Free Software Project

The final project for this year was quite a dense one - it was all about Free Software and how it compares to Open Source and Proprietary software. Firstly we were given a day to do a group project, the aim of which was to produce an illustration/illustrations comparing free/open/proprietary.

As there were three of us in my group we decided to each do one illustration for each type of software and decided to personify each of them them as... wizards... 

My wizard was Open Source - and I portrayed him as a businessman handing over the source code but not being quite sure about the ideology behind it. Also I tried to draw moons and stars on the cape to look like brackets and asterisks but maybe with limited success.

The next part of the project was to sift through some pretty complex essays about free software and focus in an aspect of the writing. I chose an essay by Toni Prug which compared the Free Software movement to Protestantism. As someone who is slightly obsessed by religion, this piqued my interest. A couple of points which particularly inspired me were:
"It [Protestantism] arose against the centralization of the Roman Catholic church, privilege in interpretation of people chosen by the church, and against the Church's extraction of wealth from it's believers. At the time, these were anti-institutional, anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic principles."
"... principle of scripture alone is similar to the hackers' dedication to the code, the text that makes all software what it is."
"Richard Stallman, because of what some considered inflexibility when discussing premises of Free Software, was seen as a fundamentalist."

I was thinking about making an object relating to the principles of Free Software, that would also look like a religious object to highlight the similarities. I first thought about making a scroll, like a Torah, which would have lines of code printed on it, to show how hackers view code with a kind of reverence. I then thought about how Richard Stallman (founder of the Free Software movement)'s "four essential freedoms" were kind of reminiscent of the Ten Commandments and thought about making some ceramic tablets which would look like stone tablets. I decided that wouldn't actually look that interesting though so I started drawing Stallman, who looks like quite a biblical character himself:

I composed a scene, with him as a Moses figure, holding his stone tablets with rays of light shining down on him from a computer... Quite obvious imagery maybe but I think it works pretty well. Here it is (hand-drawn then put together on Photoshop):

The final outcome for the project will be a page in a class newspaper. I don't think this image is enough so I'm in the process of making a scroll. I'll post my progress soon!