Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

severe financial losses due to competition posed by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. In January 1998, the company announced a loss of $88.3 million and cut three hundred jobs (Kawamoto 1998). As part of an attempt to remain in business, Netscape released the source code of its popular browser under an open-source license, causing waves in the mainstream press for its breach of corporate intellectual property norms. Netscape thus brought this new concept of intellectual property law—free software—into the public limelight. To justify its heretical choice to shareholders and the public, Netscape offered the following rationale: “This aggressive move will enable Netscape to harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by incorporating their best enhancements into future versions of Netscape’s software.” 19 The announcement introduced the idea that perhaps free software could offer economic advantages to corporate America, with the allure of free, “creative” labor constituting the support for the argument.
    During the same months when Netscape technology workers convinced their management that a radical change in the company’s intellectual property model might stave off economic demise, another group of geeks organized by an influential tech industry publisher, Tim O’Reilly, was planning to alter free software’s public image so that other corporations could follow inNetscape’s footsteps. The group wanted to present free software as a safe and irresistible business opportunity, and felt that the name free software got in the way. This collection of free software geeks, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts met in April 1998 in Palo Alto, California, at the Freeware Summit to discuss the future of free software. They were primarily interested in its business potential. The summit conspicuously lacked Stallman.
    In intentionally excluding Stallman from this semi-secret get-together, certain participants were trying to sever the message of free software from its intellectual progenitor. Though by this time the public, developers, and hackers identified free software beyond the efforts of a single individual, Stallman was nevertheless still seen as its ideological mouthpiece, and his message remained focused on software freedom. Some participants at the Freeware Summit were concerned that Stallman’s personal idiosyncrasies, uncompromising radicalism, and constant use of the terms free and freedom might send the corporate world a message of anticommercialism—or worse, some variant of communism or socialism. Even though free software licenses do not bar one from selling free software, the summit organizers felt that Stallman’s conceptualization of free might deter investors. They also pointed out that the term free software was confusing to the public—a sentiment expressed even by many ideological supporters of free software, since it so strongly suggests issues of price and not freedom.
    The group solved this problem through a process of linguistic reframing (Lakoff 2004), replacing the term free software with open source. They wanted the word open to override the ethical messages and designate what they were touting simply as a more efficient development methodology. They knew, however, that creating a new image for open source would “require marketing techniques (spin, image building, and re-branding)” (Raymond 1999, 211)—a branding effort that some of the participants were more than willing to undertake. Eric Raymond, who had recently written what would become an influential article on free software, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” took it on himself to become the mouthpiece and icon for this new open-source marketing strategy.
    Although Raymond’s goal was to bring free software into the business world, like Stallman, he was also deeply engaged in the politics of cultural revaluation (Coleman 1999). While Stallman felt that a certain type of commercial incursion (in the form of intellectual property law) threatened the values of hacker culture, Raymond wanted to bring open source to the market to improve the hacker cultural experience. If hackers could gain a respectable foothold among Fortune 500 companies, he argued, it would allow them to reap enough social capital so that they could escape a cultural ghetto of marginalized nerdiness. While Raymond (1999, 211) described the ghetto as “fairly comfortable [ … ] full of interesting friends,”