The
Politics of Survival and Prestige: Hacker Identity and the Global
Production of an Operating System
E. Gabriella Coleman
"First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win."
The open source/free software movement, in which software and its source code1 is legally made available for free over the Internet is a relatively new social movement that consists of a global and decentralized cooperation of volunteer labor amongst thousands of programmers to produce, disseminate, and upgrade various large and small-scale software systems and applications. It has also produced a vocal group of followers who have actively supported and defined open source production and philosophy through print and web journals and articles, the formation of and participation in local, national, and international conferences and user groups, and through mass-media interviews and coverage.2 Guiding the distribution and legal definitions of many free software programs is a general public license, the GPL (also known as the copyleft), that legally protects open source software from becoming proprietary by making the right to copy an inherent individual right as opposed to a private intellectual property right. There are a number of popular and widely used open source applications such as Apache, the most popular World Wide Web server, and Perl, a popular programming language. However, it is the Linux operating system currently famous for its speed, reliability, and most especially its status as "the sole non-Microsoft operating system that is expanding its market share" (Mann 1999:38) that has become the premier icon for the open source movement.
According to Eric Raymond, one of the key figures in the Linux community, the above mentioned Gandhi quote is cherished by "Linux Hackers" (Mann 1999:42). This politically charged quote, in which "you" stands for hackers and "they" stands for Microsoft, posits the open source movement as having the potential to dismantle the economic domination of the Microsoft corporation. As the quote exemplifies, this movement, composed largely of hackers, is much more than the apolitical production of technology whose aim is to develop more powerful and efficient software. In the last fifteen years, the free software and open source movement has defined itself as providing an alternative and superior style and vision of technological production, ownership, value, circulation, and use that is justified through a vast number of moral and functional arguments. This style of non-commodifed knowledge production appears unique in the face of a global economic system in which "knowledge itself becomes a key commodity to be produced and sold to the highest bidder, under conditions that are themselves organized in a competitive basis" (Harvey 1990:160). Patented software, practically non-existent in the computer science field before the late 1970's and early 1980's, has increasingly become ubiquitous in the field and industry in the last fifteen years providing the basis for tremendous wealth for certain companies like Microsoft.3 Despite the fact that some facets of open source production, such as the legal access to source code, do challenge the increasingly normative character of intellectual property regimes, the meanings, aims, visions, and aspirations of the open source community are difficult to pin down. Unlike the initial quote, which posits a unitary vision and goal for Linux hackers, closer inspection of the movement reveals a cacophony of voices and political positions: anarchic ideals of freedom, "tribal" gift-economy rhetoric, revolution, Star Wars imagery, web manifestos, evangelization to the corporate sector, the downfall of the "Evil Empire" (a.k.a. Microsoft), grass roots revolution, consumer choice and rights, community good, true market competition, DIY (Do it Yourself) culture, science as a public good, hacker cultural acceptance, functional superiority, and anti-Communist rhetoric are but a number of the terms, images, and visions promulgated by and attached to the open source community.
Given the polyvalent and diverse identities and meanings emanating from and attached to the free software/open source community, it is best to analyze the community as a social movement by describing and interrogating the processes of production, representation, meaning production, and debate as opposed to positing a homogenous and unified set of practices and ideas. More specifically, this paper examines the open source movement as a means to ask how "hackers," who have historically been a self-identified and self-reflexive community, respond as agents and collectivities to such economic and social conditions as increased commercialization, intellectual property regimes, and the prospect of corporate success that are seen as both potentially threatening to the integrity of a hacker culture but are also highly desirable. I argue that the free software movement has become a locus of debate through which the nature of hacker identity is defined, represented, and contested. 4 In this paper, I use hackers generally to mean those who share a love of programming, an activity considered to fuse artistic creation and expression with technological innovation.
Drawing from Karl Mannheim's theories on ideology and utopia (1936), this paper will interrogate the ideological and utopian positions of the open source community as a means to locate some of the heterogeneous elements and the articulations of contestation within the movement. According to Mannheim, the concept of utopia is applicable to those forms of thought and ideas that attempt to transform and replace some aspect(s) of the existing social order while ideological forces uphold the status quo even while trying to introduce change within the social order. More specifically, I will argue that the differences and debates between the ideological and utopian positions within the movement speak to and reflect the struggle to define and represent the values, practices, and spirit of a hacker sub-culture.
In relation to the open source community, the utopian position is best represented by the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which seeks to carve out a social space for the production, circulation, and use of knowledge independent of the logic of capital. The FSF has a moral and philosophical vision based on freedom for producers and users to develop, use, and circulate knowledge that challenges existing legal and cultural structures of intellectual property rights. This philosophy is also based on the communitarian values and practices of sharing historically viewed as emanating from a hacker sub-culture (Levy 1984). Furthermore, the FSF not only draws upon communitarian values but seeks to promulgate them as they were seen to be declining in use and importance among hackers themsleves. On the other hand, the ideological position of the movement is best represented by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), which has largely discarded the language of freedom and individual rights in order to promote open source production and philosophy as a revolutionary and potentially very profitable business model, especially for Fortune 500 technology companies. Open source production and philosophy is not meant to challenge any fundamental aspect of the existing economic order but to integrate itself within it. Typical of the ideological strain of the open source community is the rhetoric of the profit-making capabilities of technology: "Our guess is that Linux and open-source software related companies are and will be the hot investment through the end of the millennium" (Dibona et al. 1999:14). Despite this line of reasoning, the proponents of open source as a business model still draw upon utopian imagery and language in which the good of the community is the central image, although the "good" and "community" are usually ambiguous and ill-defined categories. As I will elaborate, this position is not just advocating a link between hacker culture as-it-is and the larger economic sphere, but is an active attempt to re-define and re-represent hacker culture as acceptable and useful in the hopes to bring "hackererdom" from the "ghetto" into mainstream culture (Raymond 1999a).
Although Mannheim's model of ideology and utopia is a useful starting point for comprehending the articulations of differences within the free software community, it is insufficient for understanding how utopian and ideological elements are constituted in practice, the relationship between them, and how power dynamics might shape them. The ideological and utopian positions will not be treated as independent and static dimensions but as dynamic positions that are produced through practice, labor, and struggle by human agents. My solution to this limitation is to delineate how the ideological and utopian elements of the open source community currently exist in a dialogical relationship with each other, a relationship that propels-often in contradictory and tense ways-the articulation of meaning and purpose within the community and between the community and the wider social order. My use of dialogics in this analysis derives from Michael Bakhtin's theories on the dialogical nature of language in which the drive and articulation of meaning is understood as responsive, never finalized, and highly contested (1981, 1986). Essential to Bakhtin's theory of dialogics is that meaning emerges through communicative action and discourse: "After all, our thought itself-philosophical, scientific, and artistic-is born and shaped in the process of interaction and struggle with others' thought, and this cannot but be reflected in the forms that verbally express our thought as well" (1986: 92). The on going struggle to define the meaning of hacker ethics and identity occurs largely though dialogue, debate, and discursive practice among the community of hackers through various media such as articles, web manifestos, open letters to the community, chat groups, and legal apparatuses. Nonetheless, although discursive social interactions are pivotal for the constitution and creation of identity, the actual practices of production are equally as important in the politics of identity formation.
A dialogical account brings into sharp focus the struggles of cultural representation between the ideological and utopian perspectives and how they are articulated and represented beyond the members of the open source community, especially through the media. However, the ideological and utopian positions do not necessarily stand or interact on equal footing; the ideological dimensions are gaining ground, acceptance, and support within the corporate sector, the mass media, and among many (although far from all) hackers. Richard Stallman, the founder of the FSF, recently remarked that he is afraid he is being "written out of history" (Perens 1999: 174), which reflects his acute awareness that his vision is becoming marginalized. It is increasingly clear that this style of production is being appropriated by the industry, making it appear as a form of knowledge production that is a "revolutionary transformation, a sort of restructuring from within, but set by the logic of capital" (Harvey 1990:9). However, in this case, employing a dialectical explanation, in which a dominant existing structure determines the nature or outcome of all economic phenomena, would be misleading for a number of reasons. As this paper will exemplify, the free software/open source style of production and legal codes were not dialectically determined by the "structures or logic of capitalism" even if aspects of open source production are being aligned with coprorate interests and influence. Instead, the initial emergence of free software production arose from a complex interplay between a conscious dialogical reaction against the logic of intellectual property rights, the potentials of technology, the desire to preserve the values thought to historically compose hacker culture, and a good deal of contingentcy and accident. Neither can we treat the entry of open source production and discourse into the corporate sector as an unconstested, smooth, and total process set nor determined by the structures of capitalism. The relationship between open source production and the computer industry is a complex one that is best understood from "necessities and contingencies of form and order that are made, unmade, and remade dialogically in social, historical processes that cannot be finally captured in any larger structure" (Kelly and Kaplan 1994:128).
A dialogical account of the utopian and ideological dimensions in the open source community and the movement's relationship to the wider socio-economic context will illuminate the social processes that underlie and make the conscious and self-reflexive creation of collective identities of groups such as hackers, especially when faced with increased commercialization, intellectual property regimes, and the prospect of corporate success. As the ideological position actively embraces a free market ideology, there are countervailing positions within the movement that are actively responding and resisting this course of action through avenues of heated debate and dialogue. Being that a dialogical engagement calls for an understanding of the relational quality between and within particular and fundamentally social and historized forms, I now turn to a detailed history and description of the institutions and practices of free software production. After presenting this history, the second half of the essay will move into a theoretical analysis that will situate the production of the ideological and utopian positions within a wider socio-economic context.
The self-consciously organized movement of free software production and dissemination began in 1983 by Richard Stallman who conceived of the Free Software Foundation and the GNU5 project while working at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. Stallman's goal was to create a free operating system similar to Unix, a type of OS popular with programmers and technical people. In 1984, he resigned from the MIT lab (in order prevent MIT from claiming any proprietary rights over his work) to begin developing free software. He formed the FSF in reaction to the commercialization of his own software products (as well as the commercialization of software in general) and what he perceived as the breakdown of the collaborative atmosphere that had traditionally characterized the culture of hackers: "The GNU project was conceived in 1983 as a way of bringing back the cooperative spirit that prevailed in the computing projects in the earlier days-to make cooperation possible once again by removing the obstacles to cooperation imposed by the owners of proprietary software" (Free Software Foundation: 1998). In particular, he felt that the "community of cooperating hackers" (Stallman 1999a: 55) was broken by the increasing number who left the universities to work in corporations and the propietary nature of software that made sharing of information illegal (1999a: 53-54). Along with the foundation, Stallman created a legal document, the GNU General Public License (GPL), 6 which is a copyright but one that inverts our traditional and commonsense notions of the function and nature of legal copyrights. Its other common name, "copyleft," a linguistic reversal/inversion of copyright, explicitly challenges the notion that a copyright is the sole and natural way to license a product. The GPL was created in order to "make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive the source code or can get it if you want, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and you know that you can do these things" (GNU General Public License 1998). According to Stallman, "the central idea of copyleft is that we give everyone the permission to run the program, copy the program, modify the program, and distribute modified versions-but not permission to add a restriction of their own" (Stallman 1999a: 59). Section 2B of the GPL affirms the ideal of freedom to copy and modify the source code of a program and also contains a "restriction" clause that prevents the creation of other restrictions:
You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work?. provided that you also meet all of these conditions: You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or is derived in part from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License. [FSF/GNU General Public License 1998]
In essence, this clause restricts the application of current copyright laws to copylefted programs.
The FSF, primarily through Richard Stallman, promoted an explicit moral justification of free software based primarily on anarchic notions of freedom.7 In the preamble to the GNU General Public License, as well as in most other GNU documents, it is stated that "When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom not price. (Think of 'free speech' not 'free beer')" (FSF/GNU General Public License 1998). At the heart of this argument is that freedom should guide the production and use of software. It encompasses the following three freedoms: "The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs. The freedom to redistribute copies so you can share with your neighbor. The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits" (FSF/What Is Free Software 1996). The argument is that all citizens of a society should be able to "read, fix, adapt, and improve, not just operate" (Stallman 1994) the products and information they use or buy. This morally-charged notion of freedom challenges the idea that one person (much less a corporation) has the intellectual right of ownership over software creation-or the knowledge that composes software-especially in that "control over the use of one's ideas really constitutes control over other people's lives" (FSF/GNU Manifesto 1985).
The Free Software Foundation first focused its efforts on the development of some components of an operating system (OS). Concurrently, but completely independent of the FSF Foundation, a lone Finnish programmer-student, Linus Torvalds, began in 1991 developing an OS kernel, which can be thought of as the liaison between software and the hardware of a computer,8 after being unsatisfied with the performance of Minix, a version of the Unix OS that runs on IBM compatible personal computers (PC's). After he had a very basic kernel running, Torvalds released the source code on an Internet newsgroup to get feedback and allow other programmers to "play" with it. Torvalds had no intention of initiating a global project aimed at developing a fully operational and powerful OS. Nonetheless, when he released the source code, the continued development of the kernel unintentionally switched from being the work and effort of a sole individual to a collective global effort and project: "Anybody anywhere in the Net could obtain the basic Linux files. Email enabled them to comment and offer improvements, while Usenet [Internet newsgroups] provided a forum for discussion. Beginning as the product of one mind, Linux was turning into a tapestry, a movement of like-minded hackers"(Moody 1997: 154). However, a kernel is useless without tools and components. Fortunately, the FSF GNU project existed and had already written many components for an OS, although they had not developed a fully operational kernel. Since the GNU software was free and included source code, the tools and applications were easy to "port" to Linux. The next move that united Linux to the Free Software Foundation was licensing Linux kernel under the GPL, a licensing arrangement still currently in use. In March 1994, an official version of this OS, Linux 1.0, was released: "a complete, world-class operating system with all the trimmings, the first to be developed entirely via the Net" (Stutz 1998:2). Although the operating system is most often referred to simply as Linux, in reality the OS is a combination of the Linux kernel and many other GNU tools and applications and is hence, in reality Linux/GNU. Stallman is currently advocating for switching the current name to Linux/GNU and there are various voting polls being undertaken on the Internet to decide the name.
Although Linux is a fully-operational and powerful OS, it is still an evolving and unfinished product in that thousands of programmers from around the world are currently modifying and improving the system. Since most of the developers who contribute to the current development of Linux are also Linux users, they are both the developers and consumers of the same product. If someone changes the code of the Linux kernel to add a feature, fix a bug,9 or modifies the code so that Linux can run some other application, the modified code can be sent directly to Torvalds or the maintainer of the modified module. The changes, if deemed appropriate and worthwhile, are usually incorporated into the source code and eventually re-released in a new version of Linux.10 The high rate of release for Linux is simply unheard of in commercial software where new releases come months (if not years) apart. Since Windows 95 was released late in 1995, there have been two bug-fix updates: SR1 and SR2. Windows 98 was released in mid-1998. Thus, over the span of almost three years, Microsoft will have made two minor releases, and two major releases of their most popular OS. In the same time period, there have been hundreds of minor releases and about ten major releases of the Linux kernel.
Since a kernel is the intermediary between hardware and software, a large portion of a kernel consists of hardware device drivers. Most of the developers currently working on the kernel are developing device drivers, which are programs that control a piece of hardware with software. For example, a video card device driver allows the programmer to draw on the screen while a modem device driver allows programs to control the modem which allows for Internet connections. All proprietary hardware devices are built to be Microsoft Windows compatible and will either supply Microsoft with a device driver for their device or include the device driver software with their hardware. Since virtually no hardware manufactures write Linux device drivers, volunteers create them under the GPL and an incredible number of device drivers have been produced. For other non-Microsoft OS's, like Sun Solaris x86 and BeOS, it is a real challenge to support all the avaliable hardware since to do so would mean writing device drivers for all of them. They do not have the legions of programmers to write the [many] drivers and cannot use the Linux drivers without adhering to the GPL, which would require them to release their changes and thus lose their intellectual property rights. Linux is a unique product not only because it is free and open source but also because it has more hardware support than any of the alternative operating systems, made possible by the volunteer labor of thousands of programmers.11
Linux use is growing at a phenomenal rate. In 1992 there were an estimated one hundred users whereas current estimates range from three million upwards to ten million.12 Since the source code is available to be modified, it "has allowed hundreds of thousands of users to employ Linux on perhaps tens of thousands of hardware configurations" (Moody 1997:155), which is another reason for its growing popularity. Another demographic feature of its growth is that it has spread tremendously in countries that are "just getting wired" (1997:124) such as South Africa, Cuba, Russia, Pakistan, Bolivia, and the Philippines because it is free and runs on older computers.
Despite this growth, Linux is not very popular among many individual PC computer users because of its relative obscurity, and if known, for its reputation for technicality and user-unfriendliness. Unlike Windows, Linux is based on a command-line interface (like DOS), foreign to most common PC users. However, there are a number of Linux-based projects aimed at providing a intuitive graphical interface that runs on top of Linux in order to popularize and spread the use of Linux-based operating systems for PC users. One such project is GNOME,13 which was initiated by Miguel de Icaza, a young Mexican computer-network administrator at the Institute of Nuclear Sciences at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. With the help of one hundred and fifty volunteers located all over the world, Icaza is leading the development of a logical and intuitive graphical interface that has already seen many development releases and released version 1.0 in late February. Like Linux kernel development and organization, GNOME developers maintain a detailed web site that contains news information, mailing lists, FAQ, documentation, guidelines, and a statement of purpose. GNOME actively supports GNU/FSF guidelines and principles and all their work has been licensed under the GPL.
The most famous non-commercial distributor of Linux is Debian, an Internet organization that provides the Debian OS based on the Linux kernel and is also explicitly committed to the FSF philosophy.14 Most of the tools that fill out their operating system comes from GNU, and all the software they provide is free and the source code is avaliable: "Debian comes with over 1500 packages (precomplied software bundled up in a nice format for easy installation on your machine)-all of it free" (Debian n.d.). The volunteers, which range from 200-300 developers, provide supplemental information, weekly news, and non-commercial support through mailing lists and their web site. Although non-commercial, their technical support is well known for its reliability and speed.
Organizations with differing, sometimes competitive, ideals than the FSF have recently been formed, such as the Open Source Initiative, that have continued to spread and promote the development and use of open source software, although with a distinct and new message.15 Unlike the Free Software Foundation, the Open Source Initiative was conceived as an organization that would formally market the use of open source products, and open source style of production to large technology corporations. One of their main strategies was to refer to free software/open source always as open source in order to dissociate themselves from the connotations of free, freedom, and communism.16 In other words, the Open Source Initiative was shifting emphasis from FSF philosophy to a neoliberal discourse that was business oriented and market-friendly. The following are six key themes/tactics that composed new strategies and goals for the open source community: "Forget bottom-up, work on top-down; Linux is our best demonstration case; Capture the Fortune 500; Co-opt the prestige media that serve the Fortune 500; Educate hackers in guerrilla marketing tactics; Use the Open Source certification mark to keep things pure" (Raymond 1999a: 213). As part of their marketing efforts, the Open Source Initiative trademarked the term "open source" and has provided a set of guidelines and definition for what constitutes and qualifies as open source/free software: "It is a specification of what is permissible in a software license for that software to be referred to as Open Source" (Perens 1999:176). 17 A number of different licensing schemes for open source programs, such as the GPL, BSD, X, Apache, and Artistic License and the Netscape Public License (NPL) Mozilla Public License (MPL) all currently fall under the rubric of the Open Source Definition. The two major differences between the GPL and the BSD, X, NPL, and MPL is that the latter four can be mixed with non-free software and modifications can be taken in private and not returned to the community (Perens: 1999:185).
One of the first major corporate entries into the realm of open source production was Netscape's decision to publicly release on the Internet the source code to its very popular World Wide Web browser. Their unprecedented decision to release their source code had been based in part on the success of Linux's production over the Internet: "By making source code free to the public, Netscape says it hopes to get the same benefit Linux has enjoyed: hundreds of testers tearing into the code, eventually making it better" (Partizio 1998:2). However, Netscape did not license their code under the GPL and instead created the Netscape Public License (NPL) that "states that Netscape can incorporate a developer's submitted code and sell the results to any party, but freeware developers are not allowed the same privileges" (Rein 1998:3). Although Netscape's release of code was applauded by the hackers as proof of the viability of open source-style production, it did not attract a comparable number of volunteer hackers as Linux. Currently, and partially due to the license restrictions, most of the development undertaken is done by Netscape employees.18
Linux has also become a solid and ever growing presence in the corporate sector on a number of different fronts. There are a number of Linux commercial distributors, Red Hat Software being the most famous, that distribute Linux for free but, unlike Debian, charge money for Linux manuals and support and for other commercial software provided in their distribution packages.19 According to their founder and CEO, Robert Young, their hope is to garner strength by becoming known as a Linux "brand name" that stands for "quality, consistency, and reliability"(1999:116). Red Hat also has salaried programmers who exclusively work on developing the Linux kernel and other Linux projects, such as GNOME, but their contributed code is subject to free software guidelines and rules. Red Hat is also the first open source related company to register with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission for the initial public offering of its common stock. Before going public on August 12, 1999, Red Hat offered five thousand developers who had contributed to Linux the option to purchase pre-IPO shares of their stock. This was intended to acknowledge and reward the developers who, in effect, created the product that Red Hat sells. Twelve hundred out of the five thousand developers offered stock actually participated in the program.20
Aside from distribution of Linux, other technology companies such as Oracle, Informix, HP, Computer Associates, and IBM have announced plans to make versions of their products available for Linux while other companies and organizations such as NASA, Wells Fargo, the French public school system, and the U.S. Postal Service use Linux.21 One of the biggest breakthroughs into the corporate worlds occurred with IBM's February 1999 announcement that it will offer Linux on their Netinfinity computers and they have made an alliance with Red Hat to provide support: "Under the agreement with IBM, customers will have the option of buying Red Hat support directly or through IBM (Carter 1998: C6). There are a number of small computer companies that offer Linux pre-installed on their PC's and Dell was the first large computer company to offer the option of ordering a PC pre-installed with Linux.
When Torvalds first released the Linux kernel source code on the web, he had no idea or intention of initiating a global style of software development that would revolutionize software production. His first posting on August 25, 1991 to the Minix newsgroup when he released his source code captures his initial humble intents: "I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)? This has been brewing since april [sic], and is starting to get ready. I'd like any feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat" (Torvalds 1992:2). At the end of his first posting he writes: "and it [the OS] probably never will support anything other than AT-harddisks, as that's all I have ?" (1992:2). Unlike Torvalds, Stallman had formulated a clear and political vision of the meaning, importance, and uses of free software. However, it was a small movement, in which development of free software was confined to himself and a handful of other programmers who wrote most of the free software programs that were then copylefted and made available to the general public. Torvalds individually turned to comp.os.minix, a particular Internet newsgroup22 to get information that would help him develop the Linux OS kernel. Although he turned to the newsgroup simply as a communication device for feedback, he initiated a unique global volunteer project of "collective invention" (Allen 1983) that occurred over the Internet.23 As the Linux project emerged and evolved from an individual project to a global endeavor, many developers were truly surprised that decentralized and global development could produce complicated and large scale products. Eric Raymond conceptualized this style of global and decentralized development method as the "bazaar" style of development, a term promulgated by hackers, soon adopted by the media, and quickly noticed by the corporate world:
release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity?No quiet reverent cathedral-building here-rather the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles. [Raymond 1997:2]24
As Linux became more well-known within the developer community, more and more developers around the world began working on Linux and other open source products. As Linux matured into a fully operational OS, it was clear that many programmers and journalists interpreted the Internet as the condition of possibility for a project such as Linux that harnessed the power of labor and the hacker ethic of sharing in an unprecedented global and decentralized fashion.25
The micro-dialectics between technology and the open source movement clearly points to the uniqueness of this movement as a global and transnational phenomenon that is deeply embedded within new modes of communication and computer technologies. Without the existence of the Internet, it is hard to imagine that this style of decentralized and non-corporate production could have occurred at this level. The Internet made possible a much wider participant labor pool both in terms of production, use, and in communicating and formulating what open source was, is, and should be. The actual practice made possible by the Internet of producing software globally without the initial backing of a corporate or academic institution must have contributed to the growing acceptance of a new and non-commodified style of knowledge production by the programmers themselves.
Due to the global and decentralized aspects to open source production, it seems like the Linux movement can be illuminated by much of the current literature of globalization that has focused on the "flows" of information, images, people, and capital across borders, made possible by new information and communication technologies, and the social, cultural, and perceptual impact of those flows (Appadurai 1990; Castells 1989, 1996, 1997; Harvey 1990; Sassen 1998). More specifically and from an anthropological perspective, the open source movement seems like an ideal example of Arjun Appadurai's imagined worlds: "the multiple worlds which are constituted by the historically situated imaginations of persons and groups spread around the world"(1990:7) that are in part a function of global processes of cultural, human, and capital flows. However, overly emphasizing the emergence to the potentials and nature of technology and global processes is a partial and very limited picture of the social dimensions of the movement. One of the limitations is that it does not allow for an understanding of the multiple visions and explicit articulations of difference and how they are represented within the community. Furthermore, the use of the word imaginary is problematic for it shifts attention away from the very material and local practices through which this movement has occurred. With the growing development and popularity of Linux, the free software/open source community evolved into a much larger and heterogeneous community that was also actively defining who they were, what they stood for, representing themselves through journals, publications, international conferences, local clubs, organizations, and foundations. New modes of technology may allow for this style of production and for the expression of meaning, but does not guide its meaning or direction.
Karl Mannheim in Ideology and Utopia (1936) is concerned with the constitution and organization of knowledge, thinking, and social action through generative social processes. Central to his analysis is that collective thoughts, values, and knowledge motivating action and practice are embedded within a wider social and historical context (1936: 90-94, 107, 193). Moreover, much of collective thought and action is directed towards changing or maintaining a given social condition or order (1936: 4). In specific, he labels collective thoughts and actions whose underlying basis seeks to transform some fundamental condition within the social order as utopian. Although he speaks of utopian "mentality," the notion of action, behavior, and practice is also central to his analysis in that utopian mentality always contains the potential to get channeled into social action: "We regard as utopian all situationally transcendent ideas which in any way have a transforming effect upon the existing historical-social order" (1936: 205) even though such ideas and actions are incongruous with the "state of reality within which it occurs" (1936: 192). Furthermore, a utopian position, by striving for aims that are generally not part of the given social order, reveals and exposes the central values and tenants of a given age.
From an analytical perspective, I have argued that within the free software movement certain forms of philosophical justifications, practices, and legal structures (such as the copyleft) challenge the normativity of and justification for intellectual property and thus, can be considered utopian. As noted by Rosemary Coombe, a scholar interested in the cultural politics and social implications of legal regimes, "western societies have witnessed a massive expansion of the scope and duration of intellectual property rights since the mid-eighteenth century and even greater growth and proliferation of legal protection in the eighteenth century" (1998:6). This growth and proliferation is evident in both the academic computer science field and the computer industry where intellectual property rights and patents are highly valued and well protected as they have become the primary basis for profit-making. The non-institutional style of production of free software, the FSF as an organization, the copyleft, and the various self-proclaimed web manifestos that speak of "freedom" appear utopian in a society thoroughly dominated by intellectual property regimes. As mentioned earlier, the FSF as an institution and the copyleft as a legal mode were created as means to protect and foster what were seen to be the central values of the hacker community, most notably the ethic of sharing (in the sense of collaboration and exchanging information), whose viability was threatened by intellectual property regimes. The creation of the copyleft reflects precisely the argument put forth by Coombe that intellectual property laws "play a constitutive role in the creation of contemporary cultures and in the social life of interpretive practice" (1996: 6) for it was seen that the copyright constituted a subject that was antithetical to hacker culture. Legal liberal justifications of intellectual property regimes are often based on a romantic notion of authorship in which individual "original" expression should be protected and rewarded in order to ensure innovation and invention (See Boyle 1996; Coombe 1998; Rose 1993). The production of free software programs and applications challenges this idea that copyright and patent protections for "individual authors" are needed to promote innovation and invention. Finally, the production of free software also challenges another central aspect of the current social order-that all our material objects must be produced and exchanged as commodity forms.
Mannheim argues that utopias dialectically arise from the development of the existing order in which "every age allows to arise those ideas and values in which are contained in condensed form the unrealized and the unfulfilled tendencies which represent the needs of each age" (1936:199). He has an overly progressivist outlook on history in which a society has "needs" that are perceived by social groups and then formulated into ideals, this process being the motor for historical change. I would like to suggest that the emergence of utopian elements of the open source movement resulted less from dialectical processes of social formation, like those proposed by Mannheim, than micro-dialogical processes in which social groups of differing positions respond agentively to socio-economic processes and conditions. The dialogical response by Stallman and other hackers to create the FSF was partially shaped by the particular social position occupied by hackers but at the same time, it was a creative and agentive response to advancing commodification and privatization within the computer science field. That is, it was a social response that newly defined and re-represented the meaning and nature of a hacker identity, a representation that was subsequently challenged by other hackers, as evidenced by the OSI.
In order to better apprehend Stallman's response, it is necessary to situate his actions within a general history of the particular hacker community to which he belonged and the economic transformations, such as the growth of the computer industry and the increasing commodification of information, that occurred in the 1980's and 1990's. This will provide a sense of the unique social position that hackers like Stallman occupied before intellectual property regimes and commercialization systematically entered the profession. The social beginnings of the hacker community were in universities such as MIT, Stanford, and Carnegie Mellon and Defense Department labs where programmers worked in collaborative teams and programs were not yet propietary.26 It was in such institutions that some of the basic tenets of hacker ethics were formulated not through discourse but practice. Steven Levy, who was one of the first authors to systematically research and write about the university hacker sub-culture, describes the following ethical principles that emerged from the MIT hacker community: "Access to computers should be unlimited; All information should be free; Mistrust Authority-Promote Decentralization; Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position: You can create art and beauty on a computer; Computers can change your life for the better" (1984:40-47).
ARPAnet, the first transcontinental, high-speed computer network, which was initially an experimental Defense Department project, eventually grew to connect hundreds of universities, the defense department, and independent research departments.27 The potential for collaboration and sharing of information expanded tremendously with this high-speed computer network and "the first intentional artifacts of hackerdom-the first slang lists, the first satires, the first self-conscious discussions of hacker ethic-all propagated on the ARPAnet in its early years" (Raymond 1999b: 20).28 As this exemplifies, the self-conscious process of self-definition and representation has a historical legacy that grew in tandem with networking and with the expressive representation of the nature of the community. In a community whose main medium of communication and production is textual (e-mail, programming, web pages, software documentation, chat sessions), it is not surprising that hacker identity was often inscribed textually over the Internet.29 However, access to the ARPAnet was strictly controlled since access was limited to affiliates of research universities and institutions with Defense Department funding. As ARPAnet grew into the Internet, hacking collaboration increased even more, and as the Linux case exemplifies, collaboration began on projects that were not even affiliated with any institutional entity. Furthermore, textual representation, archival information, and documentation has proliferated tremendously on the World Wide Web with the increased presence and popularity of open source products such as Linux.
Commercialization and corporate presence within the realm of computer technology also increased tremendously throughout the 1980's and 1990's especially with the decreasing costs of personal home computers, the advent of the World Wide Web, and the increasing commodification of information and privatization of telecommunication systems. The Internet once largely funded by the NSF, NASA, academic institutions, and other government agencies, is now almost entirely funded by private enterprise (Baran 1998:126). Furthermore, between the late 1970's and the late 1980's, most software programs were protected by copyright and trade secret law, but a shift occurred in the mid to late 1980's in which patents became the primary form for licensing software (and other forms of information such as genetic plant information). Patent litigation increased nearly fifty percent in the 1980's and even became a primary source of revenue for certain technology firms (Boyle 1996:133). The expansion of patent law use and legal enforcement within the United States is partially due to policy changes within the Justice Department and the formation of the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC). During the Ronald Reagan presidency, the Justice Department stopped antitrust suits against companies that did not license patented technology (1996: 134) while the newly created CAFC, which handled all patent appellate litigation, granted many more patents than the various courts of appeal had granted in the past: "Finding 80 percent of patents to be valid, the CAFC has proven to be much more pro-patent, with respect to finding both validity and infringement, than were the courts of appeal, which upheld only 50 percent of the patents they reviewed" (Nichols 1998:18). On the international front, in the last fifteen years Western based intellectual property regimes were expanded to an unprecedented degree through the threat of trade sanctions, the implementation of new stringent intellectual property provisions in international agreements, and the monitoring of trademark infringements by U.S. embassy offices (Boyle 1996:122).30
The growth of the computer industry, the transformation of information technology, and the increasing commoditization of information clearly transformed workplaces and job opportunities in many sectors of the economy.31 Hackers now had the option to work in a vast number of corporate settings instead of simply research labs and universities32 and the value of their labor was increasing as the computer field became one of the most lucrative areas for capitalist profit domestically and internationally.33 Job-hopping became so frequent among technology firms, especially in Silicon Valley, that technology companies were forced to offer signing bonuses, high salaries, and stock options to attract and keep experienced talent (Saxenian 1994: 34). Another marker of their corporate desirability is the fact that a professional undergraduate degree is not a requirement for many computer-related jobs unlike most high paying corporate jobs in America.
In 2600: The Hacker Quarterly, one of the more mainstream publications about hackers and hacking whose basis is the sharing of technical information, a recent editorial on what is most threatening to the hacker community captures the uneasy relationship that exists between hackers and the corporate world:
What could possibly threaten the hacker world more than government raids, selective prosecution, Orwellian surveillance, and mass hysteria? The answer will no doubt come as a shock to many. Success. Success a threat? What kind of insanity is this? Success is what everyone dreams about; it is the goal, after all. [The Victor Spoiled 2600: Winter 1998-1999:4]
The author cautions hackers from fully relinquishing the traditional values of the hacker community such a freedom of speech, the sharing of information, and individual rights, when and if entering the corporate realm: "If nothing else, the spirit of hacking can teach you to hold your head up and maintain your values no matter what. If you take this approach into the corporate environment, you might even have a chance to change the system from within and make a real difference"(1998-1999: 5).
The prospect of corporate success was the most pressing concern for Richard Stallman in the early 1980's when commercialization first began to systematically enter the computer science profession. He felt that his particular hacker community had collapsed and disintegrated by 1981 as a result of corporate encroachment: "In 1981, the spin-off company Symbolics had nearly hired away all the hackers from the AI lab, and the depopulated community was unable to maintain itself" (1999a: 53-54).34 Another problem for Stallman was that new computers were now run on operating systems that were for the first time propietary. Stallman felt this had serious implications for the spirit of sharing that had historically prevailed: "This meant that the first step in using a computer was to promise not to help your neighbor. A cooperating community was forbidden" (1999a: 54). For Stallman, intellectual property was not simply a neutral legal regime for ensuring certain economic rights but was a primary threatening force to the integrity and identity of the hacker community.
Hence, the utopic dimension of the FSF has to be treated as a response of resistance to the commercialization of the computer hacker. Although Stallman's utopian position is "oriented to the future" (Mannheim 1936:97), its formulations are based on the past. This utopian response constituted an ideal-typic view of hacker culture that was pure and unspoiled, much like the garden of Eden before it was touched by the serpentine nature of commercialization:
We did not call our software "free software," because the term did not yet exist, but that is what it was. Whenever people from another university or a company wanted to port and use a program, we gladly let them. If you saw someone using an unfamiliar and interesting program, you could always ask to see the source code, so that you could read it, change it, or cannibalize parts of it to make a new program. [Stallman1999a: 53]
The creation of the FSF was an active attempt to preserve those cultural elements that were seen to be threatened by capital encroachment and thus posited an explicit "tradition" within hacking. Hence, the positing of an explicit and essential hacker identity by the FSF was motivated by the cultural politics of survival. However, the response made by Stallman and the FSF, though concerted and loud, was small. It was not until the appearance and development of Linux, which was quickly licensed under the copyleft, that a revitalization of "traditional" hacker values and practices, like sharing and collaboration, gained critical force and mass.
Many Linux hackers explicitly backed and supported Stallman and the GNU projects and the creation of organizations such as Debian and future spin-off projects like GNOME increased and signaled support of the FSF. However, much of the support for free software products like Linux does not come in the form of explicit ideological justifications but in the extensive volunteer participation on Linux, its unprecedented use among hackers, the pride in Linux, and the symbolic currency gained by contributing to the Linux kernel.35 The following anecdote is one among many that captures the immense pride that comes with contributing to the Linux project:
In December, I stopped by to see some old friends and colleagues at Group Logic, a software firm in Virginia. After a few minutes of chatter, Derick Naef, the direct of project development, asked with a bit of excitement, "Hey, did you hear? Rob Newberry got his code in the Linux kernel. He said this with an amount of pride roughly equivalent to announcing that someone hit a hole in one, had a child accepted to Harvard, ran a marathon in under three hours? [Wayner 1999:1]
This quote begs the question of why Linux, a technological product, has gained such strong and almost fanatical loyalty among its producers and users. Although this sort of pride and emotional zeal over Linux, in which "the roster of contributors to the Linux kernel has become a kind of pantheon of respect" (1999: 2) and the extensive volunteer participation in the production of Linux, may not be an explicit and conscious response to the logic of capitalism and especially commodity production, I suggest that it speaks to and can be read as an implicit response to the alienation engendered by commodity production as understood by Marx's notion of "commodity fetishism" (1977[1867]: 325). According to Marx, one of the basic aspects of capitalist production and social relations is that labor itself becomes a commodity that is sold and bought for a wage. Due to this peculiar form of labor and the nature of exchange in capitalist society, producers lose consciousness of their own subjective contribution to their products, they are unable to own the products they make, and lastly mistake social relations between men for "the fantastic form of a relation between things" (1977: 321). Although most developers who work on Linux do sell their labor power by working (not on Linux)36 in a corporate or academic setting, the "peculiar social character of the labor" of Linux production is not wage labor, its circulation is not based on monetary exchange, its production is seen as fundamentally social and creative, and it is owned by no one. For many hackers, Linux is valued for it allows them to creatively innovate in a manner often not possible in a corporate setting. As evidenced by the pride and reputation one accrues by contributing to Linux, the objectification of one's creative labor in a product like Linux goes recognized and cannot be erased when circulated. One is reminded of the concept of "hau" (Mauss 1967:7-12) which, unlike commodity fetishism reflects a recognition of the laborer and one's labor in the product that is circulated among many. If one distributes their modified version of Linux, it must be offered for free because the logic of the GPL asserts that one cannot profit off of the labor of others. That is, although the source code is not owned by anyone, it still possesses the labor of its authors, which can be shared and circulated by others, but not owned.
Despite the explicit challenge to certain aspects of capitalism made by the FSF and the "untheorized" and implicit challenge represented by a different form of production and circulation, Linux enters commodity production and circulation at various levels. It is attached to commodities (whether by being pre-installed on computers, or other software packages), is used to produce other commodities, and much of the support, services, and documentation related to Linux also are commoditized. Furthermore, many Linux hackers have no systematic problem with capitalism as an economic system. As a matter of fact, acceptance of Linux into the corporate sector, whether simply through its use or distribution, is another major source of pride for the hacker community. The acceptance and use of Linux within the corporate sector invalidates a commonly held idea that a product is only valuable if produced as a commodity, an idea reflected in the following quote by a Microsoft software engineer: "While free distribution is a great marketing tool, what does it say about the product itself? Frankly, it says that the product (or the effort that went into making the product) has no value. Is that what software engineers out there want?" (Boling 1999: 1). For many Linux hackers, its use among corporate, educational, and institutional entities like NASA, the U.S. Postal Service, Sega, the French and Mexican public school systems actually validates the technical superiority of the product even if not produced as a commodity.
Yet, the explicit propagation of open source as a business model to "Fortune 500" companies was a recent phenomenon, beginning in the spring of 1998.37 As mentioned, it is illuminating from the perspective of Mannheim's work on the sociology of knowledge to treat this position, which seeks to present open source production as primarily a business model, as ideological. This position is an attempt to transform some aspect of the given socio-economic order by introducing a "new" business model while explicitly supporting basic characteristics of our socio-economic order-most notably current intellectual property regimes and free market capitalism. Those promoting open source into the business domain are also aware that "computer science and the computer industry do exist in an uneasy alliance today" (DiBona et al. 1999:17), but argue that the two logics can mutually co-exist and benefit each other through the open source development model. This model will allow industry to benefit from the technical innovation made possible by an open source model of information while hackers will benefit by having unlimited access to the source code.
Comprehending the emergence of this ideological line of action and thinking, which is contrary to the FSF's goals and ideas, through Mannheim's theories is problematic for he treats social groups as primarily homogenous and static in orientation: "These persons bound together in groups, strive in accordance with the character and positions of the group to which they belong to change the surrounding world of nature and society or attempt to maintain a given condition" (1936:4). Within such a model, collective responses to new social, political, or economic conditions would be primarily unified leaving little room to comprehend the heterogeneous elements of identity politics. The free software/open source movement has become a locus of debate whereby the meanings and values of hacker ethics and culture are debated, expressed, and represented through dialogical engagement. That is, the meaning of "the character and positions of the group" is being defined and contested through this movement. This doesn't mean that the differing utopian and ideological positions are separate and mutually exclusive domains that arose out of a socio-cultural vacuum. These differing positions are precisely connected to each other though a dialogical engagement that occurs within a shared social sphere. Treating the utopian or ideological positions as responsive utterances in the Bakhtinian sense (1986) that emerge within a social sphere provides a more dynamic and interactive means to comprehend the connections between the two positions, how new meaning is created through dialogue, and the social processes underlying identity politics. Although an utterance constitutes and reflects the subjective and creative intentions of a speech act that is grounded within a specific social position, utterances embody past responses:
Any concrete utterance is a link in a chain of speech communication of a particular sphere?Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication. Every utterance must be regarded primarily as a response to preceding utterances of the given sphere. [Bakhtin 1986:91]
The campaign to promote open source as a business model had to reposition itself by first responding to the philosophical position advocated by the FSF. As the GNU/FSF had set the initial tone and meaning of what free software meant and represented, Eric Raymond and the OSI had to respond and argue against the FSF formulation, in order to properly "sell" open source/free software to the business world. One major and initial response to the utopian position that then constituted the nature and form of the ideological position took place in the realm of language itself. The term "free software" was replaced with "open source," a term that the OSI trademarked and set conditions for its use.38 The following statement reveals the motivations and intention of the linguistic switch:
It seemed clear to us in retrospect that the term 'free software' had done our movement tremendous damage over the years. Part of this stemmed from the well-known 'free-speech/free-beer ambiguity.' Most of it came from something worse-the strong association of the term 'free software' with hostility to intellectual property rights, communism, and other ideas. [Raymond 1999a: 212]
In effect, OSI's initial response not only constituted a new meaning and direction for the open source movement, but also labeled the FSF as too impractical to thrive in the given social order. This reformulation, which justifies one position over another, also serves to label the FSF as utopian in the following sense: "The representatives of a given order will label as utopian all conceptions of existence which from their point of view can in principle never be realized" (Mannheim 1936:196). Hence, OSI first sought to downplay the rhetoric of freedom that was seen to impede the spread and acceptance of open source into the business world while emphasizing the "pragmatic tales, sweet to managers' and investor's ears, of higher reliability and lower costs and better features" (Raymond 1999a:212). Nonetheless, retained within this new utterance are the ideals of community and free access to information, although uneasily combined within the context of business and industry. Unlike the vision promulgated by the FSF, which clearly emphasizes first and foremost the freedom for all people to access, manipulate, copy, and distribute information, OSI's vision is focused primarily on why and how open access to information will primarily benefit hackers and the computer industry.
Another major response occurred after Microsoft documents were leaked to Eric Raymond on October 31st, 1998 that recognized the strength and viability of open source products and style of production. Raymond posted the documents on the Internet with a lengthy essay that further crystallized his formal position on the nature and potential of open source as a business model.39 The Microsoft memos (that were labeled the "Halloween Documents") and Raymond's public documents led to a flurry of mass media coverage, which according to Raymond led to the following developments:
They [the Halloween Documents and the press coverage] created a new surge of interest in the open-source phenomenon, serendipitously confirming all the points we had been making for months. And they led directly to a request for me to conference with a select group of Merrill Lynch's major investors on the state of the software industry and the prospects of open source. Wall Street, finally, came to us. [1999a: 216, italics my emphasis].
For Eric Raymond, the fact that "Wall Street, finally, came to us" is not simply about the prospect for profit and wealth for the hacker community but a matter of finally gaining wide-spread cultural recognition and acceptance for the hacker community. That is, the politics of cultural recognition forms an integral part of Raymond's response to the FSF and his desire to make the open source style of development a business model. Whereas Stallman sought to preserve the "tradition" of hacking, Raymond wants to transform how this tradition is understood and perceived by outsiders. In specific he hopes that the popularity of open source products and its acceptance within the market will allow the transcendence of "twenty years of living in a ghetto-a fairly comfortable ghetto full of interesting friends, but still one walled in by a vast and intangible barrier of prejudice inscribed 'ONLY FLAKES LIVE HERE' (1999a: 211). 40
The potential to remove cultural prejudices and refashion hacker identity through participation in the market and recognition by powerful business actors such as Wall Street investors speaks to Sahlins' argument that though capitalism appears as organized simply by pragmatic actions and principles, it is "as much as any other economic system a cultural specification and not merely a natural-material activity; for as it is the means of a total mode of life, it is necessarily the production of symbolic significance" (1976:213). One of the most apparent symbolic attributes of capitalism is its power to define and determine the symbolic and cultural nature of success, which in this case is to "make it" economically. When the editor of 2600: The Hacker Quarterly warns his hacker readers about the potentially dangerous aspects of success, he does not even have to specify the nature of success for it is a taken for granted category: "Success is what everyone dreams about; it is the goal, after all"(2600 Winter 1998-1999). Success is market success whether it be the product that circulates in the market, the corporate entity or the individual responsible for the creation of the product, or simply the signs and symbols that stand in for the product.
Rosemary Coombe, drawing upon the work of Baudrillard (1983) argues that the value of many commodities now lie not with the product itself but in "its brand name, advertising, image, or status connotations" (1999:56). As a result, fetishism is not only of the commodity but of the sign or symbol of the product. I would also add that products and their signs are also signifiers of success especially if the sign or symbol of the product is ubiquitous, such as with Coca Cola or Nike. However, I suggest that in the case of the computer industry, the actual person behind a successful corporation, such as Bill Gates for Microsoft, Steven Jobs for Apple, and Andrew Grove for Intel becomes an icon for value and success of their products-Windows, Apple Computer, and the Intel Processor. Along with the creation of consumers and the desire for consumption, the desire for creating successful products within the "market" or being successful in the stock market is an equally important driving force behind capitalism as a socio-economic system.41 In the case of today's computer industry, a successful and innovative product or brand name not only validates the symbolic significance of the product but valorizes the corporate entity and person attached to the product. AnnaLee Saxenian, who writes on the dynamics of competition and corporate cultures of technology firms, notes that among employees of Silicon Valley technology firms
competitive rivalries were often highly personalized, since status was often defined by technical excellence and innovation as much as market share. The surpassing need to bring technologies to market ahead of competitors produced an unusually hard-driving work ethic. [1994:46]
This desire for success is also evident in Raymond's marketing of open source as a "brand name with which Wall Street and corporate boardrooms can be comfortable" (Laird and Soraiz: 1998:1). Raymond hopes that the successful and wide-spread circulation and use of open source products within the market and the production of other commodities with Linux or for the support of Linux will transform hacker identity as a group that is seen to make meaningful and worthwhile contributions to society.
Although Raymond is one of the only hackers who has formally explained his own motivations driving the desire to make open source products mainstream and successful, the obsession among many other Linux hackers and users for Linux to displace Microsoft Windows and NT speaks to the symbolic significance of success as an underlying driving force within the economic sphere.42 Linus Torvalds' frequent half-joking statements of "World Domination" during his public speeches at regional, national, and international conferences ignites a roar of cheers and a thunder of applause from the crowd of Linux enthusiasts.43 In a talk he gave in the spring of 1999 in Chicago at McCormick place during a large computer conference Torvalds said that in 1991 he was the only Linux user. He went on to mention that there are now more than seven million users, and he said he expects it to "take over Windows as the most popular" operating system. This statement induced one of the louder eruptions of cheers and applause from the audience during his one hour talk. Star Wars rhetoric of winning "one more away from the dark side" (Benton 1999:64 ) is scattered throughout Linux-related web sites and web and mainstream articles and the mass-media has quickly noted the Linux vs. Microsoft debate.44 The desire for Linux to overtake various Microsoft OS's as the leading OS is firmly grounded within the widespread conviction that Linux is simply a technically superior product that gives its users the freedom to do what they want with it since the source code is always avaliable. Nonetheless, the zeal and soap-opera like quality of the debate, where figures are kept to track the number of servers run on Linux instead of Windows NT45 and Microsoft is demonized as the "dark side" of the universe reflects the desire to transfer the success and prestige bestowed on Bill Gates and Microsoft to Linus Torvalds and Linux hackers: "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." (Mann 1999: 42). Since most Linux hackers are not paid for their labor on Linux, winning becomes primarily a symbolic feat.
Since corporate interests and backing are embedded within the ideological position, the dialogical interaction between the utopian and ideological positions is not one of equal exchange. The power to define, represent, and direct open source production, especially through the mass media has largely emanated from the ideological position. There is a tremendous amount of hype and hope that open source will allow companies to increase profits while still "giving back" to the hacker community (DiBona et. al 1999: 16-17). Despite the increasing alliance between corporate interests and open source hackers, there has been a strong response of discontent from the FSF and from other hackers (who are not necessarily aligned directly with the FSF) over the presence of corporate interests and influence within Linux. And corporate presence has certainly been noticed as the following excerpt from a letter by one the most famous "master" Linux hackers, Alan Cox, exemplifies: "So the suits have invaded your favorite OS, do you care, should you care? The answer is probably yes. A large number of people are about to collide with a community they don't understand which has a long history of its own independence, and its own shared cultural references" (1999:1).
One of the more pronounced responses of disapproval to certain elements of corporate presence occurred when Bruce Perens, a past project leader for Debian and one of the original members of OSI, resigned from the OSI. He distributed a public letter of resignation that was posted on various Linux and hacker web sites. One of the primary motivating factors contributing to his resignation was to protest Tim O'Reilly/O'Reilly Publishing's role in open source since he views them as a corporate entity that takes from the hacker community and gives nothing back.50 The title of his resignation letter "It's Time to Talk about Free Software Again" reflects his intention of sparking debate and dialogue within the community in order to shift the focus once again on freedom:
Most hackers know that Free Software and Open Source are just two words for the same thing. Unfortunately, though Open Source has de-emphasized the importance of the freedoms involved in Free Software. It's time for us to fix that. We must make it clear to the world that those freedoms are still important, and that software such as Linux would not be around without them.51
Alan Cox's letter and Peren's resignation letter, like most articles and viewpoints posted on such web sites as "Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters,"52 led to a flurry of individual responses within a day of the posting that reflected both support and disapproval of their positions. The individual comments speak to the fact that the level of dialogical engagement occurs not simply at the institutional level but is an everyday occurrence among hackers who may not have any direct institutional relationship to either FSF, Debian, OSI or other similar institutions. 53 Through the web, individuals track the larger debates and dialogues and make their own textual contributions to them. Furthermore, dialogical engagement does not only occur in and through cyberspace. Large Linux conferences such as Linux World, Linux Expo, and Atlantic Linux Showcase are also other places where hackers meet each other and discuss the nature and direction of open source production.
Although marginalized in the mainstream media, the FSF members and Richard Stallman continue to propagate their message on various web sites and during Linux conferences. The FSF/GNU keeps a detailed web site that systematically offers their history and position on free software. Just recently, Stallman has started writing a column on another Linux web site, www.linuxtoday.com, to write about "the specific challenges facing the free software community, and other issues affecting freedom for computer users, as well as developments affecting the GNU/Linux operating system" (1999b:2). In a recent column he acknowledges that in the last fifteen years, the free software movement has progressed significantly but its continued existence faces new challenges:
But our freedom is not permanently assured. The world does not stand still, and we cannot count on having the freedom five years from now, just because we have it today. Free software faces difficult challenges and dangers. It will take determined efforts to preserve our freedom, just as it took to obtain freedom in the first place (1999b:2). 54
For Stallman the spread and popularity of free software validated its importance but also made it subject to forces that challenged the underlying basis of free software: freedom. His initial position was formulated in response to the commercialization of software; now he continues to respond to the challenges faced not with the commercialization of software, but of free software.
Conclusion
The production of Linux has become one important nexus though which the nature of hacker identity is represented, reformulated, and contested by different members of the free software community. The discursive and dialogical production of cultural hacker identity, which is intimately tied to the production of the actual material objects produced by hackers, offers a forceful glimpse into the creative and artistic form known as "hacking." The practice of hacking and the construction of hacker identity have changed along with the growth, diversification, and spread of computerization and the advancing commodification of information. Focusing on the production of identity instead of the existence of identity offers a more dynamic and complicated sense of how identities are created and contested through expressive struggles of representation, dialogue, and debate. My analysis of the ideological and utopian positions among hackers was meant to illustrate the heterogeneity of meanings and aims within a community that is precisely connected not by homogeneity but by dialogical engagement. Additionally, my discussion on the ideological and utopian positions was used to situate the politics of identity formation within a wider socio-economic context. Although I argue that the utopian and ideological positions are constituted in response to each other, they also represent responses to changing socio-economic conditions: the utopian response to increased commercialization, intellectual property regimes, and the prospect of corporate success was partially motivated by the politics of cultural survival while the ideological response to these conditions was motivated by the politics of recognition and prestige. The different nature of reactions within the free software/open source movement to the increased presence of commercialization reminds us that capitalism is not endowed with an imaginary "agentive" capacity to fully determine its entry into different social spheres. That is, cultural agency and creative response are integral parts of the reaction to commercialization and intellectual property regimes within the computer science field. Nonetheless, as my discussion on the ability of market and corporate success to bestow prestige among individuals and members of groups demonstrates, capitalism is a powerful and pervasive aspect to the cultural politics of identity formation.
As the utopian and ideological positions are responses to certain socio-economic conditions, they also provide a moral commentary on these conditions. One of the most marked commentaries emerging from the free software movement is a critique of current modes of intellectual property laws. This critique emerges from discursive discussion but is especially evident through the creation and use of the copyleft. As mentioned, the copyright was seen to necessitate a type of subject that was antithetical to the values, spirit, and especially practices of hacking. The copyleft was created to ensure the continued existence of a form of practice that was not possible under a regime dictated by intellectual property laws. While the FSF's aim is to create the conditions necessary to ensure the freedom to create, circulate, and access free software, its inversion of current practices and legal modes is one of the stronger challenges and legal alternatives to the copyright that exist in our society.
Even those proponents who want Linux and other open source products to have a prominent place in the market and corporate America hold the open access to information as key for open source production. Nonetheless, the push for open source as a business model provides its own moral commentary on socio-economic conditions that validates free market ideology and practices. It is a business model that hopes to improve and strengthen an already existing economic system. Yet, this commentary is fraught with complicated questions: what types of information should remain open and accessible to its producers and users? In what cases can or should a person or corporate entity claim ownership of information? Who is to decide what information remains accessible and what information should be propietary? In what other spheres of production would an open information model be viable? Can open information exist in an industry whose source of profit is often proprietary information? Among hackers these questions have largely remained focused on source code but a debate on documentation (software manuals) and the provision of services and support also exists within the free software community.
Due to the increased presence of computers in the private, public, and especially economic sphere, the cultural impact of computerization and technology has become an active topic of academic inquiry spanning a wide range of sub-fields. It is certainly true that computer and information technologies have permeated many sectors of Western society, transforming certain aspects of the economic, social and political landscapes. But all too often technology, whether it be in the form of computers, hardware, software, or the Internet, is fetishized by being divorced from those who produce such technologies although the socio-cultural and economic impact of computer and related information technologies has been well-explored.55 This essay sought to counter this tendency by offering a detailed account of those subjects involved in one particular sphere of technological production, the free software/open source operating system. Furthermore, not only do cultural accounts on computerization tend to leave out the topic of subjectivity in the production of technology, but the treatment of the different technological features of a computer is often thin. As products that are fundamentally social, each feature of a computer system has its own social history inscribed within its production. As this paper has demonstrated, the creation of an operating system, which is one of the most central components of a computer system, is embedded within a complex social history that also became a vehicle for the making of history.
APPENDIX A:
Technical Definitions
Bug A bug is a misbehavior of the code. In other words, the program does not
perform as it was intended to. The bug needs to be found and the code is
subsequently changed in order to "de-bug."
Compiler A program that generates executable machine code from source code written in
A high level programming language.
Device Driver Operating system code that provides a software interface to a specific hardware
device.
Hardware "The central processing unit (CPU), the memory, and the input/output
(I/O) devices-provides the basic computing resources." (ibid p. 3).
Kernel The kernel is the one program running at all times on the computer
All programs interact with the kernel and use the kernel to control the
hardware.
Operating System "An operating system is a program that acts as an intermediary between
a user of a computer and the computer hardware. The purpose of an operating system is to provide an environment in which a user can execute programs in a convenient and efficient manner" (Silberschatz and Galvin 1998:1).
Port To modify the source code of a program that currently runs on one operating
system to make it run on a different operating system.
Source Code The recipe and instructions behind a computer program.
The following is the source code for the standard "Hello, world!" application, in
the C programming language:
#include <stdio.h>
void
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
When compiled and executed, it will display 'Hello, world!' on the display.
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