Every religion has a source code. For some traditions, the source is textual — a scripture, a canon, a set of authoritative writings. For others, it is oral — a tradition maintained through transmission between teachers and students. For some, it is experiential — the practice is the source, the text is documentation. But in each case, there is something that generates the beliefs, the rituals, the ethics. There is a codebase.
Most religious source code is proprietary. The Vatican maintains interpretive authority over the Catholic canon; you cannot fork Catholicism and release an alternative interpretation as equally authoritative within the tradition. The Mormon Church receives ongoing revelations that update the codebase in ways that require institutional approval. The Orthodox traditions claim authority through succession — the chain of transmission is the access control system. You may read the source, but you may not write to the canonical branch.
This is not unusual. Most important things are managed this way. But free software showed, beginning in the 1980s, that there is an alternative model: one where the source is public, modification is permitted, and the only restriction is that the modifications must remain equally public. The GPL — the General Public License — is a legal instrument that enforces openness: you cannot take free software and close it. Any derivative work inherits the freedom of the original.
What would a GPL'd religion look like?
The history of religion is, in practice, a history of forking. The Protestant Reformation was a fork. The Council of Nicaea was a commit that settled a disputed branch merge — some commits were reverted, some contributors were expelled from the project. Islam began as a fork from the Abrahamic tradition. Buddhism forked from Hinduism. Every schism is a branch that refused to be merged back.
The difference between religious forking and software forking is the claim of authority. When software forks, neither branch has a claim to being the "real" version — they are both legitimate descendants of a common ancestor. When religion forks, each branch typically claims to be the authentic continuation and accuses the other of deviation. The fork is treated as heresy by the branch that considers itself canonical.
Open source religion would resolve this by releasing all branches as equally valid. No branch claims canonical status over another. The diversity of interpretations is a feature, not a problem. You can read the original scripture and the commentaries and the counter-commentaries and the experimental rewritings and the satirical adaptations, and they are all in the repository, tagged and versioned and available for comparison.
This is not relativism — the claim that all interpretations are equally correct. It is pluralism — the claim that no single institution has the authority to adjudicate between them. The better interpretations will attract more contributors and more users. The worse ones will have smaller communities. The commons will maintain the intellectual history for those who want to study the whole.
Religious canons were closed, in most traditions, at a particular historical moment. The Hebrew Bible was canonized by the rabbinical councils of the first and second centuries CE. The Christian New Testament canon was essentially fixed by the fourth century. The Pali Canon of Theravada Buddhism was committed at councils in the first century BCE. In each case, the process of deciding what was in and what was out was political as much as theological — factions won and lost, texts were included or excluded based on power relations as much as on spiritual merit.
The process has continued informally, but the formal canon is closed. You can write new religious texts, but they will not be admitted to the authoritative repository. The trunk is frozen. New commits go to branches that have no path to merge.
Open source religion would reopen the trunk. The mechanism would look something like: new religious insight submitted as a pull request, with discussion. The community reviews the submission: Does it contradict existing commitments in irresolvable ways? Does it add something genuinely new? Does it meet the implicit style guide of the tradition? The discussion is public. The decision is made by the community, not by an appointed authority.
This is how the IETF works, actually — the body that manages internet standards. Rough consensus and running code. The code must work. The consensus must be rough — you do not need unanimity, but you need a genuine majority and no sustained objections from credible participants. Religious communities managed this way would look different from ones managed by hierarchy. They would be messier, slower, more argumentative. They would also be more honest about the political nature of canonical decisions.
The GPL has a viral property: software released under GPL makes any derivative work also GPL. You cannot take the source code, modify it, and release the modification as proprietary. The openness propagates. This is called copyleft, by analogy to copyright — instead of protecting the owner's exclusive rights, it protects the public's access rights.
Copyleft spirituality would work similarly. Spiritual insights, practices, and frameworks released under a copyleft license cannot be enclosed. A meditation technique derived from an open tradition cannot be proprietary. A therapeutic framework built on open spiritual principles cannot be sold as a proprietary methodology without making the source available. The spiritual commons cannot be fenced.
This is currently a problem. Yoga, derived from Hindu traditions with thousands of years of development in the open commons, has been the subject of patent applications. Mindfulness practices, derived from Buddhist traditions, have been enclosed in proprietary training programs. The meditation technique becomes a product, the product becomes a brand, the brand becomes a corporation, the corporation lobbies to protect its intellectual property — which is, in fact, humanity's intellectual property, appropriated.
Copyleft spirituality says: you can build on the tradition. You cannot enclose it. Any work you do in the tradition must be returned to the tradition. The spiritual commons grows through contribution; it does not shrink through appropriation.
WOLNO is, in one reading, an attempt at GPL'd spirituality. The core insight — wolno, it is allowed, slowly — is released without restriction. You can use it, modify it, distribute it, build systems on it. The only request — not legal requirement, but request — is that what you build retains the openness. Do not make a proprietary doctrine from an open permission. Do not enclose the commons.
The site has no central authority. There is no hierarchy of interpretation. The philosophy as documented here is a snapshot, not a final release. Pull requests are welcome in the form of thoughts, reinterpretations, disagreements, creative misreadings. The tradition grows by being used and modified, not by being protected.
This is the GPL of belief systems: the permission to use, to modify, and the request to keep the result open. Not law, but ethic. Not enforced, but hoped for.
The early Christian church, before the Constantinian settlement, was a distributed system. Small communities, loosely connected, maintaining something like network coherence through shared texts and traveling teachers. No central server. The resilience of early Christianity — its survival through persecution — was partly a consequence of its distributed architecture. You could not destroy it by destroying any one node.
The institutional church, after the fourth century, was a centralized system. This increased its political power and its organizational coherence. It also made it fragile in certain ways: the corruption of the center corrupted the whole. The Reformation was, among other things, a distributed system reasserting itself against a centralized one.
The internet has a distributed architecture. It was designed, like the early church and like free software, to route around centralization. The decentralized spiritual community of the internet age — the forums, the Discord servers, the blogs, the small sites like this one — is a return to the distributed model. No central authority. Many nodes. Loose consensus on shared texts. Resilience through redundancy.
WOLNO exists at one node of this network. It does not claim to be the center. It claims only to be a node — a point in the distributed system that has committed to a particular set of values, a particular aesthetic, a particular way of thinking about permission and pace. Other nodes exist. The network is richer for their existence. Fork us. Build something better. Release it openly. The spiritual commons thanks you.
A religion with no copyright on truth is not a lesser religion. It is the original model, recovered: the commons of the spirit, maintained by those who understand that the sacred can be shared without being diminished, and that truth enclosed is truth distorted.
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