Think of Wikipedia, if someone described that concept to me before it had been proven I would never have thought it could be what it is.

Programming and building apps isn’t a completely mechanical process. If that were true the only OS we would have would be Windows. There is a huge amount of interpretational thought in the development of functionality and the overall usability of a product . Not only that but there are different ways to reach a functioning point, some of them infinitely more elegant than others.

Writing movies isn’t such a mystical art, especially when genres and other such established structures are involved.

There is information in terms of characters, scenes which can be derived from possible actions and relationships between those characters (also with respect to themes etc), functionality in terms of the believability of their actions, their entertainment value, and the elegance with which the overall picture is structured.

One of the greatest skills for a writer to learn is anticipating what will be enjoyed by an audience, which also comes from their own sense of enjoyment in what they are writing and how that connects with other people.

Often I think people are much more inclined to nurture bad ideas in private, bringing things into a collaborative environment with other critical enthusiasts could actually help speed up the process of weeding out lame ideas..

People are also often much better at picking from other peoples ideas and developing them than with their own where they might not have such an easy sense of objectivity.

The main motivation for trying to apply the principles of open source to artistic process is the idea that the motivation behind open source is the pursuit of quality ahead of intellectual property, individual notions of authorship, and commerce.. this is really invaluable I think..

Of course there are some kinds of movies that would never arise from this sort of process, but I still believe it could be a possible way of working that could yield good results..

And why is that? Well because software engineering is, to a large extent, an OBJECTIVE process. A bit of code works or it doesn’t. A contribution from a participant is either functional or buggy. A submitted patch either fixes a bug or it doesn’t. The real value in open source is usually that your users are also helping to fix specific problems in your software.

Creating an artistic work is a subjective exercise. Taking a script as an example. One person’s problem with the script could be considered the best bit by another and there is no way of objectively selecting between them.

People have been trying to do collaborative fiction for ages and none of it, that I’ve seen, is very interesting.

On the other hand, individuals mashing things up and performing that kind of activity is perfectly feasible. Which I think is why it’s already flourished.