EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES Technological Lives, Scientic Arts, Anthropological Voices A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit Two Bits 2008 duke university press durham and london 2008 duke university press durham and london TH E C U LT URA L SI G NI F IC ANC E O F FR E E SOF TWA RE Two Bits CH R IS TOP HER M . K E LT Y © 2008 Duke University Press Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Charis (an Open Source font) by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledg- ments appear on the last printed pages of this book. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike Li- cense, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A. “NonCommercial” as dened in this license specically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if sale does not result in a prot by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprot or NGO. Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of HASTAC (Humani- ties, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), which provided funds to help support the electronic interface of this book. Two Bits is accessible on the Web at twobits.net. To my parents, Anne and Ted Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction 1 Part I the internet 1. Geeks and Recursive Publics 27 2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists 64 Part II free software 3. The Movement 97 4. Sharing Source Code 118 5. Conceiving Open Systems 143 6. Writing Copyright Licenses 179 7. Coordinating Collaborations 210 Part III modulations 8. “If We Succeed, We Will Disappear” 243 9. Reuse, Modication, and the Nonexistence of Norms 269 Conclusion: The Cultural Consequences of Free Software 301 Notes 311 Bibliography 349 Index 367 Preface This is a book about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural signicance of Free Software. Two Bits explains how Free Software works and how it emerged in tandem with the Internet as both a technical and a social form. Understanding Free Software in detail is the best way to understand many contentious and confus- ing changes related to the Internet, to “commons,” to software, and to networks. Whether you think rst of e-mail, Napster, Wikipedia, MySpace, or Flickr; whether you think of the proliferation of da- tabases, identity thieves, and privacy concerns; whether you think of traditional knowledge, patents on genes, the death of scholarly publishing, or compulsory licensing of AIDS medicine; whether you think of MoveOn.org or net neutrality or YouTube—the issues raised by these phenomena can be better understood by looking carefully at the emergence of Free Software. Why? Because it is in Free Software and its history that the is- sues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online po- litical advocacy and “social” software—were rst gured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the in- novation of organizations and “virtual” collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how indi- viduals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most signicant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform: practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the net- work society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new at earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how. Understanding how Free Software works is not just an academic pursuit but an experience that transforms the lives and work of participants involved. Over the last decade, in eldwork with soft- ware programmers, lawyers, entrepreneurs, artists, activists, and other geeks I have repeatedly observed that understanding how Free Software works results in a revelation. People—even (or, per- haps, especially) those who do not consider themselves program- mers, hackers, geeks, or technophiles—come out of the experience with something like religion, because Free Software is all about the practices, not about the ideologies and goals that swirl on its sur- face. Free Software and its creators and users are not, as a group, antimarket or anticommercial; they are not, as a group, anti– intellectual property or antigovernment; they are not, as a group, pro- or anti- anything. In fact, they are not really a group at all: not a corporation or an organization; not an NGO or a government agency; not a professional society or an informal horde of hackers; not a movement or a research project. Free Software is, however, public; it is about making things pub- lic. This fact is key to comprehending its cultural signicance, its x preface [...]... aware of itself at the same time that it began to question its mission, is the subject of chapter 3 I use the term movement to designate one of the five core components of Free Software: the practices of argument and disagreement about the meaning of Free Software Through these practices of discussion and critique, the other four practices start to come into relief, and participants in both Free Software. .. something surprising: for all the ideological distinctions at the level of discourse, they are doing exactly the same thing at the level of practice The affect-laden histrionics with which geeks argue about the definition of what makes Free Software free or Open Source open can be matched only by the sober specificity of the detailed practices they share The second component of Free Software is just such a... of the emergence of Free Software beginning in 1998–99 and stretching back in time as far as the late 1950s; it recapitulates part I by examining Free Software as an exemplar of a recursive public The five chapters in part II tell a coherent historical story, but each is focused on a separate component of Free Software The stories in these chapters help distinguish the figure of Free Software from the. .. happens? Is this still Free Software? What happens when both the sheet and the performance are “born digital”? Or, to take a different example, Free Software requires Free Software licenses, but the terms of these licenses are often changed and often heatedly discussed and vigilantly policed by geeks What degree of change removes a license introduction 15 from the realm of Free Software and why? How... Conceived this way, Free Software is a system of thresholds, not of classification; the excitement that participants and observers sense comes from the modulation (experimentation) of each of these practices and the subsequent discovery of where the thresholds are Many, many people have written their own Free Software copyright licenses, but only some of them remain within the threshold of the practice... open access Free Software is no longer only about software it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge The terms Free Software and Open Source don’t quite capture the extent of this reorientation or their own cultural significance They  introduction refer, quite narrowly, to the practice of creating software an activity many people consider to be quite far from their experience... Free Software, but it was impossible to ignore its emergence and manifest centrality to geeks The debates about the definition of Free Software that I participated in online and in the field eventually led me away from studying geeks per se and turned me toward the central research concern of this book: what is the cultural significance of Free Software? In part II what I offer is not a definition of Free. .. environment or an infrastructure—for Free Software But the Internet looks the way it does because of Free Software Free Software and the Internet are related like figure and ground or like system and environment; neither are stable or unchanging in and of themselves, and there are a number of practical, technical, and historical places where the two are essentially indistinguishable The Internet is not itself... independent of other forms of constituted power and is capable of speaking to existing forms of power through the production of actually existing alternatives Free Software is one instance of this concept, both as it has emerged in the recent past and as it undergoes transformation and differentiation in the near future There are other instances, including those that emerge from the practices of Free Software, ... setting, rather than as a rarefied list of rules The fifth component, the practice of coordination and collaboration (chapter 7), is the most talked about: the idea of tens or hundreds of thousands of people volunteering their time to contribute to the creation of complex software In this chapter I show how novel forms of coordination developed in the 1990s and how they worked in the canonical cases of Apache . about Free Software, also known as Open Source Software, and is meant for anyone who wants to understand the cultural signicance of Free Software. Two Bits. the chance to complete much of this book. John Homan graciously and generously allowed the use of the domain name twobits.net, in support of Free Software.