What Ghalib Would Have Made of Open-Source Software

The puzzle economists can't solve

Why do software programmers at the peak of their skills write superb code and then give it away for free? The free and open-source software (FOSS) movement runs on exactly this behavior: thousands of volunteers writing, testing, and documenting software that anyone on earth can download and use. Economists have produced careful theories about reputation, signaling, and indirect material benefit — but none of them quite explains the core of it.

In a February 2013 op-ed in The Hindu, Rahul De' — then the Hewlett-Packard Chair Professor of Information Systems at IIM Bangalore — proposed an unlikely answer: ask a 19th-century Urdu poet. Read the original here: "Like poetry for software," The Hindu.

Ghalib gave his verses away too

Mirza Ghalib, the great poet of 19th-century Delhi, wrote not for money but for the discerning reader. One of his couplets captures the ethos De' saw mirrored in open source:

Bik jaate hain hum aap mata-e-sukhan ke saath Lekin ayar-e-taba-e-kharidar dekh kar

— "I give my poetry away, and give myself along with it / But first I look for people who can value what I give" (translated by Ralph Russell).

Ghalib lived mostly beyond his means and spent his life hunting for patronage, yet he wrote for perfection of form, not for pay. The open-source programmer, De' argued, is driven by the same urge: to create perfect structure, judged by the most exacting peers imaginable.

Peer review, mushairas, and forking

The parallels run deeper than motivation:

• Relentless peer scrutiny. Ghalib reviewed and critiqued the work of friends and apprentices, marking corrections in the margins, and submitted his own work to harsh judgment. Open-source code lives under the same regime — publicly visible, constantly reviewed, with bug reports and feature requests as the modern margin notes.
• Building on shared foundations. In the Mughal-era mushaira (public poetry recitation), poets would announce a zameen — a common meter and rhyming scheme — and compose variations on it. Gulzar famously adapted Ghalib's Jii dhoondhta hai phir wohi into Dil dhoondhta hai phir wohi for the film Mausam (1975). Open-source developers do the same thing when they fork a project: take the shared foundation, add something new.
• Passion over paycheck. Ghalib was confident of his legacy — "My poetry will win the world's acclaim when I am gone." The open-source creator works in the same spirit: for the pleasure of the craft and the recognition of peers, in amounts that money alone cannot buy.

Why it matters

The point is not that poets and programmers are the same people. It is that the economics of gift-giving in creative work has a long pedigree — and that the people trying to reduce open source to self-interest are missing the oldest motive of all: the desire to make something perfect, and to be known for it.

This is a commentary on Rahul De's op-ed "Like poetry for software" (The Hindu, February 2, 2013). The couplets are quoted briefly with attribution; the argument summarized here is his.