Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

could probably fill one or possibly two multivolume dissertations. On IRCs, conversation was bubbling nonstop about this debacle. Posts analyzing the event and its significance appeared on Planet Debian, the group Debian blog that aggregates individual developer’s blogs. I had to spend days reading this material.
    The cascade of responses was astonishing. It is first worth portraying the atmosphere of utter paradox that arose, in which synchronicity sat alongside unsettling discordance. The project was in one of the most pronounced moments of unity that I had seen in a long time. Hundreds and hundreds of developers gave the problem their due attention in the form of numerous writings—on mailing lists, IRCs, and blogs. For days the project felt like it was riding the same but nevertheless dangerously large and unstable collective wave. This was also a moment of pronounced dis-ease and thus discordance, where differences of opinion rang loud and overblown accusations prevailed, as if a furious legion of frenzied and rabid hydra had suddenly appeared on the scene, with each individual head screeching, rearing, and rending in all directions.
    It felt as if Debian was coming apart at its seams. But a duality of centrifugal discordance
and
centripetal synchronicity defines crisis. Crisis sits at a crossroads, a moment of betwixt and between when outcomes are decidedly uncertain. During this period, people were brought together to express their deep dissatisfaction, but pulled apart from one other by different sets of conflicting opinions—including over the very reaction—with unity underdire threat. There was a sense that this crisis was at once remarkably silly and overblown, a distraction from the work required by the immanent release, yet fully important and serious, as if some line had been crossed. Why? What was it about this particular email that caused such collective alarm?
    The crisis rested on several factors. Notably, the developers were able to suture a wide range of concerns to this email, but one of the most significant complaints, stated over and again, was about
its tone
: its disharmonious resonance struck the wrong collective chord, working to resurrect the project’s perennial discomfort over the corruptibility of meritocratic authority. Other precipitating factors included its timing and content. Last but not least was the email’s content, which many developers found shocking. Over the course of many years, Debian had built an image of being a Universal OS, special among its class because it ran on more architectures than any other Linux distribution. Developers had informally animated the edifice of the DFSG’s nondiscrimination clause to include architecture support. The announcement that the era of technical universality was perhaps soon to be part of its past was a huge blow to Debian’s sense of collective pride.
    Complaints about the email’s tone centered on the following sentence: “The release team and the FTP masters are mutually agreed that it is not sustainable to continue making coordinated releases for as many architectures as Sarge currently contains, let alone for as many new proposed architectures as are waiting in the wings.” Even though the email was stated as a proposal, below is a short excerpt from an IRC discussion that articulated the shock that the email produced:
     mm, I certainly didn’t expect the meeting to be quite so wide-ranging; in advance, I rather expected it to be mostly “ok, let’s sort out Sarge; [ … ] oh, and in the five minutes we have left, how can we look to avoid this in the future?”
     vapor-b: if you wanted open discussion, you should have stopped in your tracks when it became apparent that other people might be interested in the subject. Don’t do shadowy meetings on your part and request open discussion from us.
     Yaarr: but that is what happened: they put out a proposal and now it can be discussed.
     yeah, sure
     and the announcement, signed off by all the people who do the work, and most future dpl candidates, had an unfortunate ring of finality. If indeed this is a proposal, that is open to serious discussion (as opposed to “this is the way it is, unless you happen to convince all of us of something else, despite the hours of discussion where we hammered it all out”), than [
sic
] perhaps a follow-up is in order.
     stig: I don’t know about you, but my comprehension of the English