Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

transparency, accessibility, and openness for the purpose of facilitating as well as encouraging participation. It represented a new historical chapter in how hackers conceived of and implemented meritocracy.
    One longtime Debian developer, who came of age as a hacker well before the Linux era, powerfully captured the spirit of this change in a short comment he made during a Debian history roundtable at the Debian annual conference. He described how collaboration on Unix proceeded before the Linux era, at the University of California at Berkeley (and other locations) where the Berkeley Unix distribution was partially developed:
    There was a process by which you wrote some code and submitted in the “I-am-not-worthy but I-hope-that-this-will-be-of-use-to-you supplication mode” to Berkeley, and if they kinda looked at it and thought, “Oh, this is cool,” then it would make it in, and if they said, “Interesting idea, but there is a better way to do that,” they might write a different implementation of it.
    While the Berkeley Unix gurus accepted contributions from those who were not already participating on the project, it was difficult to pierce the inner circle of authority and become an actual team member. This, from the point of view of the developers participating in the roundtable, produced an unacceptable form of project participation, characterized by a degraded elitism that failed to equalize the terrain on which developers could prove their worth. As I argued earlier, the F/OSS hacker system of meritocracy compels individuals to release the fruits of their labor in order to constantly equalize the conditions for production, so that others can also engage in the lifelong project of technical self-cultivation within a community of peers. When Torvalds and Murdock developed their own projects (the Linux kernel and Debian, respectively), they did things differently than the earlier cadre of Unix hackers by fostering a more egalitarian environment of openness and transparency. Participation was encouraged, and recognition was given where it was due. Accepting more contributions was also, of course, seen as a way to improve and encourage technical efficiency.
    Murdock, who took on a great deal of the early work on Debian, acted as the project’s leader. Debian in this sense was not unusual. Many of the early free software projects worked and still work along this logic of informal leadership by extension of a work ethic charisma (O’Neil 2009). Authority and respect is established through the sheer amount of work one puts into the project; participants in return offer their loyalty to it. But what crucially distinguished Debian from earlier collaborative efforts was that everyone who technically contributed to the project could potentially become a member. By 1995, there was a software package system in place that harnessed the power of individuality to produce a distribution that far exceeded the contributions of any single person.
    In 1996, Debian grew in size to 120 developers and released a version of the OS that contained about 800 packages. Around this time, Murdock passed on the reins of leadership to Perens, who along with a handful of other developers, became responsible for the bulk of the project’s technical work. Perens, already famous in the geek public sphere for both his passionate commitment to the principles of free software and desire to make free software more visible in the business sector, had a marked impact on the organization of Debian, in ways recalled as both positive and negative. 7 Perhaps most significant for my purposes here, Perens helped coordinate the drafting of the Social Contract and DFSG, which were first suggested by Schuessler.
    The genesis of the Social Contract is worth briefly recounting, for it reveals the explicit sense of responsibility and accountability to a larger commonwealth of users and developers that has characterized the project since its inception (when Murdock first articulated these values in “The Debian Manifesto”). Schuessler proposed the idea for the Social Contractafter a conversation at a conference with Bob Young, the cofounder of a then-emergent commercial Linux distribution, Red Hat. When Schuessler suggested that Red Hat might want to guarantee in writing that as it grew larger, it would always provide GPL software, Young replied, “that would be the kiss of death,” implying that such an assurance made to the users of free software