Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

follow suit. In 1993, Ian Murdock, dissatisfied with the available Linux distributions, emulated the Linux kernel development model to start Debian, a distribution made “by developers and for developers.” 17 During an informal discussion at Debconf, Murdock described the idea behind it:
    [It] was to get more than one person involved. And the inspiration for that was the Linux kernel. And for some reason the Linux kernel development model seemed to work. You have one guy, Linus, coordinating things, and random people would come and go and send patches and test things, and it seemed to work, and I figured, what the hell, let’s give it a try and perhaps we can apply the same idea to this distribution.
    He announced the Debian project in August 1993 on the Linux kernel newsgroup, comp.os.linux . Immediately a handful of volunteers offered their time, attention, and labor. By the end of the following year, the number of volunteers grew to a couple of dozen. As Murdock designed the technical architecture to standardize a software package management system, he took it on himself to theorize and conceptualize the nature of this labor (like many other geeks who initiated virtual projects). Along with his initial announcement, Murdock also published “The Debian Manifesto,” where he extended and reformulated ideals in Stallman’s “GNU Manifesto,” addressing the pragmatic importance of transparency and distributed collaboration:
    The Debian design process is open to ensure that the system is of the highest quality and that it reflects the needs of the user community. By involving others with a wide range of abilities and backgrounds, Debian is able to be developed in a modular fashion. Its components are of high quality because those with expertise in a certain area are given the opportunity to construct or maintain the individual components of Debian involving that area. Involving others also ensures that valuable suggestions for improvement can be incorporated into the distribution during its development; thus, a distribution is created based on the needs and wants of the users rather than the needs and wants of the constructor. It is very difficult for one individual or small group to anticipate these needs and wants in advance without direct input from others. 18
    On their project Web pages, which act as the initial portal to these projects, most large-scale F/OSS projects (Gnome, Apache, KDE, Perl, Python, etc.) showcased similar documents, articulating the virtues of collaboration and transparency, and the pragmatic advantages of open-source development. Even projects like Apache, which ideologically distance themselves from the morality of free software, justifying openness in primarily utilitarian terms, have detailed documents that explain the “open-source way.” 19
    By contributing to a project, hackers came into closer contact with this discourse on the nature of their labor and the moral implications of licenses—a vocabulary that they themselves helped to create and transform. The growing unification of technical experience and its representation became notable on project news Web sites, mailing lists, blogs, books, and articles; these texts provided developers with a rich set of ideas about creativity, expression, and individuality. Equipped with this language of freedom and creativity, hackers brought coherence to the technical act of coding, frequently conceptualizing it as an act of individual expression, as we see here with Matthew:
    Code is a form of expression. And for some people, well it is very hard for a nontechie to think that way. [ … ] It is hard to teach the everyman the value of free. [We] need to teach [that] free is a product of the creativity of the programmer. They sat down and they put creativity into it, and they put thought into it.
    Programmers deliberately placed source code in the realm of freedom—a space often closely linked to public and rational communication. “I think this open communication,” Michael added, “is based on the freedom of the source code. Members of the community are free to discuss the intricate details of a program without fear of breaking any agreements.”
    While developers enunciate a sophisticated language of freedom that makes individual experiences of creation intelligible, their language also elaborates on ideals that are more collectivist and populist in their orientation—such as cooperation, community, and solidarity. While many