Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

person which copyright law gives me and in that way, I enhance their freedom. I enhance it to what it would be without copyright law. 3
    To secure the practice of free software, in other words, this developer claims that one must disassociate licensing along with its requirements from other ideologies, demands, and affiliations, whether they are economic, religious or political.
    This sort of political denial came as a great surprise at first. When I started my fieldwork in 2001, the bifurcation of free software and open source was already firmly in place. Because open source represents an
explicit
and firm denial of not only politics but also even the ethics of software freedom, it led me to believe that among Debian developers, I would encounter a political sensibility exceeding software freedom. Because of their dense ethical commitment to software freedom, which I covered in chapter 4 , I was startled to instead encounter a form of political disavowal whereby Debian developers routinely police collective claims so as to prevent certain forms of political associations from entering
official
project policy and even at times informal discourse. To put it another way, rather than an absolute distinction between politically engaged hackers and neutral corporate promoters of the world of open source, I had encountered something more complicated that blurred the well-known distinction between these two positions.
    The strongest evidence of this disavowal emerges from what is rarely talked about. Despite the prolific discussions on project mailing lists covering anendless stream of topics—technical problems, project politics, licensing issues, mentoring, and project policy—conversations about the role of Debian in supporting widespread political change or social justice are nearly nonexistent—except, of course, on the rare occasions when someone suggests otherwise.
    For example, in the segment here, a developer is vehemently disagreeing with another developer, who in 2003, suggested that Debian should officially participate in a World Social Forum event:
    Look, when I signed up for this project and agreed to adhere to the Social Contract, it didn’t say anything about Christianity, genetically modified beef, Microsoft, war in Iraq, or anything else like that. It said we agree to work on Free Software. That’s the *only* common belief you’re guaranteed to find among Debian developers. 4
    Most other developers participating in this heated, contentious conversation over the project’s political scope agreed with this assessment and pounced on the developer who had dared suggest the existence of a politics beyond software freedom itself. Certainly some hackers write free software to fulfill political agendas, and more than ever, they simply cannot deny the vibrant political life that they themselves have engendered. There is a small crop of Debian developers who are also technology activists, channeling their energies primarily toward social justice causes by running technology collectives bearing unmistakably leftist names like, as mentioned earlier, Riseup and Mayfirst (and using 100 percent free software to do so). But as part of their commitments to freedom of expression and nondiscrimination, many developers, especially in the context of large projects, divorce a traditional and overt political stance outside software freedom from official project discourse. Since each developer has their own personal opinion about politics as well as personal reasons for writing free software, hackers believe those sentiments should remain personal, and it behooves them not to attribute a universal political message to their collective work. This message was voiced by many in the email discussion on the World Social Forum, but was captured particularly well in the following statement:
    You must realize that your personal views on other issues are political, and therefore inherently controversial, and are almost certainly not agreed to by every other developer in this project. So let’s leave the other politics to the other organizations devoted to them, and keep Debian focused on what it does best. 5
    Here we see how politics are deemed problematic because they are personal and “inherently controversial,” and as such, should be left in the private, not public realm. Pragmatically, the inclusion of politics writ large may generate unnecessary project strife and interfere with the real task at hand: the production of