Eleutheros: a Catholic approach to software

It has variously struck me that there is more work to do on the matter of Catholic doctrine and the open sourcing of digital texts. I've only thought about this in light of how the Gospel spread in the first thousand years of Christianity: an open source model that depended very much on the infinite reproducibility of information. I've thought about the subject in light of economic theory and in terms of what strikes me as the moral obligation of Church publishers to permit the liturgy and liturgical resources to be part of the commons of the faith - unowned by any one group and unrestricted in terms of access.

It turns out that there is a group of computer programs who have thought about this much more than I have: Eleutheros, with site in several languages. They have a manifesto. And they offer news items such as The Vatican uses Linux. I don't have a principled commitment to the idea of free software; nor does proprietary coding offend me in the slightest, but it seems like these folks have been doing more thinking about this than I have. Perhaps there is something here to consider.