Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

idea that some really significant “things” had been cut from its body, but what was created was something forever eternally beautiful. Eventually, its creators kept the phonetic instantiation of eunuchs (Unix) to commemorate and signal its conditions of birth as an essentially castrated version of Multics.
    The cultural depth of Unix far exceeds naming conventions. Unix has been described as “our Gilgamesh epic” (Stephenson 1999), and its status is that of a living, adored, and complex artifact. Its epic nature is an outgrowth of its morphing flavors, always under development, that nevertheless adhere to a set of well-articulated standards and protocols: flexibility, design simplicity, clean interfaces, openness, communicability, transparency, and efficiency (Gancarz 1995; Stephenson 1999). “Unix is known, loved, understood by so many hackers,” explains sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson (1999, 69), also a fan, “that it can be re-created from scratch whenever someone needs it.”
    Due to its many layers and evolving state, learning the full capabilities of Unix is a lifelong pursuit, and it is generally accepted that most users cannot ever learn its full capabilities. In the words of one programmer who helped me (a novice user) fix a problem on my Linux machine, “Unix is not a thing, it is an adventure.” As such, for hackers, the processes of working on or learning about technology, while riddled with kinks and problems, is an activity defined in terms of exploratory, blissful quests. It is often experienced as a convergence of sensual pleasure, logical rigor, and grounds for intellectual pedagogy.
    Matching its variations is a great storehouse of ancillary knowledge archived in texts, books, manuals, and especially stories and conversations about Unix. Dissected in great detail, the endless storytelling (over Unix’s history, uses, legal battles, problems, and variations) is one important vehicle by which hackers extend themselves into objects, also linking past generations with current ones. These objects become a material token that allows hackers to intersubjectively connect with each other. Unix is but one of the many technical lingua francas (others being programming languages, text editors, and other tools) by which hackers, system administrators, and computer users communicate and forge a shared sense of technical common stock, of sense “know-how,” that mixes technological lore with arcane, esoteric humor.
    “Someone Must Brew the Beer”
    While most hackers first became interested in free software on technical grounds, and were thrilled at having access to a robust OS, some were immediately impressed by Stallman’s (considered to be the father of freesoftware) philosophy, codified in “The GNU Manifesto” included with many programs, or by reading the first free software license, the GNU GPL. The moral message of software freedom instantly resounded with this minority of the developers I interviewed. Stallman’s project to ensure software freedom “just made immediate sense,” one of them told me. Others, however, were repelled by the message, saying it sounded “too socialistic or ideological,” even though Stallman actually steered clear of any strong language of traditional Left/Right (anticapitalism, for example) politics, and instead used plain and simple language, emphasizing, say, the good that comes from sharing with your neighbors.
    The majority of developers I interviewed, though, were not initially swayed in either direction, neither especially repelled nor attracted. Many hackers’ understandings of the morality and legality of free software were quite rudimentary. Although the technical implications of unhampered access to code were usually quite clear, few developers understood this access in relation to the GPL in particular or legality in general. Largely unaware of the complicated moral-legal issues surrounding freedom and intellectual property law (much of which was then still defined only through basic terms and a few documents, later to grow as a body of theory on F/OSS projects), hackers saw free software as equivalent to “free beer.” This is especially ironic, since most programmers now adamantly insist that the free in free software is precisely about “speech, not beer.”
    In fact, the very expression “free as in speech” was nearly nonexistent or at best uncommon until at least the mid-1990s. Although the message of freedom was circulating along