Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

computers, hackers, and F/OSS, this high-tech region matters, as I quickly came to learn within weeks of my arrival there. For the last thirty years, hackers have flocked to the Bay Area from around the world to make it one of their most cherished homelands, although it certainly is not the only region where hackers have settled and set deep roots. At the turn of this century, open source also became the object of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial energy, funding, and hype, even though today the fever for open source has diminished significantly, redirected toward other social media platforms.
    The book is thus not primarily about free software in Silicon Valley. In many respects my material tilts toward the North American and European region but, nevertheless, I have chosen to treat free software in more general than regional registers as well, so as to capture the reality of the legal transnational processes under investigation along with the experience of the thousands and thousands of developers across the world. Debian, for example, has developers from Japan, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, all over western and eastern Europe, Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, and Mexico. 17 I decided on this approach as it is important to demonstrate different valuesand dynamics at play than those found in Silicon Valley, which are too often mistaken to represent
the
commitments of all engineers, computer scientists, and hackers. 18
    Coding Freedom
is composed of six chapters, divided conceptually into pairs of two. The first two chapters are historically informed, providing the reader with a more general view of free software. Chapter 1 (“The Life of a Free Software Hacker”) provides what is a fairly typical life history of a F/OSS hacker from early childhood to the moment of discovering the “gems” of free software: source code. Compiled from over seventy life histories, I demonstrate how hackers interact and collaborate through virtual technologies, how they formulate liberal discourses through virtual interactions, how they came to learn about free software, and how they individually and collectively experience the pleasures of hacking. I also offer an extended discussion of the hacker conference, which I argue is the ritual (and pleasurable) underside of discursive publics. Chapter 2 (“A Tale of Two Legal Regimes”) presents what were initially two semi-independent legal regimes that over the last decade have become intertwined. The first story pertains to free software’s maturity into a global movement, and the second turns to the globalization and so-called harmonization of intellectual property provisions administered through global institutional bodies like the World Trade Organization. By showing how these trajectories interwove, I emphasize various unexpected and ironic outcomes as I start to elaborate a single development that will continue to receive considerable treatment later in the book: the cultivation, among hackers, of a well-developed legal consciousness.
    The next two chapters provide a close ethnographic analysis of free software production. Chapter 3 (“The Craft and Craftiness of Hacking”) presents the central motif of value held by hackers by examining the practices of programming, joking, and norms of socialization through which they produce software and their hacker selves. Partly by way of humor, I tackle a series of social tensions that mark hacker interactions: individualism and collectivism, populism and elitism, hierarchy and equality as well as artistry and utility. These tensions are reflected but also partially attenuated through the expression of wit, especially jokes, and even funny code, whereby jokes (“easter eggs”) are included in source code. Chapter 4 (“Two Ethical Moments in Debian”) addresses ethical cultivation as it unfolds in the largest free software project in the world—Debian. This project is composed of over one thousand developers who produce a distribution of the Linux operating system (OS). I present and theorize on the tensions between Debian’s governance, which blends democratic majoritarian rule, a guildlike meritocracy, and ad hoc deliberations. In comparing these three modes of governance, I unearth various ethical processes—informal, formal, pedagogical, and dramatic—by which Debian developers inhabit a liberally based philosophy of free software, and use it as an opportunity to revisit the tension between liberal individualism and corporate