# Can we build a world with open source? | Victor Keegan | The Guardian

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [226]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Web page), 2009-03-05 (publication data), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/mar/05/open-source. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Press coverage of open-source shelter (hexayurt).
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - Guardian (open source) (2009): Guardian piece on the Hexayurt as open-source shelter.
  - Ending Poverty With Open Hardware (2008): Talk: half of all deaths are deaths from poverty, and open technology built household by household can... (suggested by machine)
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (suggested by machine)
  - Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and Maximizing Global Minimalism (2014): Talk at Electromagnetic Field 2014: the Hexayurt as engineering outside the market, for the three billion... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: open source hardware (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Open Source Ecology (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Akvo (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 3 undated); Wired (1 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); jobs (1 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.22 (1.00 is the top), number 345 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): same career work: Hexayurt
  - [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md): same career work: Hexayurt
- On the same works, just before: [95] [Talk outline for Jan 7th in London – Infrastructure for... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/95.md); [94] [Avoiding Capitalism for the Next Four Billion lecture... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/94.md); [96] [The Collapsonomics Practice | The Bucky-Gandhi Design... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/96.md)
- On the same works, just after: [54] [Framing The Collapsonomics Practice | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/54.md); [61] [Ending Poverty With Open Hardware | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/61.md); [16] [Hexayurt Country (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/16.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Can we build a world with open source? | Victor Keegan | The Guardian, document, 2009-03-05, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/mar/05/open-source; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [226], https://guptaoption.com/texts/226.md.

## Passages
[passage 1](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/mar/05/open-source) Open source This article is more than 17 years old Can we build a world with open source? This article is more than 17 years old Victor Keegan Thu 5 Mar 2009 00.01 GMT Share V inay Gupta is a Scottish-Indian engineer who designs low-cost homes for poor parts of the world or disaster zones, and then makes them freely available on the internet so others can do the building. His flagship is the Hexayurt shelter system, which costs around $200 (£142). It uses common building materials, including insulation boards - which, he claims, are a third of the cost of a tent. The business plan is to cut the price of essential goods and services to the point where the poor can afford them. Gupta is just one example of a global movement that offers an alternative to the scandalous tales of banking avarice that have saturated the world's media. We are often told that the best things in life are free, but few have ever tried to build it into a business model. Yet it is curious that while financial capitalism is in global meltdown, a completely different kind of entrepreneurial activity - call it commune-ism - is rising, from an admittedly low base. This is the act of doing things for the common good, for nothing - either from altruistic motives or because you expect to get compensated by using the product of someone else's free endeavours. Until recently, this kind of activity - known generically as "open source" - has been confined to software through such brilliant communal projects as Wikipedia , the Firefox browser (which now has 21.5% of the global market) or the Linux operating system. Interestingly, such products don't appear in the figures for gross domestic product (GDP) - at least, not until they are used in something that can be bought, such as a low-cost Linux computer. It is unrecorded wealth and if the movement grows we will have to look afresh at how we measure the wealth of nations. Open source was given a boost last week when the UK government dropped its hitherto shameful neglect to give an endorsement for public services to use open source rather than proprietary software where it delivers best value for money. Whether this is just an empty gesture to take the wind out of the sails of the Conservatives - who have made capital out of claims that £600m could be saved by using open source in public projects - remains to be seen, but it is a step in the right direction. Open source is on a roll and the interesting thing is that it is now expanding into hardware. The global recession, coinciding with an unprecedented expansion of social networks ought to give it a big boost and turn the new model into a global force. If you fancy an open source mobile phone try Openmoko.com . Want to be part of an open source project building a different kind of car?

[passage 2](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/mar/05/open-source) that it is now expanding into hardware. The global recession, coinciding with an unprecedented expansion of social networks ought to give it a big boost and turn the new model into a global force. If you fancy an open source mobile phone try Openmoko.com . Want to be part of an open source project building a different kind of car? Look at theoscarproject.org. Other interesting initiatives include openfarmtech.org where they are developing open source ecology including building eco-villages or akvo.org, specialising in sanitation. Wired magazine recently reported on the progress of Arduino, the Italian firm that makes a successful open source circuit board. There was a plan for an open source house via the Flickr photo site but there hasn't been much activity recently. Open source hardware doesn't have the same power as software if only because the final product, as opposed to the designs, can't be replicated for no extra cost as software can. It has a different kind of potential as it can use networks to liberate the creative energies of frustrated employees or jobless people all over the world in order to build products people actually want that reflect local realities, including availability of materials. It is a paradigm that fits a networked age in which the actual manufacture of goods is outsourced. If governments of the world are worried about where new products and jobs will come from when the recession eventually ends, then they could do a lot worse than to encourage the building of products by the people for the people. victorkeegan.com Explore more on these topics Open source Engineering Wikipedia comment Share Reuse this content

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End of [226] Can we build a world with open source? | Victor Keegan | The Guardian. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [54](https://guptaoption.com/texts/54.md) Framing The Collapsonomics Practice | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2009); the most closely related, [752](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md) Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.