful compute power are experts at deconstructing the most tangled webs humans are capable of weaving. The oversight of department management hierarchies in obscure disciplines at most every university and journal editorial board will be defenseless. One of our more cherished axioms is that obscurity is not security. Our best IT practices require observability. We want tripwires, alarms and alerts, and we are willing to submit our open source code to automated oversight, like GitGuardian.

There is ample precedence for this kind of doxxing and exposure. Most people are vaguely aware of a crisis of replication in the social sciences, and perhaps more of the sciences than anyone suspects. The legendary cracking of this came from the trio of Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose following in the footsteps of Alan Sokol whose sting of the postmodernist Social Text showed that some academic publication has gaping holes.

Stand Up Comics
One profession that ruthlessly punishes ‘biters’ is standup comedy. You can imagine a clutch of comedic geniuses that have heard every joke, just as there are professional quarterbacks and coaches who can identify ever great pass in NFL history, or ringmen who know every devastating KO punch going back 50 years. It’s not hard to make a standup comic laugh, in fact I’d bet half the time that they are visibly laughing at their own jokes during performances owes to the fact that they are instantly reminded of the other variations of their own favorite comedians. They brutally police themselves or the industry would collapse. It’s very hard to make them laugh at a stolen joke.

But the enterprise of college education is much too large these days to sustain constant innovation and integrity in those fields that attend to the core business of sustaining civilization. This is my core thesis today. There are way too many students, a plurality of whom grew up cocooned in their own private Idaho of youth cultures and grade inflation to expect a scholarly renaissance in every decade. We don’t need yet another translation of the Bible. We don’t need yet another ARIMA algorithm for social science that is only concerned with gender. We don’t need people passing themselves off as original thinkers when the history of Western culture is so damned chock full of it.

Someday, somebody is going to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem. It might even be a team of AI programmers who do so. Someday the double entry accounting system may spit out a public blockchain audit trail. That idea, of triple entry accounting, is already 34 years old today. The genius for improvement exists. The millions of eyes can be focused any day. What we need are more people who are capable of doing more than obscure research and put into action useful, reliable, transparent systems of maintenance of our civilization. Chasing down a few bugs in radical theories is a waste of time, and without question can be more vituperative than of public benefit. But the American public has long been poorly served by obscurity and lawyered up deflections of their interests instead of legitimate transparency and reform of a whole host of institutions. It is why we are best with conspiracy theories. Everyone is looking for a ‘study’ that validates their personal or even institutional suspicions.

That reminds me of the UNIX wars.

Ultimately, the question remains. Are we well-served by a demand for creative originality at all times? Is all of our research legitimately screened? How much plagiarism is too much? Why shouldn’t academic publication be subjected to greater public scrutiny? Indeed why shouldn’t legislation?

I contend that we possess a surplus of scholarly choice that produces clutter and that clutter is very costly to our collected ability to get to the core necessity of the framework of our civilization. The academic core of the steel and concrete pilings of our civilization are crusted over with barnacles we treat as part and parcel of our foundations. At some point the weight of the calcified piers breaks the design.

Demolition, Man
We Americans can’t seem to stop declaring rights of eminent domain. We whipsaw our politics until we procure a majority in favor of demolition. Sometimes it’s long overdue, more often than not the opposition rebuilds the same edifice with only slight modifications. In short, we don’t compromise well. We don’t restore well. We don’t remodel well. We want to erase the actual past and claim a shiny perfect and simple way to explain or dismiss our family, institutional and national histories. This is simply destructive, and I don’t think we can afford it. Our inability to conceive of a politics and a source of funding for such politics of scrubbing the barnacles without abrading the steel makes us want to crash the whole damned thing into the ocean.

I am on the lookout for something that works. Another path. Sometimes built from scratch, sometimes a rescued castaway, sometimes a restored classic.

The brilliance of open source software is that it does all three at once, and nothing has to be considered completely original. Letting a thousand flowers bloom in our nation requires a methodological change in how we build. But the UNIX wars should instruct us on the folly of thinking one faction can do more than capture its own small ecosystem.

Let me remind you. I don’t want communities, races, genders, ethnicities. I want liberty and justice for all. None of us own the mathematics. It is only in full transparency that we can make progress for all of us to see. That’s the culture of an open society. I’ve seen it happen in my lifetime.

The NY Public library’s original Gutenberg Bible purchased by James Lenox in 1847

In principio erat Verbum, et Verbum erat apud Deum, et Deus erat Verbum.