Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

during the early to mid-1990s. A prospective Debian developer comments on the difference in an NMP application: “Free speech is the possibility of saying whatever one wants to. Software [that is] free as in beer can be downloaded and used for free, but no more. Software [that is] free as in speech can be fixed, improved, changed, [or] be used as building block for another [
sic
] software.” 3 Some developers also note that their understanding of free speech is nested within a broader liberal meaning codified in the constitutions of most liberal democracies: “Used in this context the difference is this: ‘free speech’ represents the freedom to use/modify/distribute the software as if the source code were actual speech which is protected by law in the US by the First Amendment. [ … ] ‘[F]ree beer’ represents something that is without monetary cost.” 4 This differentiation between free beer and free speech is the clearest enunciation of what, to these developers, are the core meanings of free—expression, learning, and modification. Freedom is understood foremost to be about personal control and autonomous production, and decidedly not about commodityconsumption or “possessive individualism” (Macpherson 1962)—a message that is constantly restated by developers: free software is free as in speech, not in beer.
    This distinction may seem simple, but the licensing implications of freedom and free speech are complicated enough that the NMP continues with a series of technically oriented questions whose answers start to enter the realm of legal interpretation. Many of these questions concern the DFSG, a set of ten provisions by which to measure whether a license can be considered free. Of these questions, one or two are fairly straightforward, such as:
    “Do you know what’s wrong with Pine’s current license in regard to the DFSG?”
    After looking at the license on the upstream site it is very clear why Pine is non-free. It violates the following clauses of the DFSG:
    1. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor—it has different requirements for non-profit vs. profit concerns.
    2. License Must Not Contaminate Other Software—it insists that all other programs on a CD-ROM must be “free-of-charge, shareware, or non-proprietary.”
    3. Source Code—it potentially restricts binary distribution [binary refers to compiled source code].
    The sample license for an e-mail program, Pine, violates a number of DFSG provisions. With different provisions for nonprofit and for-profit endeavors, as an example, it discriminates according to what the DFSG calls “fields of endeavor.”
    Developers are then asked a handful of far more technical licensing questions, among them: “At http://people.debian.org/~joerg/bad.licenses.tar.bz2 you can find a tarball of bad licenses. Please compare the graphviz and three other (your choice) licenses with the first nine points of the DFSG and show what changes would be needed to make them DFSG-free.” The answer clearly demonstrates the depth of legal expertise required to address these questions: “Remove the discriminatory clauses [ … ] allow distribution of compiled versions of the original source code [ … ] replace [sections] 4.3 with 4.3.a and 4.3.b and the option to choose.” 5
    After successfully finishing the NMP, some developers think only rarely about the law or the DFSG, perhaps only tracking legal developments of personal interest. Even if a developer is not actively learning the law, however, legal discourse is nearly unavoidable because of the frequency with which it appears on Debian mailing lists or chat channels. Informal legal pedagogy thus continues long after the completion of the NMP.
    As an illustration, below I quote from an arcane discussion on IRC wherein a developer proposed a new Debian policy that would clarify how non-free-software packages (those noncompliant with their license guidelines) shouldbe categorized so as to make it absolutely clear how and why they cannot be included in the main software repository, which can only have free software. I do not want to emphasize the exact legal or technical details but rather how, late on a Friday night (when the conversation happened), a developer made a policy recommendation, and his peers immediately offered advice on how to proceed, talking about the issue with such sophisticated legal vocabulary that to the uninitiated, it will likely appear as obscure, obtuse, and hard to follow.