My dad is a car mechanic. One August, when I was back from college, we jacked up my canary '79 Starlet ($600 Blue Book value) and crawled underneath. The manual shift was close to busted and, as my father understood in an effortless way, fixing it involved a long pipe that stretched the length of the car. The details are fuzzy to me now -- I blame my lack of comprehension of physics, engineering, and the mental engine of my dad -- but by the end of the repairs, the car hummed and handled like the 15-year old, mulish jalopy it was. Which is to say it went. Somewhere there are photos.

I should say that retooling cars was never his profession. It was, however, his great passion, and when he grew up in the 1950s, he wasn't alone. In high school, he and his friends would disassemble car engines and rebuild them on a lark. It was a time when young drivers -- at least the male ones -- were expected to know something about the machines they sat behind. I immediately think of my high school's "Auto" class, and how, by the time I left, they had started to ship all the students who took it off to a vocational school in an act of uncontested segregation.

What happened? My dad would say cars got more complicated, and the manufacturers turned their operations into trade secrets. Automobiles became less novel. But people also became more dependent on them, such that the ransom at the hands of repairmen outweighed the risk of home repair. The necessity of the knowledge simply eroded (or was whisked away by AAA).

Shift from cars to software, and the analogy holds -- only the situation is even worse. "Would you buy a car with the hood welded shut?" asks Bob Young, the founder of the free software distribution company Red Hat. But the fact is, millions of us do and without complaint. We don't want to know how to mount a drive, deal with a shell, or install an operating system. We want to plug-in and produce. No surprise, the entire technology industry has capitalized on that eagerness for ignorance: Apple, Windows95, even the idiot-proof sheen of "user-friendliness." But are we losing something in the process? Isn't there something to be gained from difficulty and the struggle to understand?

This is exactly where the Open Source movement has the most to teach us. The coders involved, like the ones we profile here in "The Hard Corps," are in revolt against that laziness and false sense of security. They want to throw up the hood, snake some clamp lights into the body and find out what's leaking (or flatout re-design the car themselves). The success of free software projects like Mozilla, Gnome, Perl jams a wrench into the cycles of obsolescence and escalating returns in the industry. No wonder many companies are rushing to find ways to befriend the free software community: to turn against them is to turn against the best users you could ever hope to have. And the stakes are high. Though free software might not make proprietary code obsolescent, it stands to restore consumer choice and, even better, control. It is a new politics of technology -- a defense of our rights to comprehend our own machines.

For this inaugural "theme issue," we've let the figures in the movement speak for themselves. For a FEED Dialog, we've rounded up Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman, Eric Raymond, author of "The Cathedral and The Bazaar," and Eric Allman, the head of the hybrid Open Source/proprietary software company Sendmail. We've talked to Miguel de Icaza, leader of the Gnome project, and Larry Wall, creator of the Perl programming language. In "The Hard Corp," we profile five programmers involved in open source projects. There is also an essay by Steven Johnson on the politics of Open Source. We've also included two resources for readers, a timeline and a page of links to the best writing we've found on the issue (there's lots).

This is, of course, a work in constant progress, like free software itself. We've created a single Loop discussion for the issue and we'd love your feedback. Feel free to call us on our fuzzy details. This time I'm paying close attention.

-- Austin Bunn