Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Malaby (2009, 60) describes the mistrust of the hierarchical management that he routinely witnessed among the programmer employees of Linden Lab, makers of Second Life, which he portrays as a “politically charged disposition, one that tended to treat top-down or vertical decision making as the antithesis of empowered and creative action.” 3
    However skeptical Debian hackers are of rigid, top-down authority, their system of equal opportunity nonetheless leads to some established modes and nodes of authority, and thus is also the basis for the hierarchies that inhere in meritocracies. Individual developers who over time come to demonstrate their technical worth through a combination of ability and dedication eventually obtain the status of a trusted technical guardian. As such, a meritocratic system arises that vests power in roles, such as delegates and various technical “masters” who hold power for unspecified periods of time.As the very names of their roles suggest, guardians are not unlike the guild masters of times past who held the trust and respect of other guild members because of their wisdom, experience, and mastery of the craft.
    If democratic rule is sometimes treated with overt suspicion and dislike, there is a far more subtle fear concerning the importance of meritocracy and the meritocrats it produces—namely, the fear of corruption. Specifically, there is discomfort with the idea that the technical guardians could (as they are vested to do) exercise their authority without consulting the project as a whole, thereby foreclosing precisely the neutral, technical debate that allowed them to gain their authority in the first place. Debian developers at times express their unease about the fact that delegates have the legitimate power to make decisions without consulting other developers. This anxiety is voiced indirectly through the humorous phrase “There is no cabal.” It is manifested more critically when developers in positions of authority are seen to violate what I call “meritocratic trust”—the expectation that entrusted guardians act in good technical faith and not for personal interest.
    The building of trust and novel organizational procedures has been central to the organizational growth of Debian as well as balancing its governance modes. These themes are recurrent in science and technology studies. Whether expressed through the trustworthiness of a noble character, as was the case in seventeenth-century British scientific enterprise (Shapin 1994), or the transformation of books into transparent and vetted objects of truthful knowledge (Johns 1998), trust has been essential to bringing coherence, order, and stability to emergent social institutions, objects, and technical practices. Within F/OSS projects, issues of trust are no less pressing (Kelty 2005). Questions of who and what to trust—whether delegates, voting procedures, a piece of code, a license, or a guideline—are central to the repertoire of ethical practices that are the primary focus of this chapter. 4
    Debian and Its Social Organization
    Debian is a project, made up of just over a thousand volunteers at the time of this writing, that creates and distributes a Linux-based OS composed of thousands of individual software applications. As is the case with most mid- to large-size projects (i.e., those with over a couple of hundred developers), Debian is extraordinarily complex and has undergone considerable changes over the course of its history. In its nascency, Debian was run on an informal basis; it had fewer than two-dozen developers, who communicated primarily through a single email list. Excitement, passion, and experimentation drove the project’s early development. In order to accommodate technical and human growth, however, significant changes in its policy, procedures, and structure occurred between 1997 and 1999. Now Debian boasts an intricate hybrid political system, a developer IRC, a formalized membershipentry procedure (the NMP), and a set of charters that includes the Constitution, Social Contract, and Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG). Debian has produced detailed policy and technical manuals; controls development, testing, and mirroring machines located around the world; and manages bug-tracking and collaborative software. The project also publishes a newsletter, hosts a group blog, and organizes an annual conference.
    The bulk of the volunteer work for Debian has always consisted of software