Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

sure you have kde-minimal installed.
    Guiding this practice is the idea that the free software project represents an endeavor that far exceeds any single person’s efforts, and thus everyone’s contribution is highly regarded, whether it involves filing a bug report or offering a significant, large-scale innovation.
    On the other hand, hackers often express a commitment to self-reliance, which can be at times displayed in a quite abrasive and elitist tone. The most famous token of this stance is the short quip “Read the Fucking Manual” (RTFM). It is worth noting that accusations or RTFM replies are rarer than instances of copious sharing. Let me provide two examples of RTFM in action. In the first, “Error” drops into a new channel after asking a question in the #perl channel, where he got a prompt RTFM, after which everyone else went back to discussing the band Metallica. In this channel, they did not offer an RTFM but instead suggested going to the #metallica channel, which in this case, is a joke [IRC channels are designated by #name-of-channel].
    <813-error> i ask a question in #perl and get RTFM and they go back to talking about metallica [ … ]
    <813-error> d Match digit character     * C4 knows nothing of perl
     same here :/
     ask in #metallica
    The second example does not contain a joke but rather only a rebuke in the form of RTFM:
     Ace2016: alsamixer / aumix are interactive ncurses programs
     so?
     Ace2016: You may be able to steer ’em w/ stdin as well.
     can’t they accept a command like aumix—volume decrease 10% or something like that?
     Ace2016: RTFM
     Ace2016: Which is to say, I don’t know. Go look yourself.
    These two poles of value reflect pervasive features of hacker social and technical production as it unfolds in everyday life. It only takes a few days of following hacker technical discussion to realize that many of their conversations, whether virtual or in person, are astonishingly long question-and-answer sessions. To manage the complexity of the technological landscape, hackers turn to fellow hackers (along with manuals, books, mailing lists, documentation, and search engines) for constant information, guidance, and help. Unlike academics—who at times religiously guard their data or findings until published, or only circulate them among a small group of trusted peers—hackers freely share their findings, insights, and solutions. More than ever, and especially in the context of free software projects, hackers see their productive mutual aid as the underlying living credo driving free software philosophy, and the methodology of collaboration and openness. Hackersmaintain that this mode of production is responsible for better hackers and better technology.
    Alongside technical question-and-answer sessions, developers dissect the ethics of their labor. For example, on a Debian mentors’ mailing list discussion, one aspiring hacker asked, “How did you get from the middle ground to guru-dom?? Or is the answer that if I need to ask, I will never be a hacker!!??” A developer known for his humility and prolific contributions to the Debian project offered a lengthy response—a small section of which I quote below. In highlighting the importance of sharing, learning for others, and even coding for others, he affirms a populist stance, commonly expressed by many Debian developers:
    One other inspiration for me has been helping people. Though this has been spottier than I could hope, I do from time to time end up doing some program entirely because I can see other people need it. This tends to broaden experience a lot. Things like writing programs for an unfamiliar platform (microsoft), in a unfamiliar language (spanish), and needing to work closely with the people who would use it, cannot help but change how you look at things. My most valuable experiences in this area have been when I had direct contact with the people who would be using the program, rather than just noticing a hole and deciding I would try to go fill it like you did. 9
    Here he accords weight to pedagogy and collective interdependence in which learning from and even coding for others is a crucial component of technical progress as well as self-development.
    During this discussion, though, other developers stressed the importance of independence by urging the questioner to follow his own particular interests necessary