By: Jerome Auza
I openly support Rodrigo Duterte to be the next president of the country. Together with my wife, our family, our friends and colleagues, we have come to agree that Duterte is the right leader at this time, to steer the country for the next six years.
We’ve spent quite a sum of time and money campaigning, buying t-shirts and giving them away to people, printing hundreds of stickers and distributing them to the public and frequently promoting Duterte to our friends on Facebook. I may have overdone the Facebook part already and I might be already a “Dutertard” to some of my friends. Who knows some might have already unfollowed, or worse, unfriended me.
As we did our part as volunteers in the past few weeks, I had that feeling of familiarity to what we were doing. Contributions from thousands, if not millions, of volunteers towards a common cause seemed to be something very familiar to me as if I had been doing it for a long time.
And one day, it dawned on me. Duterte’s campaign is like open source software: made of contributions from so many people in different areas of expertise towards a common goal. The best example of a very successful open source software project is the Linux operating system.
Conceived in the early 1990s, Linux made its way into server systems, had difficult time penetrating the PC market but lately, it has become ubiquitous after Google built the Android operating system for mobile devices based on Linux.
Linux and other open source software are released to the public including its source code. Any developer can scrutinize the code, learn from it, improve it and possibly get his improvements accepted into future versions. By making the source code public, more eyes can review and study the code and discover defects or bugs.
Linux and FreeBSD (another open source operating system) have started to dominate the market with Android and Chromebook based on Linux and the MacOS based on FreeBSD. They have become so successful that Microsoft, the company that was the “opposite” of the open source software, has started to embrace open source software and have themselves, released some of their development platforms on Linux and open source.
The one thing, among others, that the open source software licenses guarantee, especially if the software uses the GNU Public License, is the freedom to use the software as you like. But you can’t claim to own it. Violate the license and you will get vilified by the open source community.
Contribute to the open source project and thousands and maybe millions of other users will benefit from your contribution.
Duterte’s volunteers are like the horde of seasoned software developers volunteering their time and expertise for a common good: free software. Free to acquire and give, free to use, free to be scrutinized and free to learn from. Some developers create new features, others fix bugs, others improve existing features and others organize the whole flow of development work from around the world. Other contributors write the documentation, create graphics, promote the software, help other people learn to use the software and many more.
However, instead of free software, the common goal of Duterte’s supporters is to give back to the Filipinos many freedoms it has lost in the past decades. Artists come up with designs for campaign materials. Musicians come up with songs, dancers choreograph dance moves, writers come up with blogs, owners of printing shops allowing the use of their equipment for free, photographers and videographers covering his rallies and many more. All done to help convince the Filipino voters to choose Duterte to be the 16th president of the country.
The Filipinos have lost or about to lose their freedom to walk the streets unharmed, their freedom to to scrutinize public information to help ensure effective use of national resources, their freedom to raise the youth free from drugs and other forms of addiction, their freedom from poor government service due to incompetent and corrupt public servants, their freedom to live in a peaceful environment and many other freedoms the normal Filipino citizen has been gradually losing in the past decades. Heck, we do not even have the freedom to enjoy fast and reliable Internet at a price comparable to western countries.
The Duterte supporters will put in the leader who they believe has the will and capability to give back to the Filipinos the many freedoms it has lost or about to lose. They have seen through the facade of traditional politicians who are backed by oligarchs. They will not be fooled again.
However, Duterte is not the long term solution. He will be running the affairs of the country for just six years. The Dutertards like me, and the rest of the Filipino people, will still be responsible for the long term success of the Filipino nation.
A Duterte presidency will just be like a new Linux version. It will be the 16th version of the Philippines. Hopefully, this time, the bugs of this country will get fixed or at least mitigated significantly. Corruption, incompetence of public servants, too much red tape, loopholes in the law, rising drug trade and crime. They are like persistent software bugs that bother you everyday and prevent you from being productive, from living life in freedom. People who keep creating bugs will get their butts kicked until they behave or leave or die if they violently resist arrest.
Just like the open source software community continuously contributing to Linux, the Filipinos need to continue contributing to the progress of the country, doing their part, disciplining themselves, following the law, paying taxes and staying vigilant in case any public servant tries to enrich himself. Some of us will be scrutinizing our systems looking for bugs and inefficiencies.
Lastly, many of us will keep an eye on Duterte and make sure he performs as mandated. Rest assured, we the Dutertards, will also be the ones to make sure that he delivers. Collectively, we have spent millions, if not billions campaigning for him. We will not let Duterte get away with lackluster performance. We will be a demanding horde of contributors.
All these going towards a much improved next version of the Philippines six years from now.
