Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

businesspeople and managers, knew little about its existence. The growing ubiquity of F/OSS confirmed developers’ sense that freesoftware, while lacking an official warranty, marketing, and glossy packaging, was the real deal, equivalent or even superior to proprietary software. This added to a growing conviction about the technical superiority of the F/OSS method of development, with its requirement of continual access to information.
    Free Software in the Workplace
    Before the widespread corporate acceptance of free software, some developers stealthy smuggled free software into work. In the early to mid-1990s at some of the larger companies, a few of the most enlightened managers “could be convinced” to switch their servers to Linux, but for the most part, use had to be kept to a minimum or under the radar. Some claimed this was not so hard to do because most (nontechnical) managers were “clueless,” as
The Hacker Jargon File
definition of “suit” makes sardonically clear:
    n. 1. Ugly and uncomfortable “business clothing” often worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a “tie,” a strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the behavior of suit-wearers. Compare droid. 2. A person who habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See loser, burble, management, Stupids, SNAFU principle, and brain-damaged. English, by the way, is relatively kind; our Moscow correspondent informs us that the corresponding idiom in Russian hacker jargon is “sovok,” lit. a tool for grabbing garbage. 14
    Developers who were self-employed or working in a small tech company that had few or no managers powered everything on free software, crediting the success of the company to solid technology as well as the money saved on software. As free software became acceptable in the corporate sphere, geeks no longer had to hide their use of this software. A few told me during interviews that they “started to put my Debian work on my resume.”
    As these examples illustrate, for most developers (with the exception of anticapitalist activist-geeks), acceptance of free software rarely led to a wholesale political opposition to corporate producers of proprietary software. Instead, developers used their experiences with free software to develop a critical eye toward proprietary software firms, targeting their complaints at specific practices, such as abuse of intellectual property law and the tendency to hide problems from customers. As one developer put it starkly, “free software encourages active participation. Corporate software encourages consumption.” Another one told me that he only realized the extent to which corporations hid software problems from their customers when he confronted the transparency of free software’s bug reporting:
    One of the things that you see with commercial, proprietary software is that vendors don’t want to talk about bugs. They are pretty closed mouth about it. It is hard to find out about it. They don’t want to acknowledge it. When I started using Unix and started reading the main pages, I was astounded. All these main pages had bug sections in them, and where they explained the major bugs, it was an epiphany. People would acknowledge and even explain their bugs.
    Probably the single most important difference flagged in interviews was that F/OSS software never could be “wrongfully” jailed under the deadweight of nondisclosure agreements and intellectual property law, never to see the light of day—the tragic fate of much proprietary software if a project is canceled. This closure violates the meritocratic tradition of recursively feeding knowledge back to the community—something that is necessary to secure ongoing technical production. Unlike proprietary software, F/OSS always has a chance to live free “even if abandoned by the original author.” As hacker Jeremiah explained in greater detail:
    The important difference for me is whether I come away feeling that I have created something of lasting intrinsic value or not. I’ve sometimes come away from corporate development with that feeling, but it is a lot more common with free software. I honestly don’t feel like there are vast differences in areas like enjoyment gained in the programming, stress level, levels of collaboration, and stuff like that. But most often when I am done with corporate software, it’s dead, and when I am done