In relaunching Punk Planet.com last year, I dove head-first into the Open Source Software Movement–a growing legion of programmers and developers committed to creating shared software free to download and powerful as all hell. It’s a concept cribbed straight out of punk rock. In this day and age of big-budget punk, Open Source Software offers a lot of object lessons in how to do things right (once again).

1. There’s power in numbers. Stop going it alone. Realize that there’s other people out there who can help pick up where you leave off. It’s hard to take on a project (I.E. big as running a show space or a zine by yourself.) Ask for help.

2. Stop hoarding your knowledge. If you’ve learned something, share what you know with those who don’t. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time someone wants to start a record label. Remember the Simple Machines flyer about starting a label? We need that back again.

3. Don’t be afraid of updates. With how people listen to music undergoing a massive reinvention, I find more and more people in the underground clinging to the physicality of records and CDs. They’re beautiful, yes, but they’re going away. Historically, we’re at about “ways of listening to music v6.3.” Don’t be afraid of 7.0.

4. Share and share alike. This leads from #2, but seems like it’s worth its own line. Sharing knowledge is a two-way street. Once you’ve figure something out, it’s on you to pass that information along.

5. Communities are powerful. Maybe this seems obvious in this day and age of 5000–name “friends” lists on MySpace. but those aren’t real communities, they’re just lists. Why not start forming communities of label owners? Of touring bands’? This can be localized, or electronic. Either way, they’re communities that would learn and influence each other (GigPosters.com is a perfect example of a working community like this).

6. Be agile. Part of why Open Source has emerged as something other than a hobby for braniacs is because the lumbering giants of software–the Microsofts etc–can no longer adapt quickly enough to new things. Remember when punk was able to adapt so quickly that it was basically able to create new things from whole cloth? Let’s go back to that.

7. Don’t worry about scaling until you need to. We’ve reached a point in the underground where seemingly every band burdens themselves with a publicist, a booking agent, a label and a crate’s worth of press releases before they’ve even played a show. That’s a burden on everyone involved. Don’t worry about having the trappings of larger bands until you become those larger bands (and even then, question whether you need them anyway).

8. There’s room for everyone. Getting stuck in a rut of concepts and tightly hewn-genres is never good for any culture–just look at the hippies, folks. Allowing new ideas in is the only way to continue to grow punk rock. New ideas-new music, new art, new writing, new whatever–beget new ideas. Closing yourself off from them promises that you’lI be stuck in a singular moment in time forever.

9. Borrowing ideas is different than stealing them. Ideas, when put out there, are meant to be borrowed, rewritten, turned on their head, improved upon, and re-injected into the community for further re-use. Punk Planet was a perfect example of taking a pre-existing template and turning it into something new, and something others can grow their ideas from.

10. Money isn’t everything. Tattoo that one backwards on your forehead so you see it every morning when you’re brushing your teeth. Sure. projects cost money, and everyone would love to not work their shit job, but we’re long past those requirements when record labels buy Hummers to do their promotion and bands are signed solely for their income potential.

This piece was originally published in Punk Planet#77.