Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

passage in Levy’s
Hackers
where he defines the tenets of the hacker ethic. In a general sense, these principles still powerfully capture the spirit of ethical commitments. Nevertheless, by leaning so heavily on Levy, what we miss is how these precepts take actual form and how they change over time. The literature, crucially, has tended to ignore how hacker commitments are transformed by the lived experiences that unfold within F/OSS projects. 1
    This chapter uses the Debian project to demonstrate how free software development is not simply a technical endeavor but also a moral one. Theanalysis is informed by the work of the legal theorist Robert Cover, who examines the ways that “jurisgenesis,” the production and stabilization of inhabited normative meanings, requires an ongoing and sometimes conflicting interpretation of codified textual norms. “Some small and private, others immense and public,” these continual acts of reinterpretation and commitment establish what Cover (1993, 95) calls a nomos:
    We inhabit a
nomos
—a normative universe. We constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful. [ … ] No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. For every constitution there is an epic, for each decalogue a scripture. Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live.
    As Debian has organizationally matured, it has also concurrently developed along legal and ethical lines, codifying key principles in two related documents: the Social Contract and DFSG. Developers continually draw on these texts to craft a dense ethical practice that sustains itself primarily via ongoing acts of narrative interpretation.
    While the idea of nomos provides a useful general framework for understanding how ethical stances are codified and internalized, for my purposes here, I specify its meaning by distinguishing among a repertoire of everyday micropractices that I group under two distinct (and contrasting) ethical moments: enculturation and punctuated crisis. While in practice these two moments exist in a far more complicated mixture and copresence, here they are separated for the sake of clarity and analytic value. Each one tells us a slightly different story about how people use narrative to adopt values, and then animate and transform them over time.
    By ethical enculturation, I refer to a process of relatively conflict-free socialization. Among developers, this includes learning the tacit and explicit knowledge (including technical, moral, or procedural knowledge) needed to effectively interact with other project members as well as acquiring trust, learning appropriate social behavior, and establishing best practices. Although ethical enculturation is ongoing and distributed, the most pertinent instance of it in the Debian project is the New Maintainer Process (NMP)—the procedure of mentorship and testing through which prospective developers apply for and gain membership in Debian. Fulfilling the mandates of the NMP is not a matter of a few days of filling out forms. It can take months of hard work. A prospective developer has to find a sponsor and advocate, learn the complicated workings of Debian policy and its technical infrastructure, successfully package a piece of software that satisfies a set of technical standards, and meet at least one other Debian developer in person for identity verification. This period of mentorship, pedagogy, and testing ensures that developers enter with a common denominator oftechnical, legal, and philosophical knowledge, and hence become trusted collective members.
    The other moment I investigate is crisis. As the number of developers in the Debian project has grown from one dozen to over one thousand, punctuated crises routinely emerge around particularly contested issues: matters of project transparency, internal and external communication, membership size, the nature of authority within the project, and the scope and limits of software licenses. Many of these crises have an acute phase (usually spurred by a provocative action or statement) in which debate erupts on several media all at once: mailing lists, IRCs, and blog entries. While the debate during these periods can be congenial, measured, rational, and sometimes even peppered liberally with jokes, its tone can also be