Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

to tort claims from BitMover, Inc., the company that produces BitKeeper, the software that is the primary source management tool for the Linux kernel. Your license to use BitKeeper free of charge is revoked if you or your employer develop,produce, sell, or resell a source management tool. Debian distributes rcs, cvs, subversion and arch at least and this seems to be a [4] different case. Ben Collins, however, who works on both the Linux kernel and the subversion project, got his license to use BitKeeper free of charge [5] revoked. 9
    These are newsletter summaries, which are read by thousands of developers outside the Debian community proper as well as by Debian developers. Practical and immediate concerns are layered on global currents along with more philosophical musings. Some discussions can be short, breeding less than a dozen posts; other topics are multiyear, multilist, and may involve other organizations, such as the FSF. These conversations may eventually expand and reformulate licensing applications.
    It is also worth noting how outsiders turn to Debian developers for legal advice. One routine task undertaken in debian-legal is to help developers and users choose appropriate licensing, by providing in-depth summaries of alternative licenses compliant with the DFSG. One such endeavor I witnessed was to determine whether a class of Creative Commons licenses (developed to provide creative producers, such as musicians and writers, with alternatives to copyright) was appropriate for software documentation. Debian developers assessed that the Creative Commons licenses under consideration failed to meet the DFSG’s standards, and suggested that Debian developers not look to them as licensing models. The most remarkable aspect of their analysis is that it concluded with a detailed set of recommendations for alterations to make the Creative Commons licenses more free according to the Debian licensing guidelines. In response to these recommendations, Lessig of Creative Commons contacted Evan Prodromou, one of the authors of this analysis, to try to find solutions to the incompatibilities between the DFSG and some of the Creative Commons licenses.
    There is something ironic, on the one hand, about a world-renowned lawyer contacting a bunch of geeks with no formal legal training to discuss changes to the licenses that he created. On the other hand, who else would Lessig contact? These developers are precisely the ones making and therefore inhabiting this legal world. These geeks are training themselves to become legal experts, and much of this training occurs in the institution of the free software project.
    Debian’s legal affairs not only produce what a group of legal theorists have identified as everyday legal awareness (Ewick and Silbey 1998; Mezey 2001; Yngvesson 1989). The F/OSS arena probably represents the largest single association of amateur intellectual property and free speech legal scholars ever to have existed. Given the right circumstances, many developers will marshal this expertise as part of broader, contentious battles over intellectual property law and the legality of software—the topic of the next section.
    Contentious Politics
    If hackers acquire legal expertise by participating in F/OSS projects, they also use and fortify their expertise during broader legal battles. Here I examine one of the most heated of the recent controversies over intellectual property, software, and access: the arrests of Johansen and Sklyarov. These arrests provoked a series of protests and produced a durable articulation of a free speech ethic that under the umbrella of F/OSS development, had been experiencing quiet cultivation in the previous decade. Intellectual property has been debated since its inception (Hesse 2002; Johns 2006; McGill 2002), but as media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan (2004, 298) notes, in recent times intellectual property debates have “rarely punctured the membrane of public concern.” It was precisely during this period (1999 to 2003), and in part because of these events, that a more visible, notable, and “contentious politics” (Tilly and Tarrow 2006) over intellectual property emerged, especially in North America and Europe.
    Before discussing how the emergence of this contentious politics worked to stabilize the connection between speech and code, some historical context is necessary. At the most general level, we can say a free speech idiom formed as a response to the excessive