STUDIO83

Legacy.

It is a strange thing; a very strange thing.

It is involved with wondering what all this that we are doing means.  It is a term bestowed upon you after you have passed on — once people have, collectively, agreed you have done something good, to their benefit.

I find it strange. I am in some obscure way a Buddhist. Somewhere down the line I find legacy a thing that does not matter, because, depending on what 'the people' perceive how you lived life.  At the same I am a pseudo-intellectual (read: philosopher). A philosopher before me Immanuel Kant proposed the idea of Utilitarian:

is the idea that the moral worth of an action is determined solely by its usefulness in maximizing utility and minimizing negative utility (utility can be defined as pleasure minus pain, preference satisfaction, knowledge or other things) as summed among all sentient beings — which I can assume implied doing things that benefit the greater good.

Wait, this is no YG&B — it ain't philosophy — lets kick into that Geekology. Okay, so, let us assume I am in agreement with this popular culture of what legacy is.

With that mind shift I can —without losing face with respect to other pseudo-intellectuals— say: Mark Shuttleworth:

Those that know me, know I believe think Mark became the First African in space for a girl, (was it Khanyi Dlomo-Mkhize?), but after that — he focused on something else, something bigger, something more about the 'greater' good: Ubuntu.

Ubuntu is a beautiful Linux Operating System (OS) — he invested time and energy to get this OS on point, in fact it is now the most popular Linux OS in just 7 years.  In all that good doing Linux, in my humble geeky opinion, is the quintessential mark of doing something that benefits the whole —  then that leads me to Unix: which inspired the existence of Linux.

Inasmuch as I can celebrate Unix — Linux — Ubuntu — Mark Shuttleworth — I do think the idea behind Open Source Software (OSS) is what legacy is about.  The idea of OSS allows for the creation of things, that this generation, the next generation, the future of the next generation can build upon.  Just in case you dispute this here are a few stats to affirm what Immanuel Kant had elluded to:

1. Android — that geeky looking mobile phone operating system that is in more devices than any of its competitors (including its better designed and gated Apple iPhone/iPad and beating Nokia from its 10 years of being on top in just 3 years)
2. Apache Web Server — 59% of the web runs on this;
3. PHP — 500 million people spend their day enjoying the benefits of this through Facebook (at best)
4. MySQL — all that stuff you store on Facebook, yep, mostly stored using MySQL
5. XML > XHTML > HTML — the meta language behind what you are reading now;
6. Twitter — all 50 million tweets per day are possible through Ruby on Rails and/or Scala;
7. Mac OS X — that powers all that is Apple computing (iOS has open source components) is made solid by a variation of Unix
8. Studio83 — is built with PHP/MySQL/JavaScript and other things I don't remember which are also open source;
9. Wordpress — your über blogging platform, yep, open source software;
10. et cetera.

I do think, as evident above, OSS emulates what that philosopher had proposed and in doing so, provided the bed rock for you and me, your momma and your cousins too:

to build from, to grow from and propel us forward without hindrance but the merit of an idea — and that is what legacy is about.

I, think — I am still a Buddhist.