Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

with free software, it is alive.
    Free Software Spreads
    A nascent, circumscribed political sensibility that differentiated proprietary software from F/OSS was fertilized by everyday geek news on Web-based periodicals like
Linux Weekly News
and Web sites such as Slashdot, which presented moral and political analyses alongside mainstream news features as well as prolific analyses about life as a coder. “Programmers started writing personally, intently, voluminously,” observes journalist Scott Rosenberg (2007, 301), “pouring out their inspirations and frustrations, their insights and tips and fears and dreams on Web sites and in blogs. It has been the basis of if not a canon of great works of software, at least an informal literature around the day-to-day practice of programming.”
    By the late 1990s, a number of academic lawyers had arrived on this scene, specifying the issues in a legal though accessible language that reinforced the ones hackers were themselves formulating. The works and opinions of these lawyers (whether derived from books, blogs, articles, or speeches) have been particularly influential, especially those of Lessig(who I will give more attention to in the conclusion). As a small token of this “lawyer effect,” I quote part of an email-based letter from a Debian developer who wrote Lessig to express dismay over a legal ruling (and its coverage), give his thanks, and explain his current contribution to the politics of information freedom:
    As a brief aside, two days ago I finished reading
The Future of Ideas
.
    I was already familiar with much of the factual material in the book (at least in broad strokes), but I have seldom put down a book so inflamed with rage. Rage at the copyright and telecommunications cartels, not the author, of course. This evening I attended the Indiana Civil Liberties Union’s holiday party, and the President offered to put me on the ICLU’s special committee on “Civil Rights in the Information Age.” In some small way I hope that I can contribute to averting the bleak future you outline in your book.
    I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you for authoring an extremely interesting book, and ask you or a colleague of yours to rebut Prof. Hamilton’s
FindLaw
article. 15
    Lessig wrote back, encouraging him to pour his energies into fighting those who take a conservative and protective view of intellectual property law: “I like your rage. Focus it. And direct it well and rightly against people who think the only truth is in what our framers may have said. There is more. There is what we say, now.” 16
    While many geeks were surprised to learn that high-quality software was available with source code and began to refine their legal vocabulary, many were as intrigued to find out that there was an identifiable community of geeks who programmed not for the sake of profit but rather for the sake of technology. One developer explained how through free software, he discovered the existence of other like-minded geeks:
    What really grabbed me was the community. That was what really grabbed me, and you have to understand at the time, it was a completely foreign notion. [ … ] I had stumbled on this group of people that were interested in the same things that I was interested in that had, basically for no particular reason, built this thing, this operating system, and it actually worked, and I could do my work in it and I had not paid a dime for it; they did not ask anything of me when I downloaded it or used it.
    No longer confined to their local area code and guided by a provocative real-world example in Linux, hackers joined forces, cobbling various communication and collaboration tools into rudimentary but highly effective virtual guildlike workshops on the Internet. There they coded software applications as well as the tools that could facilitate their work. Developers congregated on IRC for the daily pulse of interaction, mailing lists wereteeming with vibrant and at times contentious debates, while code repositories (where developers checked in and checked out source code plus tracked changes) and bug-tracking software became the crucial back-end architecture, allowing developers to manage and organize the complexity of long-distance collaboration (Yuill 2008).
    Specifically, the Linux kernel project, led by a Finnish programmer and college student named Linus Torvalds, and initiated in 1991, was a tsunami of inspiration, causing hackers and developers to