A funny thing happened when I was in Berlin two weekends ago. I was walking down the street that my AirBnB apartment was on when I heard someone say “Jeremy Keith?” It turned out it was Andre Jay Meissner, one of the founders of the excellent Open Device Lab website. We had emailed but never met before. Small world!
The Twitter account for the open device lab in Nuremburg pointed out that it’s been one year since I wrote a blog post about the open device lab I set up:
Much as I’d love to take credit for the idea of an open device lab, it simply isn’t true. Jason and Lyza had been working on setting up the open device lab in Portland for quite a while when I flung open the doors of the Clearleft test lab. But I will take credit for the “Ah, fuck it!” attitude that I introduced to the idea of sharing test devices with the community. Partly because I had seen how long it was taking the Portland device lab to get off the ground while they did everything by the book, I decided to just wait for the worst to happen instead of planning for it:
There are potential pitfalls to opening up a testing suite like this. What about the insurance? What about theft? What about breakage? But the thing about potential pitfalls is that they’re just that: potential. I’m treating all of them as YAGNI issues. I’ll address any problems if and when they occur rather than planning for worst-case scenarios.
It proved to be a great policy. So far, nothing has gone wrong. And it also served as an example to other people thinking about opening up device labs at their companies: “don’t sweat it; I didn’t!”
But as far as anniversaries go, the one-year birthday of the Clearleft device lab is not the most significant event of April 30th. Today is the twentieth anniversary of the publication of one of the most important documents in technological history: the document that officially put the World Wide Web into the public domain.
Open device labs are a small, small part of working on the web but I like to think that they represent the same kind of spirit of openness and sharing that Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues demonstrated at CERN:
I really, really like the way that communal device labs have taken off. It’s like a physical manifestation of the sharing and openness that has imbued the practice of web design and development right from the start. View source, mailing lists, blog posts, Stack Overflow, and Github are made of bits; device labs are made of atoms. But they are all open for you to use and contribute to.
At UX London I had dinner with a Swiss entrepreneur who was showing off his proprietary native app on his phone and proudly declaring that he had been granted a patent. He seemed like a nice chap, but his attitude kind of made my skin crawl. It seemed so antithetical to the spirit of sharing and openness that I’m used to from the web.
James Gleick once described the web as the patent that never was:
Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web and the Web browser — that is, the world as we now know it — pretty much single-handedly, starting in about 1989, when he was working as a software engineer at CERN, the particle-physics laboratory in Geneva. He didn’t patent it, or any part of it. On the contrary, he has labored tirelessly to keep cyberspace open and nonproprietary.
We are all reaping the benefits of Sir Tim’s kindness and generosity.