Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

that with over one thousand developers, Debian is the largest free software project and thus not simply sitting on the margins. Furthermore, each project has its own peculiar idiosyncrasies, so it is impossible to use any one project to generalize about all of them. If the processes I discussed here exist on a spectrum, Debian undoubtedly resides on one end by virtue of its articulation of strong moral commitments whereas others, such as the Linux kernel project, steer clear from explicit moral language.
    But other endeavors evince many of the elements explored here. Every large project is dynamic, and has had to deal with the problems of trust and scalability. Most of the large ones have had to routinize, like Debian, by devising formal procedures for entry that require prospective members to undergo mentorship and training. Many medium- to large-size projects have drafted key documents that define their goals and vision. In the case of Debian, they have formalized this into the Social Contract. Similar to developers who labor in distinct places, in other free software projects to large technology firms, Debian developers also seek to strike a balance between individually initiated decision making and vertical authority, yielding to the latter to some qualified degree, even if clearly preferring the former. The ways in which this balance is reached—when and if it is—never follow a predictable, unitary path, although the general attempt is a crucial conduit for articulating and embodying this commitment.

PART III
    THE POLITICS OF AVOWAL AND DISAVOWAL

    We do not act because we know. We know because we are called upon to act.
    —Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
The Vocation of Man
    T he final two chapters engage directly with the politics of free software. Chapter 5 examines the politics of avowal and popular protest, and the conclusion looks at the disavowal of broadly conceived politics among many free software hackers.
    Chapter 5 explores two different conditions under which free software developers learn about the law. It contrasts everyday legal pedagogy as it unfolds in Debian with a lively series of political protests, which I describe as a moment of political avowal because of the way hackers and programmers took to the streets between 1999 and 2003 to insist on their free speech rights to create as well as circulate software unencumbered by current legal restrictions. During this period, F/OSS hackers enunciated more reflexively than ever before their free speech rights to produce and distribute software, thereby working to stabilize a relatively new cultural claim in which source code came to be imagined as a species of free speech.
    In contrast to this period of lively political protest, the conclusion examines what I consistently witnessed during my fieldwork: a reluctance to signify free software beyond a narrow politics of software freedom. I start by discussing how and why this is articulated, but quickly move on to look at the consequence of this political disavowal. A central feature of F/OSS has been its political agnosticism, which has facilitated, I argue, its spread and adoption, allowing it to attain a position where it can circulate widely and perform a political message. Through its visibility and its use by multiple publics, F/OSS thus makes apparent the assumptions that dominate the moral landscape of intellectual property law and mainstream economic theory. An important element here is the transposability of F/OSS, or itspower to enjoin others to become part of its performance in various ways—through the use of F/OSS artifacts and licenses, participation in projects, reflections on the larger meaning of collaboration, and the reconfigurations of licenses for other nontechnological objects. Its most profound political effect has been to devitalize the hegemonic status of intellectual property law and catalyze a series of transformations in the arena of intellectual property law.

CHAPTER 5
    Code Is Speech

    L ike many computer aficionados today, Seth Schoen writes all of his software as free software to ensure that the source code—the underlying directions of computer programs—will remain accessible for other developers to use, modify, and redistribute. In so doing, Schoen not only makes technology but also participates in an effort that redefines the meaning of liberal freedom, property, and software by asserting in new ways that code is speech. A tiny portion of a 456-stanza haiku