F**k you, this is Versailles.

After spending nearly a week in the lightly controlled anarchy of an open source conference, I indulged myself in a day trip to Versailles. Having done the Liberace-esque excess of the palace already, I chose to see that gardens instead.

Even after two previous visits, the scale of Versailles is breathtaking. As big as you remember it, it’s bigger. It could fit all of Google, several Burning Man festivals, a few South-by-Southwests, CES, and still have room enough left over for the entire Washington DC mall.

Versailles is about empire, period. There is no shame, no apology, no holding back. The vast façade puts the manly trappings of military might – helmets, shields, and arms – prominently above the Muses and every other symbol of knowledge and science. You won’t get any bourgeois white guilt for all this money and power: this isn’t the Gates Foundation giving back for the monopoly that was Microsoft. It’s just plain fuck-you power.

The gardens are a planned display of man’s power over nature. Rivers were diverted to feed the fountains. The Orangerie mocks the seasons by being home to hundreds of citrus trees and palms which would never survive the Parisian winter. The lakes and monumental axes defy the very geography to with their imposed man-made geometry.

There’s no fussy channeling of energy to Versailles: the long lines of sight are the antithesis of feng shui. Rather than co-opt nature for the natural-but-shaggy look of an English garden, Versailles' designers opted for the 20-foot hedges that never end, for giant allées, and the frou-frou of topiary.

Versailles is a magnificent gallery of knockoffs, too. If you can’t pillage the Vatican for its collection of Roman masterpieces, you can always commission your best artists to copy them. I found carbon copies of the Laocoön, the Dying Gaul, and a stiff rendition of every Greco-Roman deity you could think of.

I couldn’t possibly have found a world that contrasted more with the do-ocracy of the open source world, where your stature depends on the value of your contributions. You don’t have a single master plan for the technology world; there’s a gradual evolution instead. At its unplanned worst it resembles the favelas of Rio; at its best, it’s the gracious boulevards of Paris.

The wealthiest man of our times is no match for Louis XIV. With all his power, Bill Gates couldn’t build a Versailles, nor would our world tolerate it. As we move from aristocracy to democracy to meritocracy, the sources of power become more subtle and complex.

Both the worlds of Versailles and open source come at a price. For Versailles, it was the exploitation of the commoner, as every bit of pomp was paid by tribute exacted on the peasants and the bourgeoisie.

The cost of open source is the art of software. Production values and design are irrelevant to building an open source core or a framework; they’re costly layers of abstraction that lie on top. It’s no accident that the creative community isn’t flocking to Linux; beautiful design requires funding, and that doesn’t just happen by itself. There's no Photoshop for Linux, it’s proprietary.

It’s well-known fact that the best designs in tech world comes consistently from Apple, where the master plan is dictated by the roi soleil, Steve Jobs.

In the open source world, however, it’s quite unlikely that the community would ever welcome a do-ocrat to be his counterpart.

Can the open world ever produce something as beautiful as Versailles – or is it doomed to have the aesthetics of the Gimp?