Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

passionate, uncharitable, and sometimes downright vicious.
    During these times, we find that while developers may share a common ethical ground, they often disagree about the implementation of its principles. Though the content of these debates certainly matters (and will be discussed to some extent), my primary focus is on the productive affective stance induced by these crises. I argue that these are instances of assessment, in which people turn their attentive, ethical beings toward an unfolding situation and engage in difficult questions. In this mode, passions are animated while values are challenged and sometimes reformulated. Although these debates sometimes result in project stasis, demoralization, or exodus, they can produce a heightened and productive ethical orientation among developers. Crises can be evaluated as moments of ethical production in terms of not only their functional outcomes but also their ability to move people to reflexively articulate their ideals. Such dialogic, conflicted debate reflects the active engagement of participants who renew and occasionally alter their ethical commitments. As such, crises can be vital to establishing and reestablishing the importance of normative precepts.
    The main purpose of this chapter is to explicate how different instances of ethical labor define the cohesive yet nonunitary moral commitments that developers hold toward Debian and its philosophy of freedom. It is necessary to first briefly introduce Debian’s history and structure.
    Thus, much of what is described in this part of the chapter is Debian’s historical transition from an informal group (organized largely around charismatic leadership, personal relationships, and ad hoc decision making) to a stable institution. Most F/OSS projects in their infancy, including Debian, operate without formal procedures of governance and instead are guided by the technical judgments of a small group of participants. This informal technocracy is captured in a famous pronouncement by a hacker pioneer, David Clark, who helped develop the early protocols of the Internet: “We reject: kings, presidents and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code” (quoted in Hoffman 2011). 2 Even though an ideal of rough consensus still exists in Debian today, Debian developers have had to demarcatemembership criteria, explicitly define roles, and implement a complicated voting protocol in order to successfully grow.
    Although charismatic leadership, improvised actions, and informal relationships still exist in the project today, these have been supplemented by other modes of formal governance. Through Debian’s tremendous growth, developers have cobbled together a hybrid organizational structure that integrates three different modes of governance—democratic majoritarian rule, a guildlike meritocracy, and an ad hoc process of rough consensus. It is unsurprising, then, that many of Debian’s crises result from conflicts arising from differences in these three models. What I want to emphasize is how responses to these crises often clarify the purposes and limits of each mode of interaction.
    Democratic voting reveals Debian’s populist face; it is an acknowledgment that each developer is a valuable contributor to the project and deserves an equal say in its future. Yet democracy and especially majoritarian voting is frequently viewed as an ineffective, improper method for resolving technical matters, because the mediocrity of the majority can overrule the “right” technical decisions. For this reason, developers are notably committed to an open-ended process of argumentation, where vigorous debate, conducted over mailing lists, bug reports, and IRC channels, ideally clarifies the right solution and leads to enough rough consensus to proceed. In this mode, everyone is treated as an equal subject with the potential to convince others of the merit or demerit of a given technical solution, regardless of their status in the project.
    This approach affirms two long-standing liberal dispositions. First, it displays the value placed on speech and debate in determining a nonpartisan resolution to collective problems, theorized, say, in the work of Jürgen Habermas (1981). This commitment also exhibits the preference that Debian developers hold for individually generated decision making in lieu of top-down regulation or management. These tendencies are not unique to Debian developers, though. For instance, Thomas