Imagine a city where the roads, the plumbing, and the electric grid were all built for free by volunteers—and they work better than anything a corporation could sell you.

In this episode of The Upsiders, we go "under the hood" of the digital world to explore Open Source. We often think of big tech as a series of skyscrapers owned by Apple or Google, but the foundation they sit on is a $20-trillion infrastructure built on a "gift economy."

What we’re diving into:

1. The Blueprint for Civilization: We look at the Open Source Ecology Project and how 50 industrial machines are being designed for free to help anyone, anywhere, build a sustainable society.
2. Medicine for the People: How open-source hardware, like the MIT Emergency Ventilator, can bypass corporate gatekeepers to save lives in low-resource clinics across the globe.
3. The Linux Miracle: Meet our Unsung Hero, Linus Torvalds, the college student who created the "master control program" that now runs 90% of the internet’s cloud servers.

We also break down the Word of the Week: Kernel, and hit our Reality Check to bust the myth that open source is just for "hobbyists." It turns out, the most secure and powerful code in the world isn't a trade secret—it’s open for everyone to see.

Show Notes:

Open Source Initiative

How open-source is shaping the future of innovation | Dev Ops Online

Open Source Ecology Project

Machines: Global Village Construction Set | Open Source Ecology Project

MIT Emergency Ventilator Project | MIT

Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection | John Green

Open-Source Hardware May Address the Shortage in Medical Devices for Patients with Low-Income and Chronic Respiratory Diseases in Low-Resource Countries | National Library of Medicine

Once a leading killer, tuberculosis is now rare in rich countries — here’s how it happened | Our World in Data

OER Commons

Made by educators, for educators | Moodle