Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

it was still “walled in by a vast and intangible barrier of prejudice inscribed ‘ONLY FLAKES LIVE HERE.’” For Raymond, aligning hacking with the capitalist spirit would allow hackers to accrue socially respectable forms of prestige.
    Solely judging from the amount of media attention it received, the open-source marketing campaign was a success. Mainstream journalists complemented their ensemble of sensationalist articles on the Silicon Valley miracle with tales about the wonders of open source. Engineers and geeks working in corporations had actually accomplished much of the silent grunt work that could, in certain respects, back up parts of these stories. Learning the technical, legal, and social ropes of free and open software, these technology workers taught their corporate managers (whose interest in this novel concept had been piqued by the articles in
Forbes
and
Wired
) about this enigmatic sociotechnical world or revealed the fact they were already using this software. Geeks were more than happy to finally be public about their secret work life and explain to their perplexed bosses why free software, which often came with no warranty and no corporate technical support, was superior to the business default, Microsoft. These moments are recollected with great pride as an early triumph of F/OSS.
    Gates, who had already dealt with “pesky” hobbyists in his youth, had to respond to the product and messages of these impassioned volunteers. Early in 1998, Gates publicly stated that Linux posed no competitive threat to Microsoft. In an interview, he confidently asserted that “popular newcomers such as Linux pose no threat to Windows. Like a lot of products that are free, you get a loyal following even though it’s small. I have never had a customer mention Linux to me” (quoted in Lea 1999).
    Despite Gates’s proclamations, top-level managers were writing anxious internal memos about the threat posed by open source—memos that were eventually leaked online by a Microsoft employee. They revealed that the Redmond, California, giant was in fact eminently concerned by the “loyal following”:
    OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue platform threat to Microsoft, particularly in server space. Additionally, the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in OSS has benefits that are not replicable with our current licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mindshare threat. 20
    Referring to them as the “Halloween Documents” to commemorate the day of their unauthorized release, Raymond provided extensive commentary on the memos, which circulated on the Internet like wildfire. In the short history of F/OSS, this soap opera has become one of the most memorable and influential incidents, and has been received as one of the ultimate historical ironies that many geeks savored. Since Gates’s famous 1976 letter to hobbyists is part of hacker cultural lore, it was doubly ironic to have his admonishment against the Homebrew hobbyists—“One thing you do is prevent good software from being written”—historically nullified twenty-two years later due to the action taken by hobbyists.
    While Netscape’s announcement provided a dose of credibility to an informal hacker practice and its concomitant legal arrangements, everyone knew Netscape was releasing the source code as a last-ditch effort to halt further financial hemorrhaging. Netscape’s move was an experiment whose outcome and effect on the future of open source was entirely uncertain. But having Microsoft, one of the largest, most financially secure, and certainly most influential software firms in the world, acknowledge the viability of F/OSS (as both a method and product) sent the clearest possible message to the public: open source was to be taken seriously.
    For the Freeware Summit participants who had recently launched an open-source marketing campaign to bring commercial legitimacy to this fringe practice, the leak’s timing was a blessing. The surprising yet sweetly vindicating Halloween documents sealed the idea that open source was nothing short of “the real thing” and could make waves in the market. The era of festive bewilderment was over, and it was replaced by a period of revelry as the dot-com boom also fueled the newfound discovery and celebration of the open-source phenomenon.
    Although Microsoft stated in its internal memos that it would not lead a campaign of fear, uncertainty, and doubt against open-source