Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

encounters also steadily grew in importance. The first Linux user group was established in Silicon Valley in 1995, the same year that the first Linux-specific trade show and conference was launched by an unincorporated student organization at North Carolina State University.
    Starting in this grassroots period, entrepreneurs and geeks founded small companies, like Red Hat, providing support services for free software applications, while professional print magazines, like
Linux Journal
, were published for a diversifying technical community. Despite this initial turn to the market, the mainstream press barely noticed this new mode of technological production, while most managers at corporate firms were either unaware of the existence of free software or wholly uninterested in migrating to or developing free software. Free software enthusiasts nevertheless sometimes made the move themselves by installing free software applications at work, but hiding this from “clueless” managers. As noted by Jon “maddog” Hall (2000, 118), an early free software evangelist, most managers at various technology companies would always respond “no” when asked if they used Linux, while many of the technical people would respond “yes”—adding, “but don’t tell our managers.”
    Many developers confirmed this dual life during my research interviews. One Debian developer described it as living a bipolar, “Jekyll and Hyde” existence. Although privately preferring free software, he was always a little afraid that his boss might find out that multimillion-dollar deals were being transacted on software with no corporate backing or warranty. No one knew at the time that in a mere few years, the commercial sector would jubilantly embrace free software, even if a few things had to change, including its name.
    1998–2004: Triumph of Open Source and Ominous DMCA
    By 1998, the Silicon Valley tech boom was truly booming. Technology entrepreneurs were amassing millions in stock options from inflated initial public offerings fueled in part by techno-utopic articles in
Wired
and the
New York Times
. 18 Internet companies like DoubleClick, Star Media, and Ivillage, all fledgling star Silicon Valley firms, were awash in venture capital funding and feverish stock market investments. In the context of one of Silicon Valley’s most pronounced tech booms, geeks continued to install free software servers and other applications in universities and, more than ever, companies, including many Silicon Valley start-ups. Thus by 1997, the grassroots enthusiasm of free software had grown material roots in the corporate sphere. Multiple Linux distributions—most famously Slackware, Debian, and RedHat—were under vigorous development, and newer software applications, like Apache, were gaining significant visibility and being used by high-profile dot-coms like Amazon. Many of the backbone technologies of the Internet were by this time powered by free software (BIND for the domain name system, Sendmail for email, and Apache and Perl for the Web, for example).
    The LinuxWorld trade show had grown considerably in size, while users around the world were forming Linux user groups (and other free software groups) in new locations. Geek news sites like the Web site Slashdot and online periodical
Linux Weekly News
acted as virtual glue for an emerging public, publishing general-interest pieces on free software, along with detailed discussions on the host of new legal questions prompted by the new technologies. More and more developers found jobs that hired them to write or maintain free software.
    In August 1997, Linux finally made the front cover of
Wired
. Torvalds had garnered enough fame from his hobby to be hired by a Silicon Valley hardware firm (Transmeta). In 1998, a couple of computer science graduate students at Stanford University released Google, a search engine powered entirely by Linux. All this activity signaled that although free software was still expanding through grassroots energy, hackers were clearly moving it much closer into the orbit of high-tech capitalist entrepreneurialism. Amid this trajectory, the last-ditch effort of one famous company, Netscape, at economic survival and a name change would bring free software from the geek underground out into the open, in full public view, and even on to the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
    In 1998, Netscape, one of the early great successes of the dot-com era, was battling