Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

politically paralyzing form of ideological imprisonment, F/OSS has been able to successfully avoid such polarization and thus ghettoization.
    Even if some hackers write and release free software for political reasons, many developers tend to divorce an official, broadly conceived political stance outside software freedom from their
collective
laboring (with the exception of free software projects defined primarily by political aspirations). This tight coupling between a particular version of freedom and its instantiation in technology—mediated by licensing within F/OSS—paves the way for certain sociopolitical travels. We might say that F/OSS has attained such legibility not so much because of the material nature of source code but rather because of licensing arrangements socially enveloping the source code: F/OSS technology is free (as in beer as well as in speech) for people to use, learn from, and modify. 2 Further, because these technical and legal artifacts are hinged on a politics of free software—and not traditional Right-Left political divides—others have taken hold of free software artifacts and recoded the meaning of freedom, access, and collaboration in new ways.
    As the idea of free software spread into other domains of social life, it gained significant social visibility and notoriety. Through the legibility and use of free software by multiple publics, its status has shifted dramatically. What was once an odd, exceptional, and subcultural practice has acquired a more authoritative position. Through its translations into different terms, the very practice of free software, both as a mode of production and a set of licenses, has been legitimated and brought from the subcultural background into the political foreground (largely between 2000 and 2005). In this new state of near ubiquity, free software has been well positioned to perform an embedded critique of the assumptions that dominate the moral geography of intellectual property law. If court case after court case, economist after economist, and all sorts of trade associations stipulate that economic incentives are absolutely (or self-evidently) necessary to induce labor and secure creativity, hackers counterstipulate such views, not simply through the power of rhetoric, but also through a form of collective labor that yields high-quality software (software that happens to power much of the Internet). Thousands and thousands of individual developers’ laboring to make software
libre
constitutes a social performance of collective work that contrasts with as well as effectively chips away at some of the foundational assumptions driving the continual expansion of intellectual property law.
    In the rest of this chapter I describe how and why developers of the Debian project insist on a narrow politics of software freedom, and then compare F/OSS’s translation into three different spheres. Specifically, I examine how F/OSS has become the corporate poster child for capitalist technology giants like IBM, how it has served as a technological and philosophical weapon of anticorporate activists in the Indymedia counterglobalization movement, and finally, how it has provided a pragmatic template for a nascent movement tocreate an intellectual commons as part of a larger liberal critique of neoliberal capitalism. I conclude by exploring in more detail how F/OSS has worked to defamiliarize a set of assumptions concerning intellectual property law.
    The Political Agnosticism of F/OSS
    During a discussion about the most common free software license, the GPL, the following F/OSS developer described free software as an economy working in absence of copyrights: “Free software should create a sort of economy in which things are the way they would be if there were no copyrights at all.” He subsequently fleshes out how F/OSS developers conceive of software freedom as a condition that also demands a form of restraint, neutrality, and political disavowal:
    In other words, when I write free software, I renounce the ability to control the behavior of the recipient as a condition of their making copies or modifying the software. The most obvious renunciation is that I don’t get to demand money for copies. But I also don’t get to demand that the person not be a racist; I don’t get to demand that the person contribute to the Red Cross. I don’t get to demand that the recipient contribute to free software. I renounce the little bit of control over the other