Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

back to the original developers. It also takes the realistic view that some users may still be using non-free software and that providing this software actually helps Debian’s users and indirectly the free software community.
    The Debian Free Software Guidelines is the set of concrete rules that help determine if a piece of software complies with the Social Contract and the Project’s goals. The rules in the DFSG are chosen to make sure software accepted into Debian maintains the user’s freedoms to use, distribute, and modify that software now and forever. This is not just for Debian’s users but anyone who might take software in Debian and modify it, create CDROMs, or even create a derivative distribution. [ … ]
    > Also, describe what you personally think about these documents.
    The Social Contract and the DFSG represent a very unique idea. In this day and age where society (at least in the US and some other first world countries) encourages individualism and tries to divide the people and control them it is very refreshing to read the Debian Social Contract. Proprietary software made by commercial software companies/developers is exactly that, commercial. Those companies/developers are only about profit or advancing their agenda and will do what they need to in order to maximize that. Often this conflicts with doing the right thing for the user and here are some examples,
    —If a company/developer sells a piece of proprietary software that, as all software does, has bugs and they also sell incident based support contracts then what incentive do they have for fixing bugs in the software?
    —If a company/developer’s revenue stream is based on selling new versions of their proprietary software, what incentive do they have for fixing bugs in the old one rather than forcing users to pay for a new upgrade they may not want. [ … ]
    —Imagine a company/developer that develops a proprietary application that initially meets the users needs so well and is priced reasonably that they gain a monopoly on the market. With the competition gone they can raise their prices or bundle additional unwanted applications into their software, or do pretty much anything they want.
    —Now imagine a company/developer that uses that monopoly in one market to gain entry and into other markets and attacking users’ freedoms in those as well.
    In all these examples the company/developer benefits at the expense of the users.
    In order to prevent situations like this one of the things the Social Contract/DFSG effectively says is this,
    “Our users are so important to us that we are setting these ground rules to protect their freedoms. If you can develop software that meets these rules then not only do we invite you to include it in Debian, but we accept you into the our community and will expend our resources to distribute your software, help keep track of bugs it may have and features that could be added, and help you improve and support it.”
    In addition to that statement several of the DFSG’s clauses have the effect of saying,
    “We are so committed to doing the right thing and working together with anyone in an open manner to resolve differences and always do the right thing for the users that we’re willing to let you have all the work that we’ve done. You can do whatever you wish with it as long as you obey the original author’s license.” [ … ]
    These are very powerful ideas that can’t be taken away or subverted by someone who wants to extort or control users. Personally, I think my interest in getting involved with Debian is an extension of my overall views and this is the only way that I want to use and develop software.
    While the content of this narrative certainly matters, I want to stress the type of ethical labor being produced by this text. The developer takes the vision ensconced in the Debian charters and adds value to it in numerous personalized ways: he reformulates its key principles in his own words; to hone down his points, he makes a fairly sophisticated contrast between proprietary and free software development largely along the ethical lines that matter to him—transparency, openness, and accountability; and he poignantly concludes with a succinct commitment to this style of development.
    What we see here with these applications is what Cover, in his discussion of a nomos, describes as a simultaneous process of subjective commitment to and objective projection of norms, or a bridging that