What Was Project Eva?

I know some people who use GitHub’s Gist feature like a blog. I myself have only written one public Gist in my life. Here it is, first published on May 2, 2017:

https://gist.github.com/tessgadwa/47fedfaa053cb1d8f0b9d0aef82b565f

Project Eva was for a worthy cause — evangelizing open source.

I quote,

“The chief Gnostic error is to believe that the rest of the world can remain in Hell.”

“The world cannot survive half slave and half free.”

If the tone seems a little bombastic, bear in mind that I had recently left Christianity behind. Or to be more accurate, taken a several years hiatus. Considering that I once wrote a book on the topic, that was kind of a big step. It’s not surprising I looked to something else to fill the void.

Five years later, I believe that while FOSS is powerful both as a practice and an ideology, it is not the be-all and end-all of solutions, for three reasons:

  1. Security vulnerabilities.
  2. Decentralized systems tend to propagate and amplify bias.
  3. Difficult to make economically sustainable.

I have written at length about numbers two and three, and experienced number one firsthand. That is not my point today. I am not sure that every system needs to be open source, or that the model translates across disciplines to areas such as engineering or the arts. I am not sure that it doesn’t.

I am also in a different place theologically than I was a few years ago. What strikes me now are the similarities between the communitarian principles and values of FOSS, and those of early Christians. I would love to start a coding organization for people of faith — but it’s going to have to wait until my body recovers. Right now it’s all I can do to work and cook myself meals.

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