Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

sociality explored earlier.
    The final two chapters engage with more overtly political questions, examining two different and contrasting political elements of free software. Chapter 5 (“Code Is Speech”) addresses two different types of legal pedagogy common among free software developers. First, in the context of Debian, I look at everyday legal learning, where debating and learning about the law is an integral part of project life. I then compare this with a series of dramatic arrests, lawsuits, and political protests that unfolded between 1999–2004 in the United States, Europe, and Russia, and on the Internet, and that allowed for a more explicit set of connections to be drawn between code and speech. These demonstrations were launched against what was, at the time, a relatively new copyright statute, the DMCA, and the arrest of two programmers. These multiyear protests worked, I argue, to stabilize a relatively nascent cultural claim—nearly nonexistent before the early 1990s—that source code should be protected speech under the First Amendment (or among non-American developers, protected under free speech laws). In contrast to the political avowal of the DMCA protests, my conclusion (“The Politics of Disavowal and the Cultural Critique of Intellectual Property Law”) discusses how and why hackers disavow engagement in broad-based politics, and instead formulate a narrow politics of software freedom. Because a commitment to the F/OSS principles is what primarily binds hackers together, and because many developers so actively disavow political associations that go beyond software freedom, I contend that the technoscientific project of F/OSS has been able to escape the various ideological polarizations (such as liberal versus conservative) so common in our current political climate. F/OSS has thus been taken up by a wide array of differently positioned actors and been placed in a position of significant social legibility whereby it can publicly perform its critique of intellectual property law.
    Finally, to end this introduction, it is worth noting that this book is not only an ethnography but also already an archive of sorts. All cultural formations and ethical commitments are, of course, in motion, undergoing transformation, and yet many technological worlds, such as free software, undergo relentless change. What is written in the forthcoming pages will provide a discrete snapshot of F/OSS largely between 1998 and 2005. Much of this book will still ring true at the time of its publication, while other elements have come and gone, surely to have left a trace or set of influences, but no longer in full force. And despite my inability to provide a warranty for this archival ethnography, I hope such an account will be useful in some way.

PART I
    HISTORIES

    While we read history we make history.
    —George William Curtis,
The Call of Freedom
    T he next two chapters are general in their scope, meant to introduce readers to the world of free software, and do so from two related although distinct vantage points, both historically informed. Chapter 1 , as mentioned above, describes a typical life history compiled from over fifty in-person interviews along with twenty email and/or Internet Relay Chat (IRC) interviews. It portrays everyday life and historical transformation as many experience it: in a mundane register, and without the awareness that we are making or are part of history. What it seeks to show is how hackers become hackers slowly over time and through a range of varied activities. This process, though experienced in quotidian ways, is ultimately a historical affair, for the hackers of yesteryear are not quite the same as those of today, despite crucial continuities. The first chapter tracks some of the changes within free software and also provides basic sociological data about free software developers: where they learned to program, where they work, and how they interact with other developers.
    Chapter 2 turns away from personal accounts to tell a more global story. It traces two distinct but overlapping legal trajectories and their eventual clash. During the same period in which intellectual property law assumed tremendous and global regulatory power, free software also rose to prominence, eventually providing one of the most robust challenges ever to intellectual property laws. The legal alternatives made and supported by free software did not always follow from politically motivated action,