Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

with free software, many hackers initially grasped this new technological wonder and its moral qualities using the language of money and consumerism. During an interview, Sharkie, now a free software activist, remarked that he learned about copyright through copyleft—another commonly used name for the GPL—and elaborated, “I had no understanding about copyright before this. I knew it was free beer from the beginning and I thought that was very cool.” Matthew, another developer, expressed a similar sentiment when he told me “the first draw was, I don’t have to pay for this—awesome!” Sharkie’s and Matthew’s accounts were typical of developers who first learned about free software in the 1980s and early to mid-1990s, especially those who were young or students, without a steady income to pay for expensive software like compilers (a tool that transforms source code, written in a programming language, into machine readable binary code).
    Early in their relationship with this technology, most hackers developed a strong pragmatic and utilitarian commitment to free software. But the underlying philosophy underwent change as more developers started to attach and make their own meanings. Access to source code and the model of open development represented by Linux, they said, was a superior technical methodology. Many likened it to the scientific method as an ideal. They saw it as under assault, corrupted by abuse of intellectual property law bycorporations and, worse, universities that had started to patent inventions liberally in the 1980s. Others emphasized the pedagogical freedom that F/OSS provided them. “I realized,” a developer named Wolfgang wrote me over email, “that I could delve through that code and learn things that I could never learn from a high school teacher. It’s one of the reasons why I feel so strongly about the GPL’d software now; it allows anyone to learn and participate.”
    Some developers who first only used free software later developed it and eventually took the next step: releasing their software under a F/OSS license. “For free beer to flow,” Devon, another developer, realized, “someone must brew the beer.” (This developer is quite aware that it is more common to say that free software is “free as in speech, not beer,” especially since developers are not barred from selling free software. Yet even if one sells free software, one cannot close off the source code, and thus there is some sort of free beer always available, too.) With this line of reasoning, Devon started to release his own software under the GPL, and soon after, participated in a community project. Many began to feel that releasing their own software under the GPL was just the “right thing to do,” and that it made unarguable pragmatic sense, because software is a nonscarce resource that benefits from continuous contributions and modifications.
    Matthew, quoted above, described his changing attitudes about free software when he told me, “Later [I realized], you know, though I was Joe Schmoe, I can still make this better. I can do what I want with this. And if I don’t like it, I can change it, and if I make changes, I can make it available to other people and [ … ] I am just a regular guy. That is a really powerful concept.” The experience of using, making, and distributing free software rendered the language of price largely obsolete, while language about the “freedom to tinker” and improve the software for oneself as well as for others gained more ground.
    Soon Linux and other popular pieces of free software became more common in the geek and engineering communities, and as a result, much of the fundamental Internet infrastructure was being handled by important F/OSS applications. Apache, started in 1995, was powering Web servers; Sendmail, a program used by servers to transfer email, composed the lion’s share of mail transfer nodes; Perl was becoming the language of choice for Web site development; and BIND, a critical piece of the network infrastructure providing name-to-address translations, was increasingly popular among system administrators. If many developers first thought of free software as a set of tools that transformed personal computers into powerful Unix workstations, they quickly learned that it was also the force powering much of the Internet and hence a socially validated type of software. This is more remarkable given how many people, such as Silicon Valley