Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

licensing agreements. It is routinely voiced in public discourse and everyday conversation. Such commitments to freedom, access, and transparency are formalized in a Linux distribution known as Debian, one of the most famous free software projects. These values are reflected in a pair of charters—the Debian Constitution and the Debian Social Contract—that articulate an organizational vision and formulate a set of promises to the wider free software community. These charters’ names alone unmistakably betray their liberal roots, even if they were not explicitly created with the goal of “advancing” liberal ideals.
    By liberalism, I do not mean what may first come to mind: a political party in Europe usually associated with politicians who champion free market solutions, or in the United States, a near synonym for the Democratic Party. Nor is it just an identity that follows from being a proud, card-carrying member of the American Civil Liberties Union or Electronic Frontier Foundation, although these certainly can be markers.
    Here I take liberalism to embrace historical as well as present-day moral and political commitments and sensibilities that should be familiar to most readers: protecting property and civil liberties, promoting individual autonomy and tolerance, securing a free press, ruling through limited government and universal law, and preserving a commitment to equal opportunity and meritocracy. These principles, which vary over time and place, are realized institutionally and culturally in various locations at different times. Perhaps the most famous of these are the institutions of higher education, market policies set by transnational institutions, and the press, but they are also at play on the Internet and with computer hackers, such as those who develop free software. 2
    The small statement that prefaces the GNU GPL thus hints at two elements of this community: one is esoteric, and grounded in technology and its material practices; and the other concerns a broader, culturally familiar vision of freedom, free speech rights, and liberalism that harks back to constitutional ideals. We should not take either for granted but instead open them up to critical reflection, and one route to do so is by bringing them together. This ethnography takes seriously free software’s visions of liberty and freedom as well as the mundane artifacts that hackers take pleasure and joy in creating. In considering them together, important lessons are revealed about the incomplete, sometimes fraught, but nonetheless noticeablerelationship between hacking and liberalism, and the transformations and tensions evident within the liberal tradition and computer hacking.
    A Liberal Critique within Liberalism
    The terms free and open as applied to software are distinct yet often come paired. This is in part because they designate the same alternative licenses and collaborative methodologies, but they differ in their moral orientation: the term free software foremost emphasizes the right to learn and access knowledge, while open source tends to flag practical benefits. 3 Many participants, whether they are volunteers or corporate employees paid to work on free software, refer to themselves with pride as hackers—computer aficionados driven by an inquisitive passion for tinkering and learning technical systems, and frequently committed to an ethical version of information freedom.
    Although hackers hold multiple motivations for producing their software, collectively they are committed to
productive freedom
. This term designates the institutions, legal devices, and moral codes that hackers have built in order to autonomously improve on their peers’ work, refine their technical skills, and extend craftlike engineering traditions. This ethnography is centrally concerned with how hackers have built a dense ethical and technical practice that sustains their productive freedom, and in so doing, how they extend as well as reformulate key liberal ideals such as access, free speech, transparency, equal opportunity, publicity, and meritocracy.
    I argue that F/OSS draws from and also rearticulates elements of the liberal tradition. Rather than designating only a set of explicitly held political, economic, or legal views, I treat liberalism in its cultural registers. 4 Free software hackers culturally concretize a number of liberal themes and sensibilities—for example, through their competitive mutual aid, avid free speech