Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

products, it feverishly implemented the well-worn corporate tactic of disinformation, using everything in the company’s powerful marketing arsenal to discredit the reliability of Linux. Launching a direct attack against the bulwark of F/OSS, the GPL, Microsoft representatives described this legal agreement with three of the most feared words in the United States: cancer, communism, and un-American. In 2001 during a media interview, Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, stated unabashedly, “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches” (quoted in Greene 2001). Even amid various advertising campaigns, none of these words ever stuck.
    Microsoft’s early assaults against Linux only fueled an existing anti-Microsoft sentiment among developers. Yet not everyone in the trenches of the free software community was enthused by the newfound commercial popularity of open-source software. Not surprisingly, Stallman was deeply concerned and felt that he had lost control over the crucial message of freedom—a sentiment he expressed in a 1998 interview with a sympathetic Bay Area reporter. Stallman remarked that “certain people are trying to rewrite history,” concluding that he might be denied his “place in the movement” (quoted in Leonard 1998). He was afraid that the GNU project’s message of freedom and sharing would get forever squashed, buried under the commercial prospecting characteristic of the dot-com boom.
    By early 1999, not a month passed without some well-known company—Dell, IBM, Sun, or Oracle—issuing a press release about its involvement in or support of open source. By 2000, corporations released these statements weekly. Instead of community-run free software projects, commercial ventures became the most visible players at the Linux trade shows, and began tohire some of the most active developers from leading projects like the Linux kernel and Apache. Even though much of free software (from compilers to Web servers) was stable, mature, and usable before the commercial incursion, the support and services provided by corporate dollars significantly accelerated development and improved the quality of certain products.
    Although Stallman was not opposed to the presence of the market in free software (he repeatedly stated that he hoped programmers would be paid for their labor), he was concerned that as Linux became a high-profile commercial product, the FSF’s contributions would become barely audible, marginalizing the ethical message of free software. While arguing with other developers on the Linux kernel mailing list about the need to include the name GNU within Linux (since the OS, after all, included many pieces of GNU software), Stallman again offered a dire prognosis about the future of free software: “If this thread is annoying, please imagine what it is like to see an idealistic project stymied and made ineffective, because people don’t usually give it the credit for what it has done. If you’re an idealist like me, that can ruin your whole decade.” 21
    At this time, it truly did seem as if the idealism of free software was perhaps a thing of the past. The corporate discourse of technical efficiency and market power was growing to be a Goliath in comparison to the eccentric “David” (Stallman) who initiated the idea and politics of free software. I myself wondered how the message coming out of a small nonprofit in Cambridge, Massachusetts, could ever compete with corporate behemoths like IBM that had million-dollar advertising campaigns at their disposal. Many people were coming to learn about open source through slick advertising campaigns (in the form of print ads, television commercials, and even spray-painted images on city streets) that only corporate giants could afford.
    The corporate acceptance of Linux and open source, however, did not completely eliminate the idealistic elements of free software production. In fact, the popularity of Linux among hackers, the ability of hundreds and eventually thousands of programmers to contribute to it (and other software projects), and its success in the commercial sphere had the effect of rendering visible the underlying ethics of free software to a much larger audience than the FSF and Stallman had ever reached. 22 By turning Linux and open source into household names, many more people learned about not just open source but also the ethical foundations—sharing, freedom, and