By the time you read this, or maybe as I write this now, last week’s drama in the Ruby community has likely been forgotten. It’s a new week, and Hacker News isn’t going to read itself, after all.

In this particular case, the dispute stemmed from Sam Stephenson’s release of rbenv, which bills itself as a replacement to RVM, a staple of every dutiful Rubyist’s setup. On comment threads and Twitter feeds, this release has led to a conversation that has been excessive in rhetoric, and, at times, lacking in decorum (from every side of this issue, mind you). This all came to a head when Wayne Seguin announced that he was done with RVM development for now.

This is not an article about which is better, or what you should use, or why someone is right, or why someone is wrong. This is about something more universal, and infinitely more interesting: us.

We Are Not Scientists

Open source software incorporates high-minded idealism: we operate in a pure meritocracy, where the best ideas and the best code ultimately rise to the top, on the strength of their intrinsic, objective superiority alone. This should be familiar to anyone in the realm of the sciences, where we throw out incorrect, invalidated theories, and replace them with a new one (which may one day itself be supplanted).

I call bullshit.

Our code, though it encodes logic, has no absolute truth. We are not scientists, discovering eternal, universal laws. We are poets turned engineers, bearing our passions in a cold, binary medium. We write code in human languages for a human audience. It is human all the way down, from its flaws to its beauty.

We Are Mortal

The great tragedy of ideas are how they inspire and cultivate what will ultimately replace them. Just like the aging Hollywood starlet, who one day is edged out by a perky teenaged up-and-comer from the Midwest (who incidentally grew up watching and adoring this starlet, considering her the reason for her getting into show business in the first place).

To take a cue from Richard Dawkins, it’s the gene that’s selfish and ultimately propagates, not the organism. This is not Pokémon, after all.

Our projects, like us, are but temporary vessels for ideas. In time, all projects languish and are either replaced or forgotten. Perhaps there are a lot of us who subconsciously got into this gig on the promise that in code we could preserve a lasting digital legacy… how sad to realize how little truth this bares.

Immortality is an empty goal for software, anyway. What really matters is helping each other.

We Are A Gift Culture

As Steve Klabnik said at the Lone Star Ruby Conf, talking about his work on Shoes: the payoff of open source work is the realization that an hour of your time can save three for everyone else who uses it.

If there is any truth in software, it’s that underlying spirit of beneficence. Open source is a gift culture–an economy and society built on how much we can help one another. We compete by cooperating.

Our digital medium allows us infinite abundance. It offers us a unique ability to literally share equally with everyone else. On top of that, we software developers happen to be, on average, pretty well-off doing what we do, which means that we create open source software as leisure, and not out of necessity. Given all of this, don’t we owe it to ourselves to rise above the cruelty of survival instincts?

We Are Not Ideas

This is not to say that software can’t or shouldn’t compete to be the best–that’s part of the fun! We just need a reminder that all software is written by people. People probably more like you than most people you’ll ever meet.

This is especially true–and again, tragic–for those who create libraries in with comparable alternatives. By instinct, we magnify our situation into a narcissism of incredibly small differences. There are few people, for instance, who are intimate with the logistics of managing multiple installations of Ruby; one would think that two such individuals would get along pretty well, all things considered.

We Are All Persons

If you contribute to an open-source library, I offer a simple challenge. Reach out to the author or maintainer of a “competing” project… and just say hi. Tell them how much you respect their hard work (and mean it). Extend humanity with all sincerity. While you may differ in opinions, you have more in common than you’d expect.

It’s humbling, but you’ll be glad you did it. And if you do, write about it in the comments–I’d love to hear about your experience.