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% SiSU 4.0

@title: Two Bits
 :subtitle: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

@creator:
 :author: Kelty, Christopher M.

@date:
 :published: 2008

@rights:
 :copyright: © 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 acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.
 :license: Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License, 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 defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO. \\ Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of HASTAC (Humanities, 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.

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 :topic_register: SiSU markup sample:book:discourse;open source software:social aspects;software:development:geeks;anthropology:geeks;book:subject:anthropology|information society|geeks;society;programming;society:information society;

@identifier:
 :oclc: 183914703

% :isbn: 978082234264-9

@links:
 { Two Bits home page }http://twobits.net/
 { Christopher M. Kelty }http://kelty.org/
 { Two Bits @ Amazon.com }http://www.amazon.com/Two-Bits-Cultural-Significance-Software/dp/0822342642
 { Two Bits @ Barnes & Noble }http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Two-Bits/Christopher-M-Kelty/e/9780822342649

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 :home_button_text: {Two Bits}http://twobits.net; {Christopher M. Kelty}http://kelty.org/
 :footer: {Two Bits}http://twobits.net; {Christopher M. Kelty}http://kelty.org/
%:home_button_image: {2bits.png }http://twobits.net

:A~ @title @author

1~dedication Dedication

To my parents, Anne and Ted

1~preface 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 significance 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
confusing changes related to the Internet, to "commons," to software, and to
networks. Whether you think first of e-mail, Napster, Wikipedia, MySpace, or
Flickr; whether you think of the proliferation of databases, 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. ,{[PAGE x]},

Why? Because it is in Free Software and its history that the issues raised—from
intellectual property and piracy to online political advocacy and "social"
software—were first figured 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 innovation 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 individuals 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 significant, 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 network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s
the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat 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 fieldwork with software 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, perhaps, especially) those who do not consider themselves programmers,
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 surface. 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 public. This fact
is key to comprehending its cultural significance, its ,{[PAGE xi]}, appeal,
and its proliferation. Free Software is public in a particular way: it is a
self-determining, collective, politically independent mode of creating very
complex technical objects that are made publicly and freely available to
everyone—a "commons," in common parlance. It is a practice of working through
the promises of equality, fairness, justice, reason, and argument in a domain
of technically complex software and networks, and in a context of powerful,
lopsided laws about intellectual property. The fact that something public in
this grand sense emerges out of practices so seemingly arcane is why the first
urge of many converts is to ask: how can Free Software be "ported" to other
aspects of life, such as movies, music, science or medicine, civil society, and
education? It is this proselytizing urge and the ease with which the practices
are spread that make up the cultural significance of Free Software. For better
or for worse, we may all be using Free Software before we know it.

1~ Acknowledgements

Anthropology is dependent on strangers who become friends and
colleagues—strangers who contribute the very essence of the work. In my case,
these strangers are also hyperaware of issues of credit, reputation,
acknowledgment, reuse, and modification of ideas and things. Therefore, the
list is extensive and detailed.

Sean Doyle and Adrian Gropper opened the doors to this project, providing
unparalleled insight, hospitality, challenge, and curiosity. Axel Roch
introduced me to Volker Grassmuck, and to much else. Volker Grassmuck
introduced me to Berlin’s Free Software world and invited me to participate in
the Wizards of OS conferences. Udhay Shankar introduced me to almost everyone I
know, sometimes after the fact. Shiv Sastry helped me find lodging in Bangalore
at his Aunt Anasuya Sastry’s house, which is called "Silicon Valley" and which
was truly a lovely place to stay. Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram let me haunt
their office and cat-5 cables ,{[PAGE xiv]}, during one of the more turbulent
periods of their careers. Glenn Otis Brown visited, drank, talked, invited,
challenged, entertained, chided, encouraged, drove, was driven, and gave and
received advice. Ross Reedstrom welcomed me to the Rice Linux Users’ Group and
to Connexions. Brent Hendricks did yeoman’s work, suffering my questions and
intrusions. Geneva Henry, Jenn Drummond, Chuck Bearden, Kathy Fletcher,
Manpreet Kaur, Mark Husband, Max Starkenberg, Elvena Mayo, Joey King, and Joel
Thierstein have been welcoming and enthusiastic at every meeting. Sid Burris
has challenged and respected my work, which has been an honor. Rich Baraniuk
listens to everything I say, for better or for worse; he is a magnificent
collaborator and friend.

James Boyle has been constantly supportive, for what feels like very little
return on investment. Very few people get to read and critique and help reshape
the argument and structure of a book, and to appear in it as well. Mario
Biagioli helped me see the intricate strategy described in chapter 6. Stefan
Helmreich read early drafts and transformed my thinking about networks. Manuel
DeLanda explained the term assemblage to me. James Faubion corrected my
thinking in chapter 2, helped me immeasurably with the Protestants, and has
been an exquisitely supportive colleague and department chair. Mazyar Lotfalian
and Melissa Cefkin provided their apartment and library, in which I wrote large
parts of chapter 1. Matt Price and Michelle Murphy have listened patiently to
me construct and reconstruct versions of this book for at least six years. Tom
and Elizabeth Landecker provided hospitality and stunningly beautiful
surroundings in which to rewrite parts of the book. Lisa Gitelman read
carefully and helped explain issues about documentation and versioning that I
discuss in chapter 4. Matt Ratto read and commented on chapters 4-7, convinced
me to drop a useless distinction, and to clarify the conclusion to chapter 7.
Shay David provided strategic insights about openness from his own work and
pushed me to explain the point of recursive publics more clearly. Biella
Coleman has been a constant interlocutor on the issues in this book—her
contributions are too deep, too various, and too thorough to detail. Her own
work on Free Software and hackers has been a constant sounding board and guide,
and it has been a pleasure to work together on our respective texts. Kim Fortun
helped me figure it all out. ,{[PAGE xv]},

George Marcus hired me into a fantastic anthropology department and has had
immense faith in this project throughout its lifetime. Paul Rabinow, Stephen
Collier, and Andrew Lakoff have provided an extremely valuable setting—the
Anthropology of the Contemporary Research Collaboratory—within which the
arguments of this book developed in ways they could not have as a solitary
project. Joe Dumit has encouraged and prodded and questioned and brainstormed
and guided and inspired. Michael Fischer is the best mentor and advisor ever.
He has read everything, has written much that precedes and shapes this work,
and has been an unwavering supporter and friend throughout.

Tish Stringer, Michael Powell, Valerie Olson, Ala Alazzeh, Lina Dib, Angela
Rivas, Anthony Potoczniak, Ayla Samli, Ebru Kayaalp, Michael Kriz, Erkan Saka,
Elise McCarthy, Elitza Ranova, Amanda Randall, Kris Peterson, Laura Jones,
Nahal Naficy, Andrea Frolic, and Casey O’Donnell make my job rock. Scott
McGill, Sarah Ellenzweig, Stephen Collier, Carl Pearson, Dan Wallach, Tracy
Volz, Rich Doyle, Ussama Makdisi, Elora Shehabbudin, Michael Morrow, Taryn
Kinney, Gregory Kaplan, Jane Greenberg, Hajime Nakatani, Kirsten Ostherr,
Henning Schmidgen, Jason Danziger, Kayte Young, Nicholas King, Jennifer
Fishman, Paul Drueke, Roberta Bivins, Sherri Roush, Stefan Timmermans, Laura
Lark, and Susann Wilkinson either made Houston a wonderful place to be or
provided an opportunity to escape it. I am especially happy that Thom Chivens
has done both and more.

The Center for the Study of Cultures provided me with a Faculty Fellowship in
the fall of 2003, which allowed me to accomplish much of the work in
conceptualizing the book. The Harvard History of Science Department and the MIT
Program in History, Anthropology, and Social Studies of Science and Technology
hosted me in the spring of 2005, allowing me to write most of chapters 7, 8,
and 9. Rice University has been extremely generous in all respects, and a
wonderful place to work. I’m most grateful for a junior sabbatical that gave me
the chance to complete much of this book. John Hoffman graciously and
generously allowed the use of the domain name twobits.net, in support of Free
Software. Ken Wissoker, Courtney Berger, and the anonymous reviewers for Duke
University Press have made this a much, much better book than when I started.
,{[PAGE xvi]},

My parents, Ted and Anne, and my brother, Kevin, have always been supportive
and loving; though they claim to have no idea what I do, I nonetheless owe my
small success to their constant support. Hannah Landecker has read and reread
and rewritten every part of this work; she has made it and me better, and I
love her dearly for it. Last, but not least, my new project, Ida Jane Kelty
Landecker, is much cuter and smarter and funnier than Two Bits, and I love her
for distracting me from it.

1~introduction Introduction

Introduction

Around 1998 Free Software emerged from a happily subterranean and obscure
existence stretching back roughly twenty years. At the very pinnacle of the
dotcom boom, Free Software suddenly populated the pages of mainstream business
journals, entered the strategy and planning discussions of executives,
confounded the radar of political leaders and regulators around the globe, and
permeated the consciousness of a generation of technophile teenagers growing up
in the 1990s wondering how people ever lived without e-mail. Free Software
appeared to be something shocking, something that economic history suggested
could never exist: a practice of creating software—good software—that was
privately owned, but freely and publicly accessible. Free Software, as its
ambiguous moniker suggests, is both free from constraints and free of charge.
Such characteristics seem to violate economic logic and the principles of
private ownership and individual autonomy, yet there are tens of ,{[pg 2]},
millions of people creating this software and hundreds of millions more using
it. Why? Why now? And most important: how?
={ Free Software +3 }

Free Software is a set of practices for the distributed collaborative creation
of software source code that is then made openly and freely available through a
clever, unconventional use of copyright law.~{ A Note on Terminology: There is
still debate about how to refer to Free Software, which is also known as Open
Source Software. The scholarly community has adopted either FOSS or FLOSS (or
F/LOSS): the former stands for the Anglo-American Free and Open Source
Software; the latter stands for the continental Free, Libre and Open Source
Software. Two Bits sticks to the simple term Free Software to refer to all of
these things, except where it is specifically necessary to differentiate two or
more names, or to specify people or events so named. The reason is primarily
aesthetic and political, but Free Software is also the older term, as well as
the one that includes issues of moral and social order. I explain in chapter 3
why there are two terms. }~ But it is much more: Free Software exemplifies a
considerable reorientation of knowledge and power in contemporary society—a
reorientation of power with respect to the creation, dissemination, and
authorization of knowledge in the era of the Internet. This book is about the
cultural significance of Free Software, and by cultural I mean much more than
the exotic behavioral or sartorial traits of software programmers, fascinating
though they be. By culture, I mean an ongoing experimental system, a space of
modification and modulation, of figuring out and testing; culture is an
experiment that is hard to keep an eye on, one that changes quickly and
sometimes starkly. Culture as an experimental system crosses economies and
governments, networked social spheres, and the infrastructure of knowledge and
power within which our world functions today—or fails to. Free Software, as a
cultural practice, weaves together a surprising range of places, objects, and
people; it contains patterns, thresholds, and repetitions that are not simple
or immediately obvious, either to the geeks who make Free Software or to those
who want to understand it. It is my goal in this book to reveal some of those
complex patterns and thresholds, both historically and anthropologically, and
to explain not just what Free Software is but also how it has emerged in the
recent past and will continue to change in the near future.~{ 2 Michael M. J.
Fischer, "Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems." }~
={ culture :
     as experimental system ;
   Free Software :
     open source vs. +2 | as experimental system ;
   Geeks +1 ;
   Open Source :
     Free Software vs. +2 ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge +1
}

The significance of Free Software extends far beyond the arcane and detailed
technical practices of software programmers and "geeks" (as I refer to them
herein). Since about 1998, the practices and ideas of Free Software have
extended into new realms of life and creativity: from software to music and
film to science, engineering, and education; from national politics of
intellectual property to global debates about civil society; from UNIX to Mac
OS X and Windows; from medical records and databases to international disease
monitoring and synthetic biology; from Open Source to open access. Free
Software is no longer only about software—it exemplifies a more general
reorientation of power and knowledge.
={ Open access +2 }

The terms Free Software and Open Source don’t quite capture the extent of this
reorientation or their own cultural significance. They ,{[pg 3]}, refer, quite
narrowly, to the practice of creating software—an activity many people consider
to be quite far from their experience. However, creating Free Software is more
than that: it includes a unique combination of more familiar practices that
range from creating and policing intellectual property to arguing about the
meaning of "openness" to organizing and coordinating people and machines across
locales and time zones. Taken together, these practices make Free Software
distinct, significant, and meaningful both to those who create it and to those
who take the time to understand how it comes into being.

In order to analyze and illustrate the more general cultural significance of
Free Software and its consequences, I introduce the concept of a "recursive
public." A recursive public is a /{public that is vitally concerned with the
material and practical maintenance and modification of the technical, legal,
practical, and conceptual means of its own existence as a public; it is a
collective 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, such as Creative Commons, the
Connexions project, and the Open Access movement in science. These latter
instances may or may not be Free Software, or even "software" projects per se,
but they are connected through the same practices, and what makes them
significant is that they may also be "recursive publics" in the sense I explore
in this book. Recursive publics, and publics generally, differ from interest
groups, corporations, unions, professions, churches, and other forms of
organization because of their focus on the radical technological modifiability
of their own terms of existence. In any public there inevitably arises a moment
when the question of how things are said, who controls the means of
communication, or whether each and everyone is being properly heard becomes an
issue. A legitimate public sphere is one that gives outsiders a way in: they
may or may not be heard, but they do not have to appeal to any authority
(inside or outside the organization) in order to have a voice.~{ So, for
instance, when a professional society founded on charters and ideals for
membership and qualification speaks as a public, it represents its members, as
when the American Medical Association argues for or against changes to
Medicare. However, if a new group—say, of nurses—seeks not only to participate
in this discussion—which may be possible, even welcomed—but to change the
structure of representation in order to give themselves status equal to
doctors, this change is impossible, for it goes against the very aims and
principles of the society. Indeed, the nurses will be urged to form their own
society, not to join that of the doctors, a proposition which gives the lie to
the existing structures of power. By contrast, a public is an entity that is
less controlled and hence more agonistic, such that nurses might join, speak,
and insist on changing the terms of debate, just as patients, scientists, or
homeless people might. Their success, however, depends entirely on the force
with which their actions transform the focus and terms of the public. Concepts
of the public sphere have been roundly critiqued in the last twenty years for
presuming that such "equality of access" is sufficient to achieve
representation, when in fact other contextual factors (race, class, sex)
inherently weight the representative power of different participants. But these
are two different and overlapping problems: one cannot solve the problem of
pernicious, invisible forms of inequality unless one first solves the problem
of ensuring a certain kind of structural publicity. It is precisely the focus
on maintaining publicity for a recursive public, over against massive and
powerful corporate and governmental attempts to restrict it, that I locate as
the central struggle of Free Software. Gender certainly influences who gets
heard within Free Software, for example, but it is a mistake to focus on this
inequality at the expense of the larger, more threatening form of political
failure that Free Software addresses. And I think there are plenty of
geeks—man, woman and animal—who share this sentiment. }~ Such publics are not
inherently modifiable, but are made so—and maintained—through the practices of
participants. It is possible for Free Software as we know it to cease to be
public, or to become just one more settled ,{[pg 4]}, form of power, but my
focus is on the recent past and near future of something that is (for the time
being) public in a radical and novel way.
={ Connexions project ;
   Creative Commons ;
   public +6 ;
   recursive public :
     definition of
}

The concept of a recursive public is not meant to apply to any and every
instance of a public—it is not a replacement for the concept of a "public
sphere"—but is intended rather to give readers a specific and detailed sense of
the non-obvious, but persistent threads that form the warp and weft of Free
Software and to analyze similar and related projects that continue to emerge
from it as novel and unprecedented forms of publicity and political action.

At first glance, the thread tying these projects together seems to be the
Internet. And indeed, the history and cultural significance of Free Software
has been intricately mixed up with that of the Internet over the last thirty
years. The Internet is a unique platform—an 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 a recursive public, but it is
something vitally important to that public, something about which such publics
care deeply and act to preserve. Throughout this book, I will return to these
three phenomena: the Internet, a heterogeneous and diverse, though singular,
infrastructure of technologies and uses; Free Software, a very specific set of
technical, legal, and social practices that now require the Internet; and
recursive publics, an analytic concept intended to clarify the relation of the
first two.
={ Internet +12 :
     relation to Free Software ;
   Free Software :
     relation to Internet ;
   public sphere :
     theories of
}

Both the Internet and Free Software are historically specific, that is, not
just any old new media or information technology. But the Internet is many,
many specific things to many, many specific people. As one reviewer of an early
manuscript version of this book noted, "For most people, the Internet is porn,
stock quotes, Al Jazeera clips of executions, Skype, seeing pictures of the
grandkids, porn, never having to buy another encyclopedia, MySpace, e-mail,
online housing listings, Amazon, Googling potential romantic interests, etc.
etc." It is impossible to explain all of these things; the meaning and
significance of the proliferation of digital pornography is a very different
concern than that of the fall of the print encyclopedia ,{[pg 5]}, and the rise
of Wikipedia. Yet certain underlying practices relate these diverse phenomena
to one another and help explain why they have occurred at this time and in this
technical, legal, and social context. By looking carefully at Free Software and
its modulations, I suggest, one can come to a better understanding of the
changes affecting pornography, Wikipedia, stock quotes, and many other
wonderful and terrifying things.~{ Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely known
and generally familiar example of what this book is about. Even though it is
not identified as such, it is in fact a Free Software project and a
"modulation" of Free Software as I describe it here. The non-technically
inclined reader might keep Wikipedia in mind as an example with which to follow
the argument of this book. I will return to it explicitly in part 3. However,
for better or for worse, there will be no discussion of pornography. }~
={ Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) }

Two Bits has three parts. Part I of this book introduces the reader to the
concept of recursive publics by exploring the lives, works, and discussions of
an international community of geeks brought together by their shared interest
in the Internet. Chapter 1 asks, in an ethnographic voice, "Why do geeks
associate with one another?" The answer—told via the story of Napster in 2000
and the standards process at the heart of the Internet—is that they are making
a recursive public. Chapter 2 explores the words and attitudes of geeks more
closely, focusing on the strange stories they tell (about the Protestant
Reformation, about their practical everyday polymathy, about progress and
enlightenment), stories that make sense of contemporary political economy in
sometimes surprising ways. Central to part I is an explication of the ways in
which geeks argue about technology but also argue with and through it, by
building, modifying, and maintaining the very software, networks, and legal
tools within which and by which they associate with one another. It is meant to
give the reader a kind of visceral sense of why certain arrangements of
technology, organization, and law—specifically that of the Internet and Free
Software—are so vitally important to these geeks.
={ geeks ;
   Napster ;
   technology :
     as argument
}

Part II takes a step back from ethnographic engagement to ask, "What is Free
Software and why has it emerged at this point in history?" Part II is a
historically detailed portrait 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 ground of the Internet. The
diversity of technical practices, economic concerns, information technologies,
and legal and organizational practices is huge, and these five chapters
distinguish and describe the specific practices in their historical contexts
and settings: practices of ,{[pg 6]}, proselytizing and arguing, of sharing,
porting, and forking source code, of conceptualizing openness and open systems,
of creating Free Software copyright, and of coordinating people and source
code.
={ copyright +1 }

Part III returns to ethnographic engagement, analyzing two related projects
inspired by Free Software which modulate one or more of the five components
discussed in part II, that is, which take the practices as developed in Free
Software and experiment with making something new and different. The two
projects are Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright
licenses, and Connexions, a project to develop an online scholarly textbook
commons. By tracing the modulations of practices in detail, I ask, "Are these
projects still Free Software?" and "Are these projects still recursive
publics?" The answer to the first questions reveals how Free Software’s
flexible practices are influencing specific forms of practice far from software
programming, while the answer to the second question helps explain how Free
Software, Creative Commons, Connexions, and projects like them are all related,
strategic responses to the reorientation of power and knowledge. The conclusion
raises a series of questions intended to help scholars looking at related
phenomena.
={ Connexions project ;
   Creative Commons ;
   Practices :
     five components of Free Software
}

!_ Recursive Publics and the Reorientation of Power and Knowledge
={ public +3 ;
   legitimacy :
     circulation of knowledge and +8 ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge +14
}

Governance and control of the creation and dissemination of knowledge have
changed considerably in the context of the Internet over the last thirty years.
Nearly all kinds of media are easier to produce, publish, circulate, modify,
mash-up, remix, or reuse. The number of such creations, circulations, and
borrowings has exploded, and the tools of knowledge creation and
circulation—software and networks—have also become more and more pervasively
available. The results have also been explosive and include anxieties about
validity, quality, ownership and control, moral panics galore, and new concerns
about the shape and legitimacy of global "intellectual property" systems. All
of these concerns amount to a reorientation of knowledge and power that is
incomplete and emergent, and whose implications reach directly into the heart
of the legitimacy, certainty, reliability and especially the finality and
temporality of ,{[pg 7]}, the knowledge and infrastructures we collectively
create. It is a reorientation at once more specific and more general than the
grand diagnostic claims of an "information" or "network" society, or the rise
of knowledge work or knowledge-based economies; it is more specific because it
concerns precise and detailed technical and legal practices, more general
because it is a cultural reorientation, not only an economic or legal one.
={ information society }

Free Software exemplifies this reorientation; it is not simply a technical
pursuit but also the creation of a "public," a collective that asserts itself
as a check on other constituted forms of power—like states, the church, and
corporations—but which remains independent of these domains of power.~{
Although the term public clearly suggests private as its opposite, Free
Software is not anticommercial. A very large amount of money, both real and
notional, is involved in the creation of Free Software. The term recursive
,{[PAGE   313]}, market could also be used, in order to emphasize the
importance (especially during the 1990s) of the economic features of the
practice. The point is not to test whether Free Software is a "public" or a
"market," but to construct a concept adequate to the practices that constitute
it. }~ Free Software is a response to this reorientation that has resulted in a
novel form of democratic political action, a means by which publics can be
created and maintained in forms not at all familiar to us from the past. Free
Software is a public of a particular kind: a recursive public. Recursive
publics are publics concerned with the ability to build, control, modify, and
maintain the infrastructure that allows them to come into being in the first
place and which, in turn, constitutes their everyday practical commitments and
the identities of the participants as creative and autonomous individuals. In
the cases explored herein, that specific infrastructure includes the creation
of the Internet itself, as well as its associated tools and structures, such as
Usenet, e-mail, the World Wide Web (www), UNIX and UNIX-derived operating
systems, protocols, standards, and standards processes. For the last thirty
years, the Internet has been the subject of a contest in which Free Software
has been both a central combatant and an important architect.
={ recursive public :
     definition of +35 ;
   technology :
     politics of
}

By calling Free Software a recursive public, I am doing two things: first, I am
drawing attention to the democratic and political significance of Free Software
and the Internet; and second, I am suggesting that our current understanding
(both academic and colloquial) of what counts as a self-governing public, or
even as "the public," is radically inadequate to understanding the contemporary
reorientation of knowledge and power. The first case is easy to make: it is
obvious that there is something political about Free Software, but most casual
observers assume, erroneously, that it is simply an ideological stance and that
it is anti-intellectual property or technolibertarian. I hope to show how geeks
do not start with ideologies, but instead come to them through their
involvement in the ,{[pg 8]}, practices of creating Free Software and its
derivatives. To be sure, there are ideologues aplenty, but there are far more
people who start out thinking of themselves as libertarians or liberators, but
who become something quite different through their participation in Free
Software.

The second case is more complex: why another contribution to the debate about
the public and public spheres? There are two reasons I have found it necessary
to invent, and to attempt to make precise, the concept of a recursive public:
the first is to signal the need to include within the spectrum of political
activity the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks, and
legal documents. Coding, hacking, patching, sharing, compiling, and modifying
of software are forms of political action that now routinely accompany familiar
political forms of expression like free speech, assembly, petition, and a free
press. Such activities are expressive in ways that conventional political
theory and social science do not recognize: they can both express and
"implement" ideas about the social and moral order of society. Software and
networks can express ideas in the conventional written sense as well as create
(express) infrastructures that allow ideas to circulate in novel and unexpected
ways. At an analytic level, the concept of a recursive public is a way of
insisting on the importance to public debate of the unruly technical
materiality of a political order, not just the embodied discourse (however
material) about that order. Throughout this book, I raise the question of how
Free Software and the Internet are themselves a public, as well as what that
public actually makes, builds, and maintains.
={ public sphere :
     recursive public vs. ;
   technology :
     as argument
}

The second reason I use the concept of a recursive public is that conventional
publics have been described as "self-grounding," as constituted only through
discourse in the conventional sense of speech, writing, and assembly.~{ See,
for example, Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67-74. }~ Recursive publics
are "recursive" not only because of the "self-grounding" of commitments and
identities but also because they are concerned with the depth or strata of this
self-grounding: the layers of technical and legal infrastructure which are
necessary for, say, the Internet to exist as the infrastructure of a public.
Every act of self-grounding that constitutes a public relies in turn on the
existence of a medium or ground through which communication is possible—whether
face-to-face speech, epistolary communication, or net-based assembly—and
recursive publics relentlessly question the status of these media, suggesting
,{[pg 9]}, that they, too, must be independent for a public to be authentic. At
each of these layers, technical and legal and organizational decisions can
affect whether or not the infrastructure will allow, or even ensure, the
continued existence of the recursive publics that are concerned with it.
Recursive publics’ independence from power is not absolute; it is provisional
and structured in response to the historically constituted layering of power
and control within the infrastructures of computing and communication.
={ recursive public :
     layers of +1
}

For instance, a very important aspect of the contemporary Internet, and one
that has been fiercely disputed (recently under the banner of "net
neutrality"), is its singularity: there is only one Internet. This was not an
inevitable or a technically determined outcome, but the result of a contest in
which a series of decisions were made about layers ranging from the very basic
physical configuration of the Internet (packet-switched networks and routing
systems indifferent to data types), to the standards and protocols that make it
work (e.g., TCP/IP or DNS), to the applications that run on it (e-mail, www,
ssh). The outcome of these decisions has been to privilege the singularity of
the Internet and to champion its standardization, rather than to promote its
fragmentation into multiple incompatible networks. These same kinds of
decisions are routinely discussed, weighed, and programmed in the activity of
various Free Software projects, as well as its derivatives. They are, I claim,
decisions embedded in imaginations of order that are simultaneously moral and
technical.
={ Internet :
     singularity of ;
   Net neutrality
}

By contrast, governments, corporations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
and other institutions have plenty of reasons—profit, security, control—to seek
to fragment the Internet. But it is the check on this power provided by
recursive publics and especially the practices that now make up Free Software
that has kept the Internet whole to date. It is a check on power that is by no
means absolute, but is nonetheless rigorously and technically concerned with
its legitimacy and independence not only from state-based forms of power and
control, but from corporate, commercial, and nongovernmental power as well. To
the extent that the Internet is public and extensible (including the capability
of creating private subnetworks), it is because of the practices discussed
herein and their culmination in a recursive public.

Recursive publics respond to governance by directly engaging in, maintaining,
and often modifying the infrastructure they seek, as a ,{[pg 10]}, public, to
inhabit and extend—and not only by offering opinions or protesting decisions,
as conventional publics do (in most theories of the public sphere). Recursive
publics seek to create what might be understood, enigmatically, as a constantly
"self-leveling" level playing field. And it is in the attempt to make the
playing field self-leveling that they confront and resist forms of power and
control that seek to level it to the advantage of one or another large
constituency: state, government, corporation, profession. It is important to
understand that geeks do not simply want to level the playing field to their
advantage—they have no affinity or identity as such. Instead, they wish to
devise ways to give the playing field a certain kind of agency, effected
through the agency of many different humans, but checked by its technical and
legal structure and openness. Geeks do not wish to compete qua capitalists or
entrepreneurs unless they can assure themselves that (qua public actors) that
they can compete fairly. It is an ethic of justice shot through with an
aesthetic of technical elegance and legal cleverness.
={ affinity (of geeks) +1 ;
   public sphere :
     recursive public vs. +1 ;
   modifiability +6
}

The fact that recursive publics respond in this way—through direct engagement
and modification—is a key aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge
that Free Software exemplifies. They are reconstituting the relationship
between liberty and knowledge in a technically and historically specific
context. Geeks create and modify and argue about licenses and source code and
protocols and standards and revision control and ideologies of freedom and
pragmatism not simply because these things are inherently or universally
important, but because they concern the relationship of governance to the
freedom of expression and nature of consent. Source code and copyright
licenses, revision control and mailing lists are the pamphlets, coffeehouses,
and salons of the twenty-first century: Tischgesellschaften become
Schreibtischgesellschaften.~{ Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere, esp. 27-43. }~
={ technology :
     as argument
}

The "reorientation of power and knowledge" has two key aspects that are part of
the concept of recursive publics: availability and modifiability (or
adaptability). Availability is a broad, diffuse, and familiar issue. It
includes things like transparency, open governance or transparent organization,
secrecy and freedom of information, and open access in science. Availability
includes the business-school theories of "disintermediation" and "transparency
and accountability" and the spread of "audit culture" and so-called neoliberal
regimes of governance; it is just as often the subject of suspicion as it is a
kind of moral mandate, as in the case of open ,{[pg 11]}, access to scientific
results and publications.~{ Critiques of the demand for availability and the
putatively inherent superiority of transparency include Coombe and Herman,
"Rhetorical Virtues" and "Your Second Life?"; Christen, "Gone Digital"; and
Anderson and Bowery, "The Imaginary Politics of Access to Knowledge." }~ All of
these issues are certainly touched on in detailed and practical ways in the
creation of Free Software. Debates about the mode of availability of
information made possible in the era of the Internet range from digital-rights
management and copy protection, to national security and corporate espionage,
to scientific progress and open societies.
={ adaptability ;
   modifiability +4 ;
   availability :
     open systems and +4
}

However, it is modifiability that is the most fascinating, and unnerving,
aspect of the reorientation of power and knowledge. Modifiability includes the
ability not only to access—that is, to reuse in the trivial sense of using
something without restrictions—but to transform it for use in new contexts, to
different ends, or in order to participate directly in its improvement and to
redistribute or recirculate those improvements within the same infrastructures
while securing the same rights for everyone else. In fact, the core practice of
Free Software is the practice of reuse and modification of software source
code. Reuse and modification are also the key ideas that projects modeled on
Free Software (such as Connexions and Creative Commons) see as their goal.
Creative Commons has as its motto "Culture always builds on the past," and they
intend that to mean "through legal appropriation and modification." Connexions,
which allows authors to create online bits and pieces of textbooks explicitly
encourages authors to reuse work by other people, to modify it, and to make it
their own. Modifiability therefore raises a very specific and important
question about finality. When is something (software, a film, music, culture)
finished? How long does it remain finished? Who decides? Or more generally,
what does its temporality look like, and how does that temporality restructure
political relationships? Such issues are generally familiar only to historians
and literary scholars who understand the transformation of canons, the
interplay of imitation and originality, and the theoretical questions raised,
for instance, in textual scholarship. But the contemporary meaning of
modification includes both a vast increase in the speed and scope of
modifiability and a certain automation of the practice that was unfamiliar
before the advent of sophisticated, distributed forms of software.
={ Connexions project ;
   Creative Commons ;
   finality +2 ;
   modifiability :
     implications for finality +2 ;
   practices +3
}

Modifiability is an oft-claimed advantage of Free Software. It can be updated,
modified, extended, or changed to deal with other changing environments: new
hardware, new operating systems, unforeseen technologies, or new laws and
practices. At an infrastructural level, such modifiability makes sense: it is a
response to ,{[pg 12]}, and an alternative to technocratic forms of planning.
It is a way of planning in the ability to plan out; an effort to continuously
secure the ability to deal with surprise and unexpected outcomes; a way of
making flexible, modifiable infrastructures like the Internet as safe as
permanent, inflexible ones like roads and bridges.
={ planning +1 }

But what is the cultural significance of modifiability? What does it mean to
plan in modifiability to culture, to music, to education and science? At a
clerical level, such a question is obvious whenever a scholar cannot recover a
document written in WordPerfect 2.0 or on a disk for which there are no longer
disk drives, or when a library archive considers saving both the media and the
machines that read that media. Modifiability is an imperative for building
infrastructures that can last longer. However, it is not only a solution to a
clerical problem: it creates new possibilities and new problems for
long-settled practices like publication, or the goals and structure of
intellectual-property systems, or the definition of the finality, lifetime,
monumentality, and especially, the identity of a work. Long-settled, seemingly
unassailable practices—like the authority of published books or the power of
governments to control information—are suddenly confounded and denaturalized by
the techniques of modifiability.

Over the last ten to fifteen years, as the Internet has spread exponentially
and insinuated itself into the most intimate practices of all kinds of people,
the issues of availability and modifiability and the reorientation of knowledge
and power they signify have become commonplace. As this has happened, the
significance and practices associated with Free Software have also spread—and
been modulated in the process. These practices provide a material and
meaningful starting point for an array of recursive publics who play with,
modulate, and transform them as they debate and build new ways to share,
create, license, and control their respective productions. They do not all
share the same goals, immediate or long-term, but by engaging in the technical,
legal, and social practices pioneered in Free Software, they do in fact share a
"social imaginary" that defines a particular relationship between technology,
organs of governance (whether state, corporate, or nongovernmental), and the
Internet. Scientists in a lab or musicians in a band; scholars creating a
textbook or social movements contemplating modes of organization and protest;
government bureaucrats issuing data or journalists investigating corruption;
corporations that manage ,{[pg 13]}, personal data or co-ops that monitor
community development—all these groups and others may find themselves adopting,
modulating, rejecting, or refining the practices that have made up Free
Software in the recent past and will do so in the near future.
={ social imaginary }

!_ Experiment and Modulation
={ cultural significance +1 ;
   Free Software :
     as experimental system +14
}

What exactly is Free Software? This question is, perhaps surprisingly, an
incredibly common one in geek life. Debates about definition and discussions
and denunciations are ubiquitous. As an anthropologist, I have routinely
participated in such discussions and debates, and it is through my immediate
participation that Two Bits opens. In part I I tell stories about geeks,
stories that are meant to give the reader that classic anthropological sense of
being thrown into another world. The stories reveal several general aspects of
what geeks talk about and how they do so, without getting into what Free
Software is in detail. I start in this way because my project started this way.
I did not initially intend to study 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 Software, but a history of
how it came to be. The story begins in 1998, with an important announcement by
Netscape that it would give away the source code to its main product, Netscape
Navigator, and works backward from this announcement into the stories of the
UNIX operating system, "open systems," copyright law, the Internet, and tools
for coordinating people and code. Together, these five stories constitute a
description of how Free Software works as a practice. As a cultural analysis,
these stories highlight just how experimental the practices are, and how
individuals keep track of and modulate the practices along the way.
={ Netscape +1 ;
   Netscape Navigator (application) ;
   openness +3 ;
   Open Systems
}

Netscape’s decision came at an important point in the life of Free Software. It
was at just this moment that Free Software was becoming aware of itself as a
coherent movement and not just a diverse amalgamation of projects, tools, or
practices. Ironically, this ,{[pg 14]}, recognition also betokened a split:
certain parties started to insist that the movement be called "Open Source"
software instead, to highlight the practical over the ideological commitments
of the movement. The proposal itself unleashed an enormous public discussion
about what defined Free Software (or Open Source). This enigmatic event, in
which a movement became 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 and Open Source come to
realize 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.
={ movement (component of Free Software) ;
   Free Software :
     open source vs. ;
   Open Source :
     Free Software vs. ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software)
}

The second component of Free Software is just such a mundane activity: sharing
source code (chapter 4). It is an essential and fundamentally routine practice,
but one with a history that reveals the goals of software portability, the
interactions of commercial and academic software development, and the
centrality of source code (and not only of abstract concepts) in pedagogical
settings. The details of "sharing" source code also form the story of the rise
and proliferation of the UNIX operating system and its myriad derivatives.

The third component, conceptualizing openness (chapter 5), is about the
specific technical and "moral" meanings of openness, especially as it emerged
in the 1980s in the computer industry’s debates over "open systems." These
debates concerned the creation of a particular infrastructure, including both
technical standards and protocols (a standard UNIX and protocols for networks),
and an ideal market infrastructure that would allow open systems to flourish.
Chapter 5 is the story of the failure to achieve a market infrastructure for
open systems, in part due to a significant blind spot: the role of intellectual
property.
={ Open Systems }

The fourth component, applying copyright (and copyleft) licenses (chapter 6),
involves the problem of intellectual property as it faced programmers and geeks
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this ,{[pg 15]}, chapter I detail the
story of the first Free Software license—the GNU General Public License
(GPL)—which emerged out of a controversy around a very famous piece of software
called EMACS. The controversy is coincident with changing laws (in 1976 and
1980) and changing practices in the software industry—a general drift from
trade secret to copyright protection—and it is also a story about the vaunted
"hacker ethic" that reveals it in its native practical setting, rather than as
a rarefied list of rules.
={ hacker ethic }

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 and Linux; I
also highlight how coordination facilitates the commitment to adaptability (or
modifiability) over against planning and hierarchy, and how this commitment
resolves the tension between individual virtuosity and the need for collective
control.
={ adaptability ;
   Apache (Free Software project) ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) ;
   Linux (Free Software project)
}

Taken together, these five components make up Free Software—but they are not a
definition. Within each of these five practices, many similar and dissimilar
activities might reasonably be included. The point of such a redescription of
the practices of Free Software is to conceptualize them as a kind of collective
technical experimental system. Within each component are a range of differences
in practice, from conventional to experimental. At the center, so to speak, are
the most common and accepted versions of a practice; at the edges are more
unusual or controversial versions. Together, the components make up an
experimental system whose infrastructure is the Internet and whose "hypotheses"
concern the reorientation of knowledge and power.
={ experiment, collective technical +2 }

For example, one can hardly have Free Software without source code, but it need
not be written in C (though the vast majority of it is); it can be written in
Java or perl or TeX. However, if one stretches the meaning of source code to
include music (sheet music as source and performance as binary), what 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 ,{[pg 16]}, from the realm of Free Software
and why? How much flexibility is allowed?
={ TeX ;
   perl (programming language)
}

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 as defined by the system. Modulations happen whenever
someone learns how some component of Free Software works and asks, "Can I try
these practices out in some other domain?"
={ modulation :
     of Free Software +4 ;
   Free Software :
     modulations of
}

The reality of constant modulation means that these five practices do not
define Free Software once and for all; they define it with respect to its
constitution in the contemporary. It is a set of practices defined "around the
point" 1998-99, an intensive coordinate space that allows one to explore Free
Software’s components prospectively and retrospectively: into the near future
and the recent past. Free Software is a machine for charting the (re)emergence
of a problematic of power and knowledge as it is filtered through the technical
realities of the Internet and the political and economic configuration of the
contemporary. Each of these practices has its own temporality of development
and emergence, but they have recently come together into this full house called
either Free Software or Open Source.~{ This description of Free Software could
also be called an "assemblage." The most recent source for this is Rabinow,
Anthropos Today. The language of thresholds and intensities is most clearly
developed by Manuel DeLanda in A Thousand Years of Non-linear History and in
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. The term problematization, from
Rabinow (which he channels from Foucault), is a synonym for the phrase
"reorientation of knowledge and power" as I use it here. }~

Viewing Free Software as an experimental system has a strategic purpose in Two
Bits. It sets the stage for part III, wherein I ask what kinds of modulations
might no longer qualify as Free Software per se, but still qualify as recursive
publics. It was around 2000 that talk of "commons" began to percolate out of
discussions about Free Software: commons in educational materials, commons in
biodiversity materials, commons in music, text, and video, commons in medical
data, commons in scientific results and data.~{ See Kelty, "Culture’s Open
Sources." }~ On the one hand, it was continuous with interest in creating
"digital archives" or "online collections" or "digital libraries"; on the other
hand, it was a conjugation of the digital collection with the problems and
practices of intellectual property. The very term commons—at once a new name
and a theoretical object of investigation—was meant to suggest something more
than simply a collection, whether of ,{[pg 17]}, digital objects or anything
else; it was meant to signal the public interest, collective management, and
legal status of the collection.~{ The genealogy of the term commons has a
number of sources. An obvious source is Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 article
"The Tragedy of the Commons." James Boyle has done more than anyone to specify
the term, especially during a 2001 conference on the public domain, which
included the inspired guest-list juxtaposition of the appropriation-happy
musical collective Negativland and the dame of "commons" studies, Elinor
Ostrom, whose book Governing the Commons has served as a certain inspiration
for thinking about commons versus public domains. Boyle, for his part, has
ceaselessly pushed the "environmental" metaphor of speaking for the public
domain as environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s spoke for the environment
(see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public
Domain" and "A Politics of Intellectual Property"). The term commons is useful
in this context precisely because it distinguishes the "public domain" as an
imagined object of pure public transaction and coordination, as opposed to a
"commons," which can consist of privately owned things/spaces that are managed
in such a fashion that they effectively function like a "public domain" is
imagined to (see Boyle, "The Public Domain"; Hess and Ostrom, Understanding
Knowledge as a Commons). }~
={ commons +2 }

In part III, I look in detail at two "commons" understood as modulations of the
component practices of Free Software. Rather than treating commons projects
simply as metaphorical or inspirational uses of Free Software, I treat them as
modulations, which allows me to remain directly connected to the changing
practices involved. The goal of part III is to understand how commons projects
like Connexions and Creative Commons breach the thresholds of these practices
and yet maintain something of the same orientation. What changes, for instance,
have made it possible to imagine new forms of free content, free culture, open
source music, or a science commons? What happens as new communities of people
adopt and modulate the five component practices? Do they also become recursive
publics, concerned with the maintenance and expansion of the infrastructures
that allow them to come into being in the first place? Are they concerned with
the implications of availability and modifiability that continue to unfold,
continue to be figured out, in the realms of education, music, film, science,
and writing?
={ Connexions project +1 ;
   Creative Commons +1 ;
   figuring out +1 ;
   modifiability +1
}

The answers in part III make clear that, so far, these concerns are alive and
well in the modulations of Free Software: Creative Commons and Connexions each
struggle to come to terms with new ways of creating, sharing, and reusing
content in the contemporary legal environment, with the Internet as
infrastructure. Chapters 8 and 9 provide a detailed analysis of a technical and
legal experiment: a modulation that begins with source code, but quickly
requires modulations in licensing arrangements and forms of coordination. It is
here that Two Bits provides the most detailed story of figuring out set against
the background of the reorientation of knowledge and power. This story is, in
particular, one of reuse, of modifiability and the problems that emerge in the
attempt to build it into the everyday practices of pedagogical writing and
cultural production of myriad forms. Doing so leads the actors involved
directly to the question of the existence and ontology of norms: norms of
scholarly production, borrowing, reuse, citation, reputation, and ownership.
These last chapters open up questions about the stability of modern knowledge,
not as an archival or a legal problem, but as a social and normative one; they
raise questions about the invention and control of norms, and the forms of life
that may emerge from these ,{[pg 18]}, practices. Recursive publics come to
exist where it is clear that such invention and control need to be widely
shared, openly examined, and carefully monitored.
={ norms :
     existence of
}

!_ Three Ways of Looking at Two Bits

Two Bits makes three kinds of scholarly contributions: empirical,
methodological, and theoretical. Because it is based largely on fieldwork
(which includes historical and archival work), these three contributions are
often mixed up with each other. Fieldwork, especially in cultural and social
anthropology in the last thirty years, has come to be understood less and less
as one particular tool in a methodological toolbox, and more and more as
distinctive mode of epistemological encounter.~{ Marcus and Fischer,
Anthropology as Cultural Critique; Marcus and Clifford, Writing Culture;
Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice; Marcus,
Ethnography through Thick and Thin; Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of
Reason and Anthropos Today. }~ The questions I began with emerged out of
science and technology studies, but they might end up making sense to a variety
of fields, ranging from legal studies to computer science.

Empirically speaking, the actors in my stories are figuring something out,
something unfamiliar, troubling, imprecise, and occasionally shocking to
everyone involved at different times and to differing extents.~{ The language
of "figuring out" has its immediate source in the work of Kim Fortun, "Figuring
Out Ethnography." Fortun’s work refines two other sources, the work of Bruno
Latour in Science in Action and that of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger in Towards
History of Epistemic Things. Latour describes the difference between "science
made" and "science in the making" and how the careful analysis of new objects
can reveal how they come to be. Rheinberger extends this approach through
analysis of the detailed practices involved in figuring out a new object or a
new process—practices which participants cannot quite name or explain in
precise terms until after the fact. }~ There are two kinds of figuring-out
stories: the contemporary ones in which I have been an active participant
(those of Connexions and Creative Commons), and the historical ones conducted
through "archival" research and rereading of certain kinds of texts,
discussions, and analyses-at-the-time (those of UNIX, EMACS, Linux, Apache, and
Open Systems). Some are stories of technical figuring out, but most are stories
of figuring out a problem that appears to have emerged. Some of these stories
involve callow and earnest actors, some involve scheming and strategy, but in
all of them the figuring out is presented "in the making" and not as something
that can be conveniently narrated as obvious and uncontested with the benefit
of hindsight. Throughout this book, I tell stories that illustrate what geeks
are like in some respects, but, more important, that show them in the midst of
figuring things out—a practice that can happen both in discussion and in the
course of designing, planning, executing, writing, debugging, hacking, and
fixing.
={ Connexions project ;
   Creative Commons ;
   figuring out +1
}

There are also myriad ways in which geeks narrate their own actions to
themselves and others, as they figure things out. Indeed, ,{[pg 19]}, there is
no crisis of representing the other here: geeks are vocal, loud, persistent,
and loquacious. The superalterns can speak for themselves. However, such
representations should not necessarily be taken as evidence that geeks provide
adequate analytic or critical explanations of their own actions. Some of the
available writing provides excellent description, but distracting analysis.
Eric Raymond’s work is an example of such a combination.~{ Raymond, The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. }~ Over the course of my fieldwork, Raymond’s work
has always been present as an excellent guide to the practices and questions
that plague geeks—much like a classic "principal informant" in anthropology.
And yet his analyses, which many geeks subscribe to, are distracting. They are
fanciful, occasionally enjoyable and enlightening—but they are not about the
cultural significance of Free Software. As such I am less interested in
treating geeks as natives to be explained and more interested in arguing with
them: the people in Two Bits are a sine qua non of the ethnography, but they
are not the objects of its analysis.~{ The literature on "virtual communities,"
"online communities," the culture of hackers and geeks, or the social study of
information technology offers important background information, although it is
not the subject of this book. A comprehensive review of work in anthropology
and related disciplines is Wilson and Peterson, "The Anthropology of Online
Communities." Other touchstones are Miller and Slater, The Internet; Carla
Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy; Hine, Virtual
Ethnography; Kling, Computerization and Controversy; Star, The Cultures of
Computing; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Boczkowski, Digitizing
the News. Most social-science work in information technology has dealt with
questions of inequality and the so-called digital divide, an excellent overview
being DiMaggio et al., "From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use." Beyond
works in anthropology and science studies, a number of works from various other
disciplines have recently taken up similar themes, especially Adrian MacKenzie,
Cutting Code; Galloway, Protocol; Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom; and Liu,
Laws of Cool. By contrast, if social-science studies of information technology
are set against a background of historical and ethnographic studies of
"figuring out" problems of specific information technologies, software, or
networks, then the literature is sparse. Examples of anthropology and science
studies of figuring out include Barry, Political Machines; Hayden, When Nature
Goes Public; and Fortun, Advocating Bhopal. Matt Ratto has also portrayed this
activity in Free Software in his dissertation, "The Pressure of Openness." }~
={ ethnography +1 ;
   geeks :
     self-representation ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ;
   Cathedral and the Bazaar
}

Because the stories I tell here are in fact recent by the standards of
historical scholarship, there is not much by way of comparison in terms of the
empirical material. I rely on a number of books and articles on the history of
the early Internet, especially Janet Abbate’s scholarship and the single
historical work on UNIX, Peter Salus’s A Quarter Century of Unix.~{ In addition
to Abbate and Salus, see Norberg and O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology;
Naughton, A Brief History of the Future; Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late;
Waldrop, The Dream Machine; Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1. For a classic
autodocumentation of one aspect of the Internet, see Hauben and Hauben,
Netizens. }~ There are also a couple of excellent journalistic works, such as
Glyn Moody’s Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution (which,
like Two Bits, relies heavily on the novel accessibility of detailed
discussions carried out on public mailing lists). Similarly, the scholarship on
Free Software and its history is just starting to establish itself around a
coherent set of questions.~{ Kelty, "Culture’s Open Sources"; Coleman, "The
Social Construction of Freedom"; Ratto, "The Pressure of Openness"; Joseph
Feller et al., Perspectives ,{[pg 315]}, on Free and Open Source Software; see
also http://freesoftware.mit.edu/, organized by Karim Lakhani, which is a large
collection of work on Free Software projects. Early work in this area derived
both from the writings of practitioners such as Raymond and from business and
management scholars who noticed in Free Software a remarkable, surprising set
of seeming contradictions. The best of these works to date is Steven Weber, The
Success of Open Source. Weber’s conclusions are similar to those presented
here, and he has a kind of cryptoethnographic familiarity (that he does not
explicitly avow) with the actors and practices. Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of
Networks extends and generalizes some of Weber’s argument. }~
={ Moody, Glyn ;
   Salus, Peter
}

Methodologically, Two Bits provides an example of how to study distributed
phenomena ethnographically. Free Software and the Internet are objects that do
not have a single geographic site at which they can be studied. Hence, this
work is multisited in the simple sense of having multiple sites at which these
objects were investigated: Boston, Bangalore, Berlin, Houston. It was conducted
among particular people, projects, and companies and at conferences and online
gatherings too numerous to list, but it has not been a study of a single Free
Software project distributed around the globe. In all of these places and
projects the geeks I worked with were randomly and loosely affiliated people
with diverse lives and histories. Some ,{[pg 20]}, identified as Free Software
hackers, but most did not. Some had never met each other in real life, and some
had. They represented multiple corporations and institutions, and came from
diverse nations, but they nonetheless shared a certain set of ideas and idioms
that made it possible for me to travel from Boston to Berlin to Bangalore and
pick up an ongoing conversation with different people, in very different
places, without missing a beat.
={ Berlin ;
   distributed phenomena, ethnography of +6
}

The study of distributed phenomena does not necessarily imply the detailed,
local study of each instance of a phenomenon, nor does it necessitate visiting
every relevant geographical site—indeed, such a project is not only extremely
difficult, but confuses map and territory. As Max Weber put it, "It is not the
‘actual’ inter-connection of ‘things’ but the conceptual inter-connection of
problems that define the scope of the various sciences."~{ Max Weber,
"Objectivity in the Social Sciences and Social Policy," 68. }~ The decisions
about where to go, whom to study, and how to think about Free Software are
arbitrary in the precise sense that because the phenomena are so widely
distributed, it is possible to make any given node into a source of rich and
detailed knowledge about the distributed phenomena itself, not only about the
local site. Thus, for instance, the Connexions project would probably have
remained largely unknown to me had I not taken a job in Houston, but it
nevertheless possesses precise, identifiable connections to the other sites and
sets of people that I have studied, and is therefore recognizable as part of
this distributed phenomena, rather than some other. I was actively looking for
something like Connexions in order to ask questions about what was becoming of
Free Software and how it was transforming. Had there been no Connexions in my
back yard, another similar field site would have served instead.
={ Weber, Max }

It is in this sense that the ethnographic object of this study is not geeks and
not any particular project or place or set of people, but Free Software and the
Internet. Even more precisely, the ethnographic object of this study is
"recursive publics"—except that this concept is also the work of the
ethnography, not its preliminary object. I could not have identified "recursive
publics" as the object of the ethnography at the outset, and this is nice proof
that ethnographic work is a particular kind of epistemological encounter, an
encounter that requires considerable conceptual work during and after the
material labor of fieldwork, and throughout the material labor of writing and
rewriting, in order to make sense of and reorient it into a question that will
have looked deliberate and ,{[pg 21]}, answerable in hindsight. Ethnography of
this sort requires a long-term commitment and an ability to see past the
obvious surface of rapid transformation to a more obscure and slower
temporality of cultural significance, yet still pose questions and refine
debates about the near future.~{ Despite what might sound like a "shoot first,
ask questions later" approach, the design of this project was in fact conducted
according to specific methodologies. The most salient is actor-network theory:
Latour, Science in Action; Law, "Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering";
Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation"; Latour, Pandora’s Hope;
Latour, Re-assembling the Social; Callon, Laws of the Markets; Law and Hassard,
Actor Network Theory and After. Ironically, there have been no actor-network
studies of networks, which is to say, of particular information and
communication technologies such as the Internet. The confusion of the word
network (as an analytical and methodological term) with that of network (as a
particular configuration of wires, waves, software, and chips, or of people,
roads, and buses, or of databases, names, and diseases) means that it is
necessary to always distinguish this-network-here from any-network-whatsoever.
My approach shares much with the ontological questions raised in works such as
Law, Aircraft Stories; Mol, The Body Multiple; Cussins, "Ontological
Choreography"; Charis Thompson, Making Parents; and Dumit, Picturing
Personhood. }~ Historically speaking, the chapters of part II can be understood
as a contribution to a history of scientific infrastructure—or perhaps to an
understanding of large-scale, collective experimentation.~{ I understand a
concern with scientific infrastructure to begin with Steve Shapin and Simon
Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump, but the genealogy is no doubt more
complex. It includes Shapin, The Social History of Truth; Biagioli, Galileo,
Courtier; Galison, How Experiments End and Image and Logic; Daston, Biographies
of Scientific Objects; Johns, The Nature of the Book. A whole range of works
explore the issue of scientific tools and infrastructure: Kohler, Lords of the
Fly; Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things; Landecker, Culturing
Life; Keating and Cambrosio, Biomedical Platforms. Bruno Latour’s "What Rules
of Method for the New Socio-scientific Experiments" provides one example of
where science studies might go with these questions. Important texts on the
subject of technical infrastructures include Walsh and Bayma, "Computer
Networks and Scientific Work"; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Edwards,
The ,{[pg 316]}, Closed World; Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and
Technology; Star and Ruhleder, "Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure." }~
The Internet and Free Software are each an important practical transformation
that will have effects on the practice of science and a kind of complex
technical practice for which there are few existing models of study.
={ Actor Network Theory ;
   Internet +1
}

A methodological note about the peculiarity of my subject is also in order. The
Attentive Reader will note that there are very few fragments of conventional
ethnographic material (i.e., interviews or notes) transcribed herein. Where
they do appear, they tend to be "publicly available"—which is to say,
accessible via the Internet—and are cited as such, with as much detail as
necessary to allow the reader to recover them. Conventional wisdom in both
anthropology and history has it that what makes a study interesting, in part,
is the work a researcher has put into gathering that which is not already
available, that is, primary sources as opposed to secondary sources. In some
cases I provide that primary access (specifically in chapters 2, 8, and 9), but
in many others it is now literally impossible: nearly everything is archived.
Discussions, fights, collaborations, talks, papers, software, articles, news
stories, history, old software, old software manuals, reminiscences, notes, and
drawings—it is all saved by someone, somewhere, and, more important, often made
instantly available by those who collect it. The range of conversations and
interactions that count as private (either in the sense of disappearing from
written memory or of being accessible only to the parties involved) has shrunk
demonstrably since about 1981.
={ ethnographic data :
     availability of +5
}

Such obsessive archiving means that ethnographic research is stratified in
time. Questions that would otherwise have required "being there" are much
easier to research after the fact, and this is most evident in my
reconstruction from sources on USENET and mailing lists in chapters 1, 6, and
7. The overwhelming availability of quasi-archival materials is something I
refer to, in a play on the EMACS text editor, as "self-documenting history."
That is to say, one of the activities that geeks love to participate in, and
encourage, is the creation, analysis, and archiving of their own roles in the
,{[pg 22]}, development of the Internet. No matter how obscure or arcane, it
seems most geeks have a well-developed sense of possibility—their contribution
could turn out to have been transformative, important, originary. What geeks
may lack in social adroitness, they make up for in archival hubris.

Finally, the theoretical contribution of Two Bits consists of a refinement of
debates about publics, public spheres, and social imaginaries that appear
troubled in the context of the Internet and Free Software. Terminology such as
virtual community, online community, cyberspace, network society, or
information society are generally not theoretical constructs, but ways of
designating a subgenre of disciplinary research having to do with electronic
networks. The need for a more precise analysis of the kinds of association that
take place on and through information technology is clear; the first step is to
make precise which information technologies and which specific practices make a
difference.
={ public sphere :
     theories of +3 ;
   social imaginary +2 ;
   information society :
     see also public sphere
}

There is a relatively large and growing literature on the Internet as a public
sphere, but such literature is generally less concerned with refining the
concept through research and more concerned with pronouncing whether or not the
Internet fits Habermas’s definition of the bourgeois public sphere, a
definition primarily conceived to account for the eighteenth century in
Britain, not the twenty-first-century Internet.~{ Dreyfus, On the Internet;
Dean, "Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere." }~ The facts of technical and human
life, as they unfold through the Internet and around the practices of Free
Software, are not easy to cram into Habermas’s definition. The goal of Two Bits
is not to do so, but to offer conceptual clarity based in ethnographic
fieldwork.
={ Habermas, Jürgen +2 }

The key texts for understanding the concept of recursive publics are the works
of Habermas, Charles Taylor’s Modern Social Imaginaries, and Michael Warner’s
The Letters of the Republic and Publics and Counterpublics. Secondary texts
that refine these notions are John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems and
Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. Here it is not the public sphere per se
that is the center of analysis, but the "ideas of modern moral and social
order" and the terminology of "modern social imaginaries."~{ In addition, see
Lippmann, The Phantom Public; Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Latour
and Weibel, Making Things Public. The debate about social imaginaries begins
alternately with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities or with Cornelius
Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society; see also Chatterjee, "A
Response to Taylor’s ‘Modes of Civil Society’"; Gaonkar, "Toward New
Imaginaries"; Charles Taylor, "Modes of Civil Society" and Sources of the Self.
}~ I find these concepts to be useful as starting points for a very specific
reason: to distinguish the meaning of moral order from the meaning of moral and
technical order that I explore with respect to geeks. I do not seek to test the
concept of social imaginary here, but to build something on top of it. ,{[pg
23]},
={ Arendt, Hannah ;
   Taylor, Charles
}

If recursive public is a useful concept, it is because it helps elaborate the
general question of the "reorientation of knowledge and power." In particular
it is meant to bring into relief the ways in which the Internet and Free
Software are related to the political economy of modern society through the
creation not only of new knowledge, but of new infrastructures for circulating,
maintaining, and modifying it. Just as Warner’s book The Letters of the
Republic was concerned with the emergence of the discourse of republicanism and
the simultaneous development of an American republic of letters, or as
Habermas’s analysis was concerned with the relationship of the bourgeois public
sphere to the democratic revolutions of the eighteenth century, this book asks
a similar series of questions: how are the emergent practices of recursive
publics related to emerging relations of political and technical life in a
world that submits to the Internet and its forms of circulation? Is there still
a role for a republic of letters, much less a species of public that can
seriously claim independence and autonomy from other constituted forms of
power? Are Habermas’s pessimistic critiques of the bankruptcy of the public
sphere in the twentieth century equally applicable to the structures of the
twenty-first century? Or is it possible that recursive publics represent a
reemergence of strong, authentic publics in a world shot through with cynicism
and suspicion about mass media, verifiable knowledge, and enlightenment
rationality?  [PAGE 24: BLANK]

:B~ Part I the internet

1~part1 [the internet] -#

_1 The concept of the state, like most concepts which are introduced by "The,"
is both too rigid and too tied up with controversies to be of ready use. It is
a concept which can be approached by a flank movement more easily than by a
frontal attack. The moment we utter the words "The State" a score of
intellectual ghosts rise to obscure our vision. Without our intention and
without our notice, the notion of "The State" draws us imperceptibly into a
consideration of the logical relationship of various ideas to one another, and
away from the facts of human activity. It is better, if possible, to start from
the latter and see if we are not led thereby into an idea of something which
will turn out to implicate the marks and signs which characterize political
behavior.
={ Dewey, John }

- john dewey, /{The Public and Its Problems}/

1~ 1. Geeks and Recursive Publics
={ recursive public +12 ;
   geeks +6
}

% Geek entry added here as seems implied as relevant to section

Since about 1997, I have been living with geeks online and off. I have been
drawn from Boston to Bangalore to Berlin to Houston to Palo Alto, from
conferences and workshops to launch parties, pubs, and Internet Relay Chats
(IRCs). All along the way in my research questions of commitment and practice,
of ideology and imagination have arisen, even as the exact nature of the
connections between these people and ideas remained obscure to me: what binds
geeks together? As my fieldwork pulled me from a Boston start-up company that
worked with radiological images to media labs in Berlin to young
entrepreneurial elites in Bangalore, my logistical question eventually
developed into an analytical concept: geeks are bound together as a recursive
public.
={ Berlin +2 ;
   Internet +5
}

How did I come to understand geeks as a public constituted around the technical
and moral ideas of order that allow them to associate with one another? Through
this question, one can start to understand the larger narrative of Two Bits:
that of Free Software ,{[pg 28]}, as an exemplary instance of a recursive
public and as a set of practices that allow such publics to expand and spread.
In this chapter I describe, ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and as an
exemplary instance of a recursive public and as a set of practices that allow
such publics to expand and spread. In this chapter I describe,
ethnographically, the diverse, dispersed, and novel forms of entanglements that
bind geeks together, and I construct the concept of a recursive public in order
to explain these entanglements.
={ ethnography +1 ;
   moral and technical order +3
}

A recursive public is a public that is constituted by a shared concern for
maintaining the means of association through which they come together as a
public. Geeks find affinity with one another because they share an abiding
moral imagination of the technical infrastructure, the Internet, that has
allowed them to develop and maintain this affinity in the first place. I
elaborate the concept of recursive public (which is not a term used by geeks)
in relation to theories of ideology, publics, and public spheres and social
imaginaries. I illustrate the concept through ethnographic stories and examples
that highlight geeks’ imaginations of the technical and moral order of the
Internet. These stories include those of the fate of Amicas, a Boston-based
healthcare start-up, between 1997 and 2003, of my participation with new media
academics and activists in Berlin in 1999-2001, and of the activities of a
group of largely Bangalore-based information technology (IT) professionals on
and offline, especially concerning the events surrounding the peer-topeer file
sharing application Napster in 2000-2001.
={ affinity (of geeks) +3 ;
   Napster +2
}

The phrase "moral and technical order" signals both technology—principally
software, hardware, networks, and protocols—and an imagination of the proper
order of collective political and commercial action, that is, how economy and
society should be ordered collectively. Recursive publics are just as concerned
with the moral order of markets as they are with that of commons; they are not
anticommercial or antigovernment. They exist independent of, and as a check on,
constituted forms of power, which include markets and corporations. Unlike
other concepts of a public or of a public sphere, "recursive public" captures
the fact that geeks’ principal mode of associating and acting is through the
medium of the Internet, and it is through this medium that a recursive public
can come into being in the first place. The Internet is not itself a public
sphere, a public, or a recursive public, but a complex, heterogeneous
infrastructure that constitutes and constrains geeks’ everyday practical
commitments, their ability to "become public" or to compose a common world. As
such, their participation qua recursive publics structures their identity as
creative and autonomous ,{[pg 29]}, individuals. The fact that the geeks
described here have been brought together by mailing lists and e-mail,
bulletin-board services and Web sites, books and modems, air travel and
academia, and cross-talking and cross-posting in ways that were not possible
before the Internet is at the core of their own reasoning about why they
associate with each other. They are the builders and imaginers of this space,
and the space is what allows them to build and imagine it.

Why recursive? I call such publics recursive for two reasons: first, in order
to signal that this kind of public includes the activities of making,
maintaining, and modifying software and networks, as well as the more
conventional discourse that is thereby enabled; and second, in order to suggest
the recursive "depth" of the public, the series of technical and legal
layers—from applications to protocols to the physical infrastructures of waves
and wires—that are the subject of this making, maintaining, and modifying. The
first of these characteristics is evident in the fact that geeks use technology
as a kind of argument, for a specific kind of order: they argue about
technology, but they also argue through it. They express ideas, but they also
express infrastructures through which ideas can be expressed (and circulated)
in new ways. The second of these characteristics—regarding layers—is reflected
in the ability of geeks to immediately see connections between, for example,
Napster (a user application) and TCP/IP (a network protocol) and to draw out
implications for both of them. By connecting these layers, Napster comes to
represent the Internet in miniature. The question of where these layers stop
(hardware? laws and regulations? physical constants? etc.) circumscribes the
limits of the imagination of technical and moral order shared by geeks.
={ recursive public :
     layers of ;
   technology :
     as argument
}

Above all, "recursive public" is a concept—not a thing. It is intended to make
distinctions, allow comparison, highlight salient features, and relate two
diverse kinds of things (the Internet and Free Software) in a particular
historical context of changing relations of power and knowledge. The stories in
this chapter (and throughout the book) give some sense of how geeks interact
and what they do technically and legally, but the concept of a recursive public
provides a way of explaining why geeks (or people involved in Free Software or
its derivatives) associate with one another, as well as a way of testing
whether other similar cases of contemporary, technologically mediated affinity
are similarly structured. ,{[pg 30]},

!_ Recursion
={ recursion, definition of +5 }


_1 Recursion (or "recursive") is a mathematical concept, one which is a
standard feature of any education in computer programming. The definition from
the Oxford English Dictionary reads: "2. a. Involving or being a repeated
procedure such that the required result at each step except the last is given
in terms of the result(s) of the next step, until after a finite number of
steps a terminus is reached with an outright evaluation of the result." It
should be distinguished from simple iteration or repetition. Recursion is
always subject to a limit and is more like a process of repeated deferral,
until the last step in the process, at which point all the deferred steps are
calculated and the result given.

_1 Recursion is powerful in programming because it allows for the definition of
procedures in terms of themselves—something that seems at first
counterintuitive. So, for example,

group{

    ;
   otherwise return n times factorial of n-1;
    (defun (factorial n) 	; This is the name of the function and its input n.
    (if (=n 1) 	; This is the final limit, or recursive depth
    1 	; if n=1, then return 1
    (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))
    ;
   call the procedure from within itself, and
    ;
   calculate the next step of the result before
    ;
   giving an answer.1

}group
={ Abelson, Hal }

_1 In Two Bits a recursive public is one whose existence (which consists solely
in address through discourse) is only possible through discursive and technical
reference to the means of creating this public. Recursiveness is always
contingent on a limit which determines the depth of a recursive procedure. So,
for instance, a Free Software project may depend on some other kind of software
or operating system, which may in turn depend on particular open protocols or a
particular process, which in turn depend on certain kinds of hardware that
implement them. The "depth" of recursion is determined by the openness
necessary for the project itself.
={ recursive public :
     layers of
}

_1 James Boyle has also noted the recursive nature, in particular, of Free
Software: "What’s more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the
production process does need more centralized coordination, some governance
that guides how the sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least
theoretically possible that we can come up with the control system in exactly
the same way. In this sense, distributed production is potentially recursive."2
={ Boyle, James }

_1 1. Abelson and Sussman, The Structure and Interpretation of Computer
Programs, 30.

_1 2. Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public
Domain," 46. ,{[pg 31]},

2~ From the Facts of Human Activity

Boston, May 2003. Starbucks. Sean and Adrian are on their way to pick me up for
dinner. I’ve already had too much coffee, so I sit at the window reading the
paper. Eventually Adrian calls to find out where I am, I tell him, and he
promises to show up in fifteen minutes. I get bored and go outside to wait,
watch the traffic go by. More or less right on time (only post-dotcom is Adrian
ever on time), Sean’s new blue VW Beetle rolls into view. Adrian jumps out of
the passenger seat and into the back, and I get in. Sean has been driving for a
little over a year. He seems confident, cautious, but meanders through the
streets of Cambridge. We are destined for Winchester, a township on the Charles
River, in order to go to an Indian restaurant that one of Sean’s friends has
recommended. When I ask how they are doing, they say, "Good, good." Adrian
offers, "Well, Sean’s better than he has been in two years." "Really?" I say,
impressed.
={ Doyle, Sean +6 ;
   Gropper, Adrian +6
}

Sean says, "Well, happier than at least the last year. I, well, let me put it
this way: forgive me father for I have sinned, I still have unclean thoughts
about some of the upper management in the company, I occasionally think they
are not doing things in the best interest of the company, and I see them as
self-serving and sometimes wish them ill." In this rolling blue confessional
Sean describes some of the people who I am familiar with whom he now tries very
hard not to think about. I look at him and say, "Ten Hail Marys and ten Our
Fathers, and you will be absolved, my child." Turning to Adrian, I ask, "And
what about you?" Adrian continues the joke: "I, too, have sinned. I have
reached the point where I can see absolutely nothing good coming of this
company but that I can keep my investments in it long enough to pay for my
children’s college tuition." I say, "You, my son, I cannot help." Sean says,
"Well, funny thing about tainted money . . . there just taint enough of it."

I am awestruck. When I met Sean and Adrian, in 1997, their start-up company,
Amicas, was full of spit, with five employees working out of Adrian’s living
room and big plans to revolutionize the medical-imaging world. They had
connived to get Massachusetts General Hospital to install their rudimentary
system and let it compete with the big corporate sloths that normally stalked
back offices: General Electric, Agfa, Siemens. It was these behemoths,
according to Sean and Adrian, that were bilking hospitals ,{[pg 32]}, and
healthcare providers with promises of cure-all technologies and horribly
designed "silos," "legacy systems," and other closed-system monsters of
corporate IT harkening back to the days of IBM mainframes. These beasts
obviously did not belong to the gleaming future of Internet-enabled
scalability. By June of 2000, Amicas had hired new "professional" management,
moved to Watertown, and grown to about a hundred employees. They had achieved
their goal of creating an alternative Picture Archiving and Communication
System (PACS) for use in hospital radiology departments and based on Internet
standards.
={ Amicas (corporation) +9 ;
   standards :
     Internet ;
   proprietary systems :
     closed
}

At that point, in the spring of 2000, Sean could still cheerfully introduce me
to his new boss—the same man he would come to hate, inasmuch as Sean hates
anyone. But by 2002 he was frustrated by the extraordinary variety of
corner-cutting and, more particularly, by the complacency with which management
ignored his recommendations and released software that was almost certainly
going to fail later, if not sooner. Sean, who is sort of permanently callow
about things corporate, could find no other explanation than that the new
management was evil.

But by 2003 the company had succeeded, having grown to more than 200 employees
and established steady revenue and a stable presence throughout the healthcare
world. Both Sean and Adrian were made rich—not wildly rich, but rich enough—by
its success. In the process, however, it also morphed into exactly what Sean
and Adrian had created it in order to fight: a slothlike corporate purveyor of
promises and broken software. Promises Adrian had made and software Sean had
built. The failure of Amicas to transform healthcare was a failure too complex
and technical for most of America to understand, but it rested atop the success
of Amicas in terms more readily comprehensible: a growing company making
profit. Adrian and Sean had started the company not to make money, but in order
to fix a broken healthcare system; yet the system stayed broken while they made
money.

In the rolling confessional, Sean and Adrian did in fact see me, however
jokingly, as a kind of redeemer, a priest (albeit of an order with no flock)
whose judgment of the affairs past was essential to their narration of their
venture as a success, a failure, or as an unsatisfying and complicated mixture
of both. I thought about this strange moment of confession, of the combination
of recognition and denial, of Adrian’s new objectification of the company as an
,{[pg 33]}, investment opportunity, and of Sean’s continuing struggle to make
his life and his work harmonize in order to produce good in the world. Only the
promise of the next project, the next mission (and the ostensible reason for
our dinner meeting) could possibly have mitigated the emotional disaster that
their enterprise might otherwise be. Sean’s and Adrian’s endless, arcane fervor
for the promise of new technologies did not cease, even given the quotidian
calamities these technologies leave in their wake. Their faith was strong, and
continuously tested.

Adrian’s and Sean’s passion was not for money—though money was a powerful
drug—it was for the Internet: for the ways in which the Internet could replace
the existing infrastructure of hospitals and healthcare providers, deliver on
old promises of telemedicine and teleradiology, and, above all, level a playing
field systematically distorted and angled by corporate and government
institutions that sought secrecy and private control, and stymied progress. In
healthcare, as Adrian repeatedly explained to me, this skewed playing field was
not only unfair but malicious and irresponsible. It was costing lives. It
slowed the creation and deployment of technologies and solutions that could
lower costs and thus provide more healthcare for more people. The Internet was
not part of the problem; it was part of the solution to the problems that ailed
1990s healthcare.

At the end of our car trip, at the Indian restaurant in Winchester, I learned
about their next scheme, a project called MedCommons, which would build on the
ideals of Free Software and give individuals a way to securely control and
manage their own healthcare data. The rhetoric of commons and the promise of
the Internet as an infrastructure dominated our conversation, but the realities
of funding and the question of whether MedCommons could be pursued without
starting another company remained unsettled. I tried to imagine what form a
future confession might take.
={ commons ;
   MedCommons +2
}

2~ Geeks and Their Internets
={ geeks +8 ;
   Internet :
     geeks and +8
}

Sean and Adrian are geeks. They are entrepreneurs and idealists in different
ways, a sometimes paradoxical combination. They are certainly ,{[pg 34]},
obsessed with technology, but especially with the Internet, and they clearly
distinguish themselves from others who are obsessed with technology of just any
sort. They aren’t quite representative—they do not stand in for all geeks—but
the way they think about the Internet and its possibilities might be. Among the
rich story of their successes and failures, one might glimpse the outlines of a
question: where do their sympathies lie? Who are they with? Who do they
recognize as being like them? What might draw them together with other geeks if
not a corporation, a nation, a language, or a cause? What binds these two geeks
to any others?
={ affinity (of geeks) ;
   entrepreneurialism +4
}

Sean worked for the Federal Reserve in the 1980s, where he was introduced to
UNIX, C programming, EMACS, Usenet, Free Software, and the Free Software
Foundation. But he was not a Free Software hacker; indeed, he resisted my
attempts to call him a hacker at all. Nevertheless, he started a series of
projects and companies with Adrian that drew on the repertoire of practices and
ideas familiar from Free Software, including their MedCommons project, which
was based more or less explicitly in the ideals of Free Software. Adrian has a
degree in medicine and in engineering, and is a serial entrepreneur, with
Amicas being his biggest success—and throughout the last ten years has attended
all manner of conferences and meetings devoted to Free Software, Open Source,
open standards, and so on, almost always as the lone representative from
healthcare. Both graduated from the MIT (Sean in economics, Adrian in
engineering), one of the more heated cauldrons of the Internet and the storied
home of hackerdom, but neither were MIT hackers, nor even computer-science
majors.
={ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ;
   Free Software Foundation
}

% open standards

Their goals in creating a start-up rested on their understanding of the
Internet as an infrastructure: as a standardized infrastructure with certain
extremely powerful properties, not the least of which was its flexibility. Sean
and Adrian talked endlessly about open systems, open standards, and the need
for the Internet to remain open and standardized. Adrian spoke in general terms
about how it would revolutionize healthcare; Sean spoke in specific terms about
how it structured the way Amicas’s software was being designed and written.
Both participated in standards committees and in the online and offline
discussions that are tantamount to policymaking in the Internet world. The
company they created was a "virtual" company, that is, built on tools that
depended on the Internet and allowed employees to manage and work from a
variety of locations, though not without frustration, of course: Sean waited
years for broadband access in his home, and the hospitals they served ,{[pg
35]}, hemmed themselves in with virtual private networks, intranets, and
security firewalls that betrayed the promises of openness that Sean and Adrian
heralded.
={ infrastructure }

The Internet was not the object of their work and lives, but it did represent
in detail a kind of moral or social order embodied in a technical system and
available to everyone to use as a platform whereby they might compete to
improve and innovate in any realm. To be sure, although not all Internet
entrepreneurs of the 1990s saw the Internet in the same way, Sean and Adrian
were hardly alone in their vision. Something about the particular way in which
they understood the Internet as representing a moral order—simultaneously a
network, a market, a public, and a technology—was shared by a large group of
people, those who I now refer to simply as geeks.

The term geek is meant to be inclusive and to index the problematic of a
recursive public. Other terms may be equally useful, but perhaps semantically
overdetermined, most notably hacker, which regardless of its definitional
range, tends to connote someone subversive and/or criminal and to exclude
geek-sympathetic entrepreneurs and lawyers and activists.~{ For the canonical
story, see Levy, Hackers. Hack referred to (and still does) a clever use of
technology, usually unintended by the maker, to achieve some task in an elegant
manner. The term has been successfully redefined by the mass media to refer to
computer users who break into and commit criminal acts on corporate or
government or personal computers connected to a network. Many self-identified
hackers insist that the criminal element be referred to as crackers (see, in
particular, the entries on "Hackers," "Geeks" and "Crackers" in The Jargon
File, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/, also published as Raymond, The New
Hackers’ Dictionary). On the subject of definitions and the cultural and
ethical characteristics of hackers, see Coleman, "The Social Construction of
Freedom," chap. 2. }~ Geek is meant to signal, like the public in "recursive
public," that geeks stand outside power, at least in some aspects, and that
they are not capitalists or technocrats, even if they start businesses or work
in government or industry.~{ One example of the usage of geek is in Star, The
Cultures of Computing. Various denunciations (e.g., Barbrook and Cameron, "The
California Ideology"; Borsook, Technolibertarianism) tend to focus on
journalistic accounts of an ideology that has little to do with what hackers,
geeks, and entrepreneurs actually make. A more relevant categorical distinction
than that between hackers and geeks is that between geeks and technocrats; in
the case of technocrats, the "anthropology of technocracy" is proposed as the
study of the limits of technical rationality, in particular the forms through
which "planning" creates "gaps in the form that serve as ‘targets of
intervention’" (Riles, "Real Time," 393). Riles’s "technocrats" are certainly
not the "geeks" I portray here (or at least, if they are, it is only in their
frustrating day jobs). Geeks do have libertarian, specifically Hayekian or
Feyerabendian leanings, but are more likely to see technical failures not as
failures of planning, but as bugs, inefficiencies, or occasionally as the
products of human hubris or stupidity that is born of a faith in planning. }~
Geek is meant to signal a mode of thinking and working, not an identity; it is
a mode or quality that allows people to find each other, for reasons other than
the fact that they share an office, a degree, a language, or a nation.
={ geeks :
     hackers vs. +3 ;
   hackers +3
}

Until the mid-1990s, hacker, geek, and computer nerd designated a very specific
type: programmers and lurkers on relatively underground networks, usually
college students, computer scientists, and "amateurs" or "hobbyists." A classic
mock self-diagnostic called the Geek Code, by Robert Hayden, accurately and
humorously detailed the various ways in which one could be a geek in 1996—UNIX/
Linux skills, love/hate of Star Trek, particular eating and clothing habits—but
as Hayden himself points out, the geeks of the early 1990s exist no longer. The
elite subcultural, relatively homogenous group it once was has been overrun:
"The Internet of 1996 was still a wild untamed virgin paradise of geeks and
eggheads unpopulated by script kiddies, and the denizens of AOL. When things
changed, I seriously lost my way. I mean, all the ‘geek’ that was the Internet
,{[pg 36]}, was gone and replaced by Xfiles buzzwords and politicians passing
laws about a technology they refused to comprehend."~{ See The Geek Code,
http://www.geekcode.com/. }~
={ Hayden, Robert +2 }

For the purists like Hayden, geeks were there first, and they understood
something, lived in a way, that simply cannot be comprehended by "script
kiddies" (i.e., teenagers who perform the hacking equivalent of spray painting
or cow tipping), crackers, or AOL users, all of whom are despised by
Hayden-style geeks as unskilled users who parade around the Internet as if they
own it. While certainly elitist, Hayden captures the distinction between those
who are legitimately allowed to call themselves geeks (or hackers) and those
who aren’t, a distinction that is often formulated recursively, of course: "You
are a hacker when another hacker calls you a hacker."

However, since the explosive growth of the Internet, geek has become more
common a designation, and my use of the term thus suggests a role that is
larger than programmer/hacker, but not as large as "all Internet users."
Despite Hayden’s frustration, geeks are still bound together as an elite and
can be easily distinguished from "AOL users." Some of the people I discuss
would not call themselves geeks, and some would. Not all are engineers or
programmers: I have met businessmen, lawyers, activists, bloggers,
gastroenterologists, anthropologists, lesbians, schizophrenics, scientists,
poets, people suffering from malaria, sea captains, drug dealers, and people
who keep lemurs, many of whom refer to themselves as geeks, some of the time.~{
Geeks are also identified often by the playfulness and agility with which they
manipulate these labels and characterizations. See Michael M. J. Fischer,
"Worlding Cyberspace" for an example. }~ There are also lawyers, politicians,
sociologists, and economists who may not refer to themselves as geeks, but who
care about the Internet just as other geeks do. By contrast "users" of the
Internet, even those who use it eighteen out of twenty-four hours in a day to
ship goods and play games, are not necessarily geeks by this characterization.

2~ Operating Systems and Social Systems

Berlin, November 1999. I am in a very hip club in Mitte called WMF. It’s about
eight o’clock—five hours too early for me to be a hipster, but the context is
extremely cool. WMF is in a hard-to-find, abandoned building in the former
East; it is partially converted, filled with a mixture of new and old
furnishings, video projectors, speakers, makeshift bars, and dance-floor
lighting. A crowd of around fifty people lingers amid smoke and Beck’s beer
bottles, ,{[pg 37]}, sitting on stools and chairs and sofas and the floor. We
are listening to an academic read a paper about Claude Shannon, the MIT
engineer credited with the creation of information theory. The author is
smoking and reading in German while the audience politely listens. He speaks
for about seventy minutes. There are questions and some perfunctory discussion.
As the crowd breaks up, I find myself, in halting German that quickly converts
to English, having a series of animated conversations about the GNU General
Public License, the Debian Linux Distribution, open standards in net radio, and
a variety of things for which Claude Shannon is the perfect ghostly
technopaterfamilias, even if his seventy-minute invocation has clashed heavily
with the surroundings.
={ Berlin +2 ;
   Shannon, Claude
}

Despite my lame German, I still manage to jump deeply into issues that seem
extremely familiar: Internet standards and open systems and licensing issues
and namespaces and patent law and so on. These are not businesspeople, this is
not a start-up company. As I would eventually learn, there was even a certain
disdain for die Krawattenfaktor, the suit-and-tie factor, at these occasional,
hybrid events hosted by Mikro e.V., a nonprofit collective of journalists,
academics, activists, artists, and others interested in new media, the
Internet, and related issues. Mikro’s constituency included people from
Germany, Holland, Austria, and points eastward. They took some pride in
describing Berlin as "the farthest East the West gets" and arranged for a group
photo in which, facing West, they stood behind the statue of Marx and Lenin,
who face East and look eternally at the iconic East German radio tower
(Funkturm) in Alexanderplatz. Mikro’s members are resolutely activist and see
the issues around the Internet-as-infrastructure not in terms of its potential
for business opportunities, but in urgently political and unrepentantly
aesthetic terms—terms that are nonetheless similar to those of Sean and Adrian,
from whom I learned the language that allows me to mingle with the Mikro crowd
at WMF. I am now a geek.
={ Mikro e.V. +1 ;
   Open Systems ;
   standards :
     Internet
}

Before long, I am talking with Volker Grassmuck, founding member of Mikro and
organizer of the successful "Wizards of OS" conference, held earlier in the
year, which had the very intriguing subtitle "Operating Systems and Social
Systems." Grassmuck is inviting me to participate in a planning session for the
next WOS, held at the Chaos Computer Congress, a hacker gathering that occurs
each year in December in Berlin. In the following months I will meet a huge
number of people who seem, uncharacteristically for artists ,{[pg 38]}, and
activists, strangely obsessed with configuring their Linux distributions or
hacking the http protocol or attending German Parliament hearings on copyright
reform. The political lives of these folks have indeed mixed up operating
systems and social systems in ways that are more than metaphorical.
={ Grassmuck, Volker }

2~ The Idea of Order at the Keyboard

If intuition can lead one from geek to geek, from start-up to nightclub, and
across countries, languages, and professional orientations, it can only be due
to a shared set of ideas of how things fit together in the world. These ideas
might be "cultural" in the traditional sense of finding expression among a
community of people who share backgrounds, homes, nations, languages, idioms,
ethnos, norms, or other designators of belonging and co-presence. But because
the Internet—like colonialism, satellite broadcasting, and air travel, among
other things—crosses all these lines with abandon that the shared idea of order
is better understood as part of a public, or public sphere, a vast republic of
letters and media and ideas circulating in and through our thoughts and papers
and letters and conversations, at a planetary scope and scale.
={ culture ;
   public +15 ;
   public sphere :
     theories of +15 ;
   social imaginary +15 ;
   Internet :
     idea of order and +1
}

% index could have been more precise, matches book

"Public sphere" is an odd kind of thing, however. It is at once a
concept—intended to make sense of a space that is not the here and now, but one
made up of writings, ideas, and discussions—and a set of ideas that people have
about themselves and their own participation in such a space. I must be able to
imagine myself speaking and being spoken to in such a space and to imagine a
great number of other people also doing so according to unwritten rules we
share. I don’t need a complete theory, and I don’t need to call it a public
sphere, but I must somehow share an idea of order with all those other people
who also imagine themselves participating in and subjecting themselves to that
order. In fact, if the public sphere exists as more than just a theory, then it
has no other basis than just such a shared imagination of order, an imagination
which provides a guide against which to make judgments and a map for changing
or achieving that order. Without such a shared imagination, a public sphere is
otherwise nothing more than a cacophony of voices and information, nothing more
than a stream of data, structured and formatted by and for machines, whether
paper or electronic. ,{[pg 39]},

Charles Taylor, building on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Michael Warner,
suggests that the public sphere (both idea and thing) that emerged in the
eighteenth century was created through practices of communication and
association that reflected a moral order in which the public stands outside
power and guides or checks its operation through shared discourse and
enlightened discussion. Contrary to the experience of bodies coming together
into a common space (Taylor calls them "topical spaces," such as conversation,
ritual, assembly), the crucial component is that the public sphere "transcends
such topical spaces. We might say that it knits a plurality of spaces into one
larger space of non-assembly. The same public discussion is deemed to pass
through our debate today, and someone else’s earnest conversation tomorrow, and
the newspaper interview Thursday and so on. . . . The public sphere that
emerges in the eighteenth century is a meta-topical common space."~{ Taylor,
Modern Social Imaginaries, 86. }~
={ Habermas, Jürgen ;
   Taylor, Charles +3 ;
   Warner, Michael
}

Because of this, Taylor refers to his version of a public as a "social
imaginary," a way of capturing a phenomena that wavers between having concrete
existence "out there" and imagined rational existence "in here." There are a
handful of other such imagined spaces—the economy, the self-governing people,
civil society—and in Taylor’s philosophical history they are related to each
through the "ideas of moral and social order" that have developed in the West
and around the world.~{ On the subject of imagined communities and the role of
information technologies in imagined networks, see Green, Harvey, and Knox,
"Scales of Place and Networks"; and Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire. }~
={ social imaginary :
     ideology vs. +3
}

Taylor’s social imaginary is intended to do something specific: to resist the
"spectre of idealism," the distinction between ideas and practices, between
"ideologies" and the so-called material world as "rival causal agents." Taylor
suggests, "Because human practices are the kind of thing that makes sense,
certain ideas are internal to them; one cannot distinguish the two in order to
ask the question Which causes which?"~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 32.
}~ Even if materialist explanations of cause are satisfying, as they often are,
Taylor suggests that they are so "at the cost of being implausible as a
universal principle," and he offers instead an analysis of the rise of the
modern imaginaries of moral order.~{ Ibid., 33-48. Taylor’s history of the
transition from feudal nobility to civil society to the rise of republican
democracies (however incomplete) is comparable to Foucault’s history of the
birth of biopolitics, in La naissance de la biopolitique, as an attempt to
historicize governance with respect to its theories and systems, as well as
within the material forms it takes. }~
={ ideology +6 }

The concept of recursive public, like that of Taylor’s public sphere, is
understood here as a kind of social imaginary. The primary reason is to bypass
the dichotomy between ideas and material practice. Because the creation of
software, networks, and legal documents are precisely the kinds of activities
that trouble this distinction—they are at once ideas and things that have
material effects in the ,{[pg 40]}, world, both expressive and performative—it
is extremely difficult to identify the properly material materiality (source
code? computer chips? semiconductor manufacturing plants?). This is the first
of the reasons why a recursive public is to be distinguished from the classic
formulae of the public sphere, that is, that it requires a kind of imagination
that includes the writing and publishing and speaking and arguing we are
familiar with, as well as the making of new kinds of software infrastructures
for the circulation, archiving, movement, and modifiability of our
enunciations.

The concept of a social imaginary also avoids the conundrums created by the
concept of "ideology" and its distinction from material practice. Ideology in
its technical usage has been slowly and surely overwhelmed by its pejorative
meaning: "The ideological is never one’s own position; it is always the stance
of someone else, always their ideology."~{ Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and
Utopia, 2. }~ If one were to attempt an explanation of any particular ideology
in nonpejorative terms, there is seemingly nothing that might rescue the
explanation from itself becoming ideological.

The problem is an old one. Clifford Geertz noted it in "Ideology as a Cultural
System," as did Karl Mannheim before him in Ideology and Utopia: it is the
difficulty of employing a non-evaluative concept of ideology.~{ Geertz,
"Ideology as a Cultural System"; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Both, of
course, also signal the origin of the scientific use of the term proximately
with Karl Marx’s "German Ideology" and more distantly in the Enlightenment
writings of Destutt de Tracy. }~ Of all the versions of struggle over the
concept of a scientific or objective sociology, it is the claim of exploring
ideology objectively that most rankles. As Geertz put it, "Men do not care to
have beliefs to which they attach great moral significance examined
dispassionately, no matter for how pure a purpose; and if they are themselves
highly ideologized, they may find it simply impossible to believe that a
disinterested approach to critical matters of social and political conviction
can be other than a scholastic sham."~{ Geertz, "Ideology as a Cultural
System," 195. }~
={ Geertz, Clifford +3 ;
   Mannheim, Karl +1
}

Mannheim offered one response: a version of epistemological relativism in which
the analysis of ideology included the ideological position of the analyst.
Geertz offered another: a science of "symbolic action" based in Kenneth Burke’s
work and drawing on a host of philosophers and literary critics.~{ Ibid.,
208-13. }~ Neither the concept of ideology, nor the methods of cultural
anthropology have been the same since. "Ideology" has become one of the most
widely deployed (some might say, most diffuse) tools of critique, where
critique is understood as the analysis of cultural patterns given in language
and symbolic structures, for the purposes of bringing ,{[pg 41]}, to light
systems of hegemony, domination, authority, resistance, and/or
misrecognition.~{ The depth and the extent of this issue is obviously huge.
Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia is an excellent analysis to the
problem of ideology prior to 1975. Terry Eagleton’s books The Ideology of the
Aesthetic and Ideology: An Introduction are Marxist explorations that include
discussions of hegemony and resistance in the context of artistic and literary
theory in the 1980s. Slavoj Žižek creates a Lacanian-inspired algebraic system
of analysis that combines Marxism and psychoanalysis in novel ways (see Žižek,
Mapping Ideology). There is even an attempt to replace the concept of ideology
with a metaphor of "software" and "memes" (see Balkin, Cultural Software). The
core of the issue of ideology as a practice (and the vicissitudes of
materialism that trouble it) are also at the heart of works by Pierre Bourdieu
and his followers (on the relationship of ideology and hegemony, see Laclau and
Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). In anthropology, see Comaroff and
Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. }~ However, the practices
of critique are just as (if not more) likely to be turned on critical scholars
themselves, to show how the processes of analysis, hidden assumptions, latent
functions of the university, or other unrecognized features the material,
non-ideological real world cause the analyst to fall into an ideological trap.

The concept of ideology takes a turn toward "social imaginary" in Paul
Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, where he proposes ideological and
utopian thought as two components of "social and cultural imagination."
Ricoeur’s overview divides approaches to the concept of ideology into three
basic types—the distorting, the integrating, and the legitimating—according to
how actors deal with reality through (symbolic) imagination. Does the
imagination distort reality, integrate it, or legitimate it vis-à-vis the
state? Ricoeur defends the second, Geertzian flavor: ideologies integrate the
symbolic structure of the world into a meaningful whole, and "only because the
structure of social life is already symbolic can it be distorted."~{ Ricoeur,
Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10. }~
={ social imaginary :
     ideology vs. +6 ;
   Ricoeur, Paul +1
}

For Ricoeur, the very substance of life begins in the interpretation of
reality, and therefore ideologies (as well as utopias—and perhaps conspiracies)
could well be treated as systems that integrate those interpretations into the
meaningful wholes of political life. Ricoeur’s analysis of the integration of
reality though social imagination, however, does not explicitly address how
imagination functions: what exactly is the nature of this symbolic action or
interpretation, or imagination? Can one know it from the outside, and does it
resist the distinction between ideology and material practice? Both Ricoeur and
Geertz harbor hope that ideology can be made scientific, that the integration
of reality through symbolic action requires only the development of concepts
adequate to the job.

Re-enter Charles Taylor. In Modern Social Imaginaries the concept of social
imaginary is distinctive in that it attempts to capture the specific
integrative imaginations of modern moral and social order. Taylor stresses that
they are imaginations—not necessarily theories—of modern moral and social
order: "By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the
intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality
in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways in ,{[pg 42]}, which
people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how
things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally
met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these
expectations."~{ Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23. }~ Social imaginaries
develop historically and result in both new institutions and new
subjectivities; the concepts of public, market, and civil society (among
others) are located in the imaginative faculties of actors who recognize the
shared, common existence of these ideas, even if they differ on the details,
and the practices of those actors reflect a commitment to working out these
shared concepts.
={ Taylor, Charles +3 }

Social imaginaries are an extension of "background" in the philosophical sense:
"a wider grasp of our whole predicament."~{ Ibid., 25. }~ The example Taylor
uses is that of marching in a demonstration: the action is in our imaginative
repertory and has a meaning that cannot be reduced to the local context: "We
know how to assemble, pick up banners and march. . . . [W]e understand the
ritual. . . . [T]he immediate sense of what we are doing, getting the message
to our government and our fellow citizens that the cuts must stop, say, makes
sense in a wider context, in which we see ourselves standing in a continuing
relation with others, in which it is appropriate to address them in this
manner."~{ Ibid., 26-27. }~ But we also stand "internationally" and "in
history" against a background of stories, images, legends, symbols, and
theories. "The background that makes sense of any given act is wide and deep.
It doesn’t include everything in our world, but the relevant sense-giving
features can’t be circumscribed. . . . [It] draws on our whole world, that is,
our sense of our whole predicament in time and space, among others and in
history."~{ Ibid., 28. }~

The social imaginary is not simply the norms that structure our actions; it is
also a sense of what makes norms achievable or "realizable," as Taylor says.
This is the idea of a "moral order," one that we expect to exist, and if it
doesn’t, one that provides a plan for achieving it. For Taylor, there is such a
thing as a "modern idea of order," which includes, among other things, ideas of
what it means to be an individual, ideas of how individual passions and desires
are related to collective association, and, most important, ideas about living
in time together (he stresses a radically secular conception of time—secular in
a sense that means more than simply "outside religion"). He by no means insists
that this is the only such definition of modernity (the door is wide open to
understanding alternative modernities), but that the modern idea of moral order
is ,{[pg 43]}, one that dominates and structures a very wide array of
institutions and individuals around the world.

The "modern idea of moral order" is a good place to return to the question of
geeks and their recursive publics. Are the ideas of order shared by geeks
different from those Taylor outlines? Do geeks like Sean and Adrian, or
activists in Berlin, possess a distinctive social imaginary? Or do they
(despite their planetary dispersal) participate in this common modern idea of
moral order? Do the stories and narratives, the tools and technologies, the
theories and imaginations they follow and build on have something distinctive
about them? Sean’s and Adrian’s commitment to transforming healthcare seems to
be, for instance, motivated by a notion of moral order in which the means of
allocation of healthcare might become more just, but it is also shot through
with technical ideas about the role of standards, the Internet, and the
problems with current technical solutions; so while they may seem to be simply
advocating for better healthcare, they do so through a technical language and
practice that are probably quite alien to policymakers, upper management, and
healthcare advocacy groups that might otherwise be in complete sympathy.
={ Berlin ;
   Doyle, Sean ;
   Gropper, Adrian ;
   moral and technical order +1
}

The affinity of geeks for each other is processed through and by ideas of order
that are both moral and technical—ideas of order that do indeed mix up
"operating systems and social systems." These systems include the technical
means (the infrastructure) through which geeks meet, assemble, collaborate, and
plan, as well as how they talk and think about those activities. The
infrastructure—the Internet—allows for a remarkably wide and diverse array of
people to encounter and engage with each other. That is to say, the idea of
order shared by geeks is shared because they are geeks, because they "get it,"
because the Internet’s structure and software have taken a particular form
through which geeks come to understand the moral order that gives the fabric of
their political lives warp and weft.
={ affinity (of geeks) }

2~ Internet Silk Road
={ Bangalore +7 ;
   Internet :
     India and +7
}

Bangalore, March 2000. I am at another bar, this time on one of Bangalore’s
trendiest streets. The bar is called Purple Haze, and I have been taken there,
the day after my arrival, by Udhay Shankar ,{[pg 44]}, N. Inside it is dark and
smoky, purple, filled with men between eighteen and thirty, and decorated with
posters of Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Jim Morrison (Udhay: "I hate that
band"), Led Zeppelin, and a somewhat out of place Frank Zappa (Udhay: "One of
my political and musical heroes"). All of the men, it appears, are singing
along with the music, which is almost without exception heavy metal.
={ Shakar, Udhay +6 ;
   music +1
}

I engage in some stilted conversation with Udhay and his cousin Kirti about the
difference between Karnatic music and rock-androll, which seems to boil down to
the following: Karnatic music decreases metabolism and heart rate, leading to a
relaxed state of mind; rock music does the opposite. Given my aim of focusing
on the Internet and questions of openness, I have already decided not to pay
attention to this talk of music. In retrospect, I understand this to have been
a grave methodological error: I underestimated the extent to which the subject
of music has been one of the primary routes into precisely the questions about
the "reorientation of knowledge and power" I was interested in. Over the course
of the evening and the following days, Udhay introduced me, as promised, to a
range of people he either knew or worked with in some capacity. Almost all of
the people I met appeared to sincerely love heavy-metal music.

I met Udhay Shankar N. in 1999 through a newsletter, distributed via e-mail,
called Tasty Bits from the Technology Front. It was one of a handful of sources
I watched closely while in Berlin, looking for such connections to geek
culture. The newsletter described a start-up company in Bangalore, one that was
devoted to creating a gateway between the Internet and mobile phones, and which
was, according to the newsletter, an entirely Indian operation, though
presumably with U.S. venture funds. I wanted to find a company to compare to
Amicas: a start-up, run by geeks, with a similar approach to the Internet, but
halfway around the world and in a "culture" that might be presumed to occupy a
very different kind of moral order. Udhay invited me to visit and promised to
introduce me to everyone he knew. He described himself as a "random networker";
he was not really a programmer or a designer or a Free Software geek, despite
his extensive knowledge of software, devices, operating systems, and so on,
including Free and Open Source Software. Neither was he a businessman, but
rather described himself as the guy who "translates between the suits and the
techs." ,{[pg 45]},
={ Berlin ;
    Amicas (corporation) +2 ;
   culture
}

Udhay "collects interesting people," and it was primarily through his zest for
collecting that I met all the people I did. I met cosmopolitan activists and
elite lawyers and venture capitalists and engineers and cousins and brothers
and sisters of engineers. I met advertising executives and airline flight
attendants and consultants in Bombay. I met journalists and
gastroenterologists, computer-science professors and musicians, and one mother
of a robot scientist in Bangalore. Among them were Muslims, Hindus, Jains,
Jews, Parsis, and Christians, but most of them considered themselves more
secular and scientific than religious. Many were self-educated, or like their
U.S. counterparts, had dropped out of university at some point, but continued
to teach themselves about computers and networks. Some were graduates or
employees of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, an institution that
was among the most important for Indian geeks (as Stanford University is to
Silicon Valley, many would say). Among the geeks to whom Udhay introduced me,
there were only two commonalities: the geeks were, for the most part, male, and
they all loved heavy-metal music.~{ The question of gender plagues the topic of
computer culture. The gendering of hackers and geeks and the more general
exclusion of women in computing have been widely observed by academics. I can
do no more here than direct readers to the increasingly large and sophisticated
literature on the topic. See especially Light, "When Computers Were Women";
Turkle, The Second Self and Life on the Screen. With respect to Free Software,
see Nafus, Krieger, Leach, "Patches Don’t Have Gender." More generally, see
Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg; Downey, The Machine in Me; Faulkner,
"Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering"; Grint and Gill, The
Gender-Technology Relation; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Herring, "Gender
and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication"; Kendall, "‘Oh No! I’m a
NERD!’"; Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse; Green and Adam, Virtual
Gender; P. Hopkins, Sex/Machine; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology and
"Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies"; and Fiona Wilson, "Can’t
Compute, Won’t Compute." Also see the novels and stories of Ellen Ullman,
including Close to the Machine and The Bug: A Novel. }~
={ Gender ;
   Religion +1
}

While I was in Bangalore, I was invited to join a mailing list run by Udhay
called Silk-list, an irregular, unmoderated list devoted to "intelligent
conversation." The list has no particular focus: long, meandering conversations
about Indian politics, religion, economics, and history erupt regularly; topics
range from food to science fiction to movie reviews to discussions on Kashmir,
Harry Potter, the singularity, or nanotechnology. Udhay started Silk-list in
1997 with Bharath Chari and Ram Sundaram, and the recipients have included
hundreds of people around the world, some very well-known ones, programmers,
lawyers, a Bombay advertising executive, science-fiction authors,
entrepreneurs, one member of the start-up Amicas, at least two transhumanists,
one (diagnosed) schizophrenic, and myself. Active participants usually numbered
about ten to fifteen, while many more lurked in the background.
={ Chari, Bharath ;
   Silk-list (mailing list) +5 ;
   Sundaram, Ram
}

% silk index marking not identical to book page numbering

Silk-list is an excellent index of the relationship between the network of
people in Bangalore and their connection to a worldwide community on the
Internet—a fascinating story of the power of heterogeneously connected networks
and media. Udhay explained that in the early 1990s he first participated in and
then taught himself to configure and run a modem-based networking system known
as a Bulletin Board Service (BBS) in Bangalore. In 1994 he heard about a book
by Howard Rheingold called The Virtual ,{[pg 46]}, Community, which was his
first introduction to the Internet. A couple of years later when he finally had
access to the Internet, he immediately e-mailed John Perry Barlow, whose work
he knew from Wired magazine, to ask for Rheingold’s e-mail address in order to
connect with him. Rheingold and Barlow exist, in some ways, at the center of a
certain kind of geek world: Rheingold’s books are widely read popular accounts
of the social and community aspects of new technologies that have often had
considerable impact internationally; Barlow helped found the Electronic
Frontier Foundation and is responsible for popularizing the phrase "information
wants to be free."~{ Originally coined by Steward Brand, the phrase was widely
cited after it appeared in Barlow’s 1994 article "The Economy of Ideas." }~
Both men had a profound influence on Udhay and ultimately provided him with the
ideas central to running an online community. A series of other connections of
similar sorts—some personal, some precipitated out of other media and other
channels, some entirely random—are what make up the membership of Silk-list.~{
On the genesis of "virtual communities" and the role of Steward Brand, see
Turner, "Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy." }~
={ Rheingold, Howard ;
   Barlow, John Perry ;
   Wired (magazine)
}

Like many similar communities of "digerati" during and after the dot.com boom,
Silk-list constituted itself more or less organically around people who "got
it," that is, people who claimed to understand the Internet, its transformative
potential, and who had the technical skills to participate in its expansion.
Silk-list was not the only list of its kind. Others such as the Tasty Bits
newsletter, the FoRK (Friends of Rohit Khare) mailing list (both based in
Boston), and the Nettime and Syndicate mailing lists (both based in the
Netherlands) ostensibly had different reasons for existence, but many had the
same subscribers and overlapping communities of geeks. Subscription was open to
anyone, and occasionally someone would stumble on the list and join in, but
most were either invited by members or friends of friends, or they were
connected by virtue of cross-posting from any number of other mailing lists to
which members were subscribed.

2~ /pub
={ Internet :
     public spheres and +25 ;
   Silk-list (mailing list) :
     as a public +12
}

Silk-list is public in many senses of the word. Practically speaking, one need
not be invited to join, and the material that passes through the list is
publicly archived and can be found easily on the Internet. Udhay does his best
to encourage everyone to speak and to participate, and to discourage forms of
discourse that he thinks ,{[pg 47]}, might silence participants into lurking.
Silk-list is not a government, corporate, or nongovernmental list, but is
constituted only through the activity of geeks finding each other and speaking
to each other on this list (which can happen in all manner of ways: through
work, through school, through conferences, through fame, through random
association, etc.). Recall Charles Taylor’s distinction between a topical and a
metatopical space. Silk-list is not a conventionally topical space: at no point
do all of its members meet face-to-face (though there are regular meet-ups in
cities around the world), and they are not all online at the same time (though
the volume and tempo of messages often reflect who is online "speaking" to each
other at any given moment). It is a topical space, however, if one considers it
from the perspective of the machine: the list of names on the mailing list are
all assembled together in a database, or in a file, on the server that manages
the mailing list. It is a stretch to call this an "assembly," however, because
it assembles only the avatars of the mailing-list readers, many of whom
probably ignore or delete most of the messages.
={ Taylor, Charles +2 }

Silk-list is certainly, on the other hand, a "metatopical" public. It "knits
together" a variety of topical spaces: my discussion with friends in Houston,
and other members’ discussions with people around the world, as well as the
sources of multiple discussions like newspaper and magazine articles, films,
events, and so on that are reported and discussed online. But Silk-list is not
"The" public—it is far from being the only forum in which the public sphere is
knitted together. Many, many such lists exist.

In Publics and Counterpublics Michael Warner offers a further distinction.
"The" public is a social imaginary, one operative in the terms laid out by
Taylor: as a kind of vision of order evidenced through stories, images,
narratives, and so on that constitute the imagination of what it means to be
part of the public, as well as plans necessary for creating the public, if
necessary. Warner distinguishes, however, between a concrete, embodied
audience, like that at a play, a demonstration, or a riot (a topical public in
Taylor’s terms), and an audience brought into being by discourse and its
circulation, an audience that is not metatopical so much as it is a public that
is concrete in a different way; it is concrete not in the face-to-face
temporality of the speech act, but in the sense of calling a public into being
through an address that has a different temporality. It is a public that is
concrete in a media-specific ,{[pg 48]}, manner: it depends on the structures
of creation, circulation, use, performance, and reuse of particular kinds of
discourse, particular objects or instances of discourse.
={ public :
     self-grounding of +4 ;
   social imaginary +4 ;
   Warner, Michael +4
}

% check public self grounding of marker

Warner’s distinction has a number of implications. The first, as Warner is
careful to note, is that the existence of particular media is not sufficient
for a public to come into existence. Just because a book is printed does not
mean that a public exists; it requires also that the public take corresponding
action, that is, that they read it. To be part of a particular public is to
choose to pay attention to those who choose to address those who choose to pay
attention . . . and so on. Or as Warner puts it, "The circularity is essential
to the phenomenon. A public might be real and efficacious, but its reality lies
in just this reflexivity by which an addressable object is conjured into being
in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence."~{ Warner,
"Publics and Counterpublics," 51. }~

This "autotelic" feature of a public is crucial if one is to understand the
function of a public as standing outside of power. It simply cannot be
organized by the state, by a corporation, or by any other social totality if it
is to have the legitimacy of an independently functioning public. As Warner
puts it, "A public organizes itself independently of state institutions, law,
formal frameworks of citizenship, or preexisting institutions such as the
church. If it were not possible to think of the public as organized
independently of the state or other frameworks, the public could not be
sovereign with respect to the state. . . . Speaking, writing, and thinking
involve us—actively and immediately—in a public, and thus in the being of the
sovereign."~{ Ibid., 51-52. See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69. }~
={ public :
     autotelic and independent +1
}

% ={Public:autotelic and independent+6} ??

Warner’s description makes no claim that any public or even The Public actually
takes this form in the present: it is a description of a social imaginary or a
"faith" that allows individuals to make sense of their actions according to a
modern idea of social order. As Warner (and Habermas before him) suggests, the
existence of such autonomous publics—and certainly the idea of "public
opinion"— does not always conform to this idea of order. Often such publics
turn out to have been controlled all along by states, corporations, capitalism,
and other forms of social totality that determine the nature of discourse in
insidious ways. A public whose participants have no faith that it is autotelic
and autonomous is little more than a charade meant to assuage opposition to
authority, to transform ,{[pg 49]}, political power and equality into the
negotiation between unequal parties.

Is Silk-list a public? More important, is it a sovereign one? Warner’s
distinction between different media-specific forms of assembly is crucial to
answering this question. If one wants to know whether a mailing list on the
Internet is more or less likely to be a sovereign public than a book-reading
public or the nightly-news-hearing one, then one needs to approach it from the
specificity of the form of discourse. This specificity not only includes
whether the form is text or video and audio, or whether the text is ASCII or
Unicode, or the video PAL or NTSC, but it also includes the means of creation,
circulation, and reuse of that discourse as well.

The on-demand, Internet-mediated book, by contrast, will have a much different
temporality of circulation: it might languish in obscurity due to lack of
marketing or reputable authority, or it might get mentioned somewhere like the
New York Times and suddenly become a sensation. For such a book, copyright law
(in the form of a copyleft license) might allow a much wider range of uses and
reuses, but it will restrict certain forms of commercialization of the text.
The two publics might therefore end up looking quite different, overlapping, to
be sure, but varying in terms of their control ,{[pg 50]}, and the terms of
admittance. What is at stake is the power of one or the other such public to
appear as an independent and sovereign entity—free from suspect constraints and
control—whose function is to argue with other constituted forms of power.
={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) ;
   publication +1
}

The conventionally published book may well satisfy all the criteria of being a
public, at least in the colloquial sense of making a set of ideas and a
discourse widely available and expecting to influence, or receive a response
from, constituted forms of sovereign power. However, it is only the latter
"on-demand" scheme for publishing that satisfies the criteria of being a
recursive public. The differences in this example offer a crude indication of
why the Internet is so crucially important to geeks, so important that it draws
them together, in its defense, as an infrastructure that enables the creation
of publics that are thought to be autonomous, independent, and autotelic. Geeks
share an idea of moral and technical order when it comes to the Internet; not
only this, but they share a commitment to maintaining that order because it is
what allows them to associate as a recursive public in the first place. They
discover, or rediscover, through their association, the power and possibility
of occupying the position of independent public—one not controlled by states,
corporations, or other organizations, but open (they claim) through and
through—and develop a desire to defend it from encroachment, destruction, or
refeudalization (to use Habermas’s term for the fragmentation of the public
sphere).
={ Habermas, Jürgen ;
   moral and technical order +2 ;
   public :
     autotelic and independent +2
}

The recursive public is thus not only the book and the discourse around the
book. It is not even "content" expanded to include all kinds of media. It is
also the technical structure of the Internet as well: its software, its
protocols and standards, its applications and software, its legal status and
the licenses and regulations that govern it. This captures both of the reasons
why recursive publics are distinctive: (1) they include not only the discourses
of a public, but the ability to make, maintain, and manipulate the
infrastructures of those discourses as well; and (2) they are "layered" and
include both discourses and infrastructures, to a specific technical extent
(i.e., not all the way down). The meaning of which layers are important
develops more or less immediately from direct engagement with the medium. In
the following example, for instance, Napster represents the potential of the
Internet in miniature—as an application—but it also connects immediately to
concerns about the core protocols that govern the Internet and the process of
standardization ,{[pg 51]}, that governs the development of these protocols:
hence recursion through the layers of an infrastructure.
={ Napster ;
   recursive public :
     layers of ;
   Standards :
     Internet
}

These two aspects of the recursive public also relate to a concern about the
fragmentation or refeudalization of the public sphere: there is only one
Internet. Its singularity is not technically determined or by any means
necessary, but it is what makes the Internet so valuable to geeks. It is a
contest, the goal of which is to maintain the Internet as an infrastructure for
autonomous and autotelic publics to emerge as part of The Public, understood as
part of an imaginary of moral and technical order: operating systems and social
systems.
={ Internet :
     singularity of
}

2~ From Napster to the Internet
={ Napster +21 }

On 27 July 2000 Eugen Leitl cross-posted to Silk-list a message with the
subject line "Prelude to the Singularity." The message’s original author, Jeff
Bone (not at the time a member of Silk-list), had posted the "op-ed piece"
initially to the FoRK mailing list as a response to the Recording Industry
Association of America’s (RIAA) actions against Napster. The RIAA had just
succeeded in getting U.S. district judge Marilyn Hall Patel, Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals, to issue an injunction to Napster to stop downloads of
copyrighted music. Bone’s op-ed said,
={ Bone, Jeff +26 ;
   Internet :
     singularity of ;
   Leitl, Eugene ;
   Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1
}

_1 Popular folklore has it that the Internet was designed with decentralized
routing protocols in order to withstand a nuclear attack. That is, the Internet
"senses damage" and "routes around it." It has been said that, on the ’Net,
censorship is perceived as damage and is subsequently routed around. The RIAA,
in a sense, has cast itself in a censor’s role. Consequently, the music
industry will be perceived as damage—and it will be routed around. There is no
doubt that this will happen, and that technology will evolve more quickly than
businesses and social institutions can; there are numerous highly-visible
projects already underway that attempt to create technology that is
invulnerable to legal challenges of various kinds. Julian Morrison, the
originator of a project (called Fling) to build a fully anonymous/untraceable
suite of network protocols, expresses this particularly eloquently.~{ The rest
of this message can be found in the Silk-list archives at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2869 (accessed 18 August 2006).
The reference to "Fling" is to a project now available at
http://fling.sourceforge.net/ (accessed 18 August 2006). The full archives of
Silk-list can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/ and the full
archives of the FoRK list can be found at
http://www.xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork/. }~
={ censorship }

Bone’s message is replete with details that illustrate the meaning and value of
the Internet to geeks, and that help clarify the concept ,{[pg 52]}, of a
recursive public. While it is only one message, it nonetheless condenses and
expresses a variety of stories, images, folklore, and technical details that I
elaborate herein.
={ recursive public :
     layers of +2 | examples of +28
}

The Napster shutdown in 2000 soured music fans and geeks alike, and it didn’t
really help the record labels who perpetrated it either. For many geeks,
Napster represented the Internet in miniature, an innovation that both
demonstrated something on a scope and scale never seen before, and that also
connected people around something they cared deeply about—their shared interest
in music. Napster raised interesting questions about its own success: Was it
successful because it allowed people to develop new musical interests on a
scope and scale they had never experienced before? Or was it successful because
it gave people with already existing musical interests a way to share music on
a scope and scale they had never experienced before? That is to say, was it an
innovation in marketing or in distribution? The music industry experienced it
as the latter and hence as direct competition with their own means of
distribution. Many music fans experienced it as the former, what Cory Doctorow
nicely labeled "risk-free grazing," meaning the ability to try out an almost
unimaginable diversity of music before choosing what to invest one’s interests
(and money) in. To a large extent, Napster was therefore a recapitulation of
what the Internet already meant to geeks.

Bone’s message, the event of the Napster shutdown, and the various responses to
it nicely illustrate the two key aspects of the recursive public: first, the
way in which geeks argue not only about rights and ideas (e.g., is it legal to
share music?) but also about the infrastructures that allow such arguing and
sharing; second, the "layers" of a recursive public are evidenced in the
immediate connection of Napster (an application familiar to millions) to the
"decentralized routing protocols" (TCP/IP, DNS, and others) that made it
possible for Napster to work the way it did.
={ Domain Name System (DNS) }

Bone’s message contains four interrelated points. The first concerns the
concept of autonomous technical progress. The title "Prelude to the
Singularity" refers to a 1993 article by Vernor Vinge about the notion of a
"singularity," a point in time when the speed of autonomous technological
development outstrips the human capacity to control it.~{ Vinge, "The Coming
Technological Singularity." }~ The notion of singularity has the status of a
kind of colloquial "law" similar to Moore’s Law or Metcalfe’s Law, as well as
signaling links to a more general literature with roots in ,{[pg 53]},
libertarian or classically liberal ideas of social order ranging from John
Locke and John Stuart Mill to Ayn Rand and David Brin.~{ Moore’s Law—named for
Gordon Moore, former head of Intel—states that the speed and capacity of
computer central processing units (CPUs) doubles every eighteen months, which
it has done since roughly 1970. Metcalfe’s Law—named for Robert Metcalfe,
inventor of Ethernet—states that the utility of a network equals the square of
the number of users, suggesting that the number of things one can do with a
network increases exponentially as members are added linearly. }~
={ liberalism, classical ;
   Metcalfe's Law ;
   Moore's Law ;
   singularity ;
   transhumanism ;
   Locke, John ;
   Mill, John Stuart ;
   Rand, Ayn ;
   Brin, David ;
   Vinge, Vernor
}

Bone’s affinity for transhumanist stories of evolutionary theory, economic
theory, and rapid innovation sets the stage for the rest of his message. The
crucial rhetorical gambit here is the appeal to inevitability (as in the
emphatic "there is no doubt that this will happen"): Bone establishes that he
is speaking to an audience that is accustomed to hearing about the
inevitability of technical progress and the impossibility of legal maneuvering
to change it, but his audience may not necessarily agree with these
assumptions. Geeks occupy a spectrum from "polymath" to "transhumanist," a
spectrum that includes their understandings of technological progress and its
relation to human intervention. Bone’s message clearly lands on the far
transhumanist side.

A second point concerns censorship and the locus of power: according to Bone,
power does not primarily reside with the government or the church, but comes
instead from the private sector, in this case the coalition of corporations
represented by the RIAA. The significance of this has to do with the fact that
a "public" is expected to be its own sovereign entity, distinct from church,
state, or corporation, and while censorship by the church or the state is a
familiar form of aggression against publics, censorship by corporations (or
consortia representing them), as it strikes Bone and others, is a novel
development. Whether the blocking of file-sharing can legitimately be called
censorship is also controversial, and many Silk-list respondents found the
accusation of censorship untenable.
={ censorship +1 ;
   Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) +1
}

Proving Bone’s contention, over the course of the subsequent years and court
cases, the RIAA and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) have been
given considerably more police authority than even many federal
agencies—especially with regard to policing networks themselves (an issue
which, given its technical abstruseness, has rarely been mentioned in the
mainstream mass media). Both organizations have not only sought to prosecute
filesharers but have been granted rights to obtain information from Internet
Service Providers about customer activities and have consistently sought the
right to secretly disable (hack into, disable, or destroy) private computers
suspected of illegal activity. Even if these practices may not be defined as
censorship per se, they are nonetheless fine examples of the issues that most
exercise geeks: the use of legal means by a few (in this case, private
corporations) to ,{[pg 54]}, suppress or transform technologies in wide use by
the many. They also index the problems of monopoly, antitrust, and technical
control that are not obvious and often find expression, for example, in
allegories of reformation and the control of the music-sharing laity by papal
authorities.
={ antitrust ;
   monopoly ;
   Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) ;
   protestant Reformation :
     as usable past
}

Third, Bone’s message can itself be understood in terms of the reorientation of
knowledge and power. Although what it means to call his message an "op-ed"
piece may seem obvious, Bone’s message was not published anywhere in any
conventional sense. It doesn’t appear to have been widely cited or linked to.
However, for one day at least, it was a heated discussion topic on three
mailing lists, including Silk-list. "Publication" in this instance is a
different kind of event than getting an op-ed in the New York Times.
={ publication +2 }

The material on Silk-list rests somewhere between private conversation (in a
public place, perhaps) and published opinion. No editor made a decision to
"publish" the message—Bone just clicked "send." However, as with any print
publication, his piece was theoretically accessible by anyone, and what’s more,
a potentially huge number of copies may be archived in many different places
(the computers of all the participants, the server that hosts the list, the
Yahoo! Groups servers that archive it, Google’s search databases, etc.). Bone’s
message exemplifies the recursive nature of the recursive public: it is a
public statement about the openness of the Internet, and it is an example of
the new forms of publicness it makes possible through its openness.
={ Internet +9 }

% Internet +9 is not in original index

The constraints on who speaks in a public sphere (such as the power of printers
and publishers, the requirements of licensing, or issues of cost and
accessibility) are much looser in the Internet era than in any previous one.
The Internet gives a previously unknown Jeff Bone the power to dash off a
manifesto without so much as a second thought. On the other hand, the ease of
distribution belies the difficulty of actually being heard: the multitudes of
other Jeff Bones make it much harder to get an audience. In terms of publics,
Bone’s message can constitute a public in the same sense that a New York Times
op-ed can, but its impact and meaning will be different. His message is openly
and freely available for as long as there are geeks and laws and machines that
maintain it, but the New York Times piece will have more authority, will be
less accessible, and, most important, will not be available to just anyone.
Geeks imagine a space where anyone can speak with similar reach and staying
,{[pg 55]}, power—even if that does not automatically imply authority—and they
imagine that it should remain open at all costs. Bone is therefore interested
precisely in a technical infrastructure that ensures his right to speak about
that infrastructure and offer critique and guidance concerning it.

The ability to create and to maintain such a recursive public, however, raises
the fourth and most substantial point that Bone’s message makes clear. The leap
to speaking about the "decentralized routing protocols" represents clearly the
shared moral and technical order of geeks, derived in this case from the
specific details of the Internet. Bone’s post begins with a series of
statements that are part of the common repertoire of technical stories and
images among geeks. Bone begins by making reference to the "folklore" of the
Internet, in which routing protocols are commonly believed to have been created
to withstand a nuclear attack. In calling it folklore he suggests that this is
not a precise description of the Internet, but an image that captures its
design goals. Bone collapses it into a more recent bit of folklore: "The
Internet treats censorship as damage and routes around it."~{ This quotation
from the 1990s is attributed to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s founder and
"cyber-libertarian" John Gilmore. Whether there ,{[pg 319]}, is any truth to
this widespread belief expressed in the statement is not clear. On the one
hand, the protocol to which this folklore refers—the general system of "message
switching" and, later, "packet switching" invented by Paul Baran at RAND
Corporation—does seem to lend itself to robustness (on this history, see
Abbate, Inventing the Internet). However, it is not clear that nuclear threats
were the only reason such robustness was a design goal; simply to ensure
communication in a distributed network was necessary in itself. Nonetheless,
the story has great currency as a myth of the nature and structure of the
Internet. Paul Edwards suggests that both stories are true ("Infrastructure and
Modernity," 216-20, 225n13). }~ Both bits of folklore are widely circulated and
cited; they encapsulate one of the core intellectual ideas about the
architecture of the Internet, that is, its open and distributed
interconnectivity. There is certainly a specific technical backdrop for this
suggestion: the TCP/IP "internetting" protocols were designed to link up
multiple networks without making them sacrifice their autonomy and control.
However, Bone uses this technical argument more in the manner of a social
imaginary than of a theory, that is, as a way of thinking about the technical
(and moral) order of the Internet, of what the Internet is supposed to be like.
={ censorship +5 ;
   moral and technical order ;
   Gilmore, John +1 ;
   Internet :
     folklore and ;
   libertarianism +1 ;
   protocols :
     TCP/IP ;
   social imaginary +10 ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) ;
   folklore of Internet :
     see also usable pasts
}

In the early 1990s this version of the technical order of the Internet was part
of a vibrant libertarian dogma asserting that the Internet simply could not be
governed by any land-based sovereign and that it was fundamentally a place of
liberty and freedom. This was the central message of people such as John Perry
Barlow, John Gilmore, Howard Rheingold, Esther Dyson, and a host of others who
populated both the pre-1993 Internet (that is, before the World Wide Web became
widely available) and the pages of magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000—the
same group of people, incidentally, whose ideas were visible and meaningful to
Udhay Shankar and his friends in India even prior to Internet access there, not
to mention to Sean and Adrian in Boston, and artists and activists in ,{[pg
56]}, Europe, all of whom often reacted more strongly against this libertarian
aesthetic.
={ Barlow, John Perry ;
   Doyle, Sean ;
   Dyson, Esther ;
   Rheingold, Howard ;
   Shakar, Udhay ;
   Wired (magazine)
}

For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net
treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that
censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A
related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the
Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks
as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet.

For Jeff Bone (and a great many geeks), the folkloric notion that "the net
treats censorship as damage" is a very powerful one: it suggests that
censorship is impossible because there is no central point of control. A
related and oft-cited sentiment is that "trying to take something off of the
Internet is like trying to take pee out of a pool." This is perceived by geeks
as a virtue, not a drawback, of the Internet.

On the other side of the spectrum, however, this view of the unregulatable
nature of the Internet has been roundly criticized, most prominently by
Lawrence Lessig, who is otherwise often in sympathy with geek culture. Lessig
suggests that just because the Internet has a particular structure does not
mean that it must always be that way.~{ Lessig, Code and Other Laws of
Cyberspace. See also Gillespie, "Engineering a Principle" on the related
history of the "end to end" design principle. }~ His argument has two prongs:
first, that the Internet is structured the way it is because it is made of code
that people write, and thus it could have been and will be otherwise, given
that there are changes and innovations occurring all the time; second, that the
particular structure of the Internet therefore governs or regulates behavior in
particular ways: Code is Law. So while it may be true that no one can make the
Internet "closed" by passing a law, it is also true that the Internet could
become closed if the technology were to be altered for that purpose, a process
that may well be nudged and guided by laws, regulations, and norms.
={ norms ;
   Lessig, Lawrence +2 ;
   recursive public :
     layers of +2 ;
   regulation :
     Internet
}

Lessig’s critique is actually at the heart of Bone’s concern, and the concern
of recursive publics generally: the Internet is a contest and one that needs to
be repeatedly and constantly replayed in order to maintain it as the legitimate
infrastructure through which geeks associate with one another. Geeks argue in
detail about what distinguishes technical factors from legal or social ones.
Openness on the Internet is complexly intertwined with issues of availability,
price, legal restriction, usability, elegance of design, censorship, trade
secrecy, and so on. ,{[pg 57]},

However, even where openness is presented as a natural tendency for technology
(in oft-made analogies with reproductive fitness and biodiversity, for
example), it is only a partial claim in that it represents only one of the
"layers" of a recursive public. For instance, when Bone suggests that the net
is "invulnerable to legal attack" because "technology will evolve more quickly
than businesses and social institutions can," he is not only referring to the
fact that the Internet’s novel technical configuration has few central points
of control, which makes it difficult for a single institution to control it,
but also talking about the distributed, loosely connected networks of people
who have the right to write and rewrite software and deal regularly with the
underlying protocols of the Internet—in other words, of geeks themselves.

Many geeks, perhaps including Bone, discover the nature of this order by coming
to understand how the Internet works—how it works technically, but also who
created it and how. Some have come to this understanding through participation
in Free Software (an exemplary "recursive public"), others through stories and
technologies and projects and histories that illuminate the process of
creating, growing, and evolving the Internet. The story of the process by which
the Internet is standardized is perhaps the most well known: it is the story of
the Internet Engineering Task Force and its Requests for Comments system.
={ Request for Comments (RFC) }

2~ Requests for Comments
={ Internet +9 ;
   Request for Comments (RFC) +7
}

For many geeks, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and its Requests for
Comments (RFC) system exemplify key features of the moral and technical order
they share, the "stories and practices" that make up a social imaginary,
according to Charles Taylor. The IETF is a longstanding association of Internet
engineers who try to help disseminate some of the core standards of the
Internet through ,{[pg 58]}, the RFC process. Membership is open to
individuals, and the association has very little real control over the
structure or growth of the Internet—only over the key process of Internet
standardization. Its standards rarely have the kind of political legitimacy
that one associates with international treaties and the standards bodies of
Geneva, but they are nonetheless de facto legitimate. The RFC process is an
unusual standards process that allows modifications to existing technologies to
be made before the standard is finalized. Together Internet standards and the
RFC process form the background of the Napster debate and of Jeff Bone’s claims
about "internet routing protocols."
={ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) +8 ;
   moral and technical order +1 ;
   Napster +8 ;
   standards :
     Internet +6 ;
   standards processes +2 ;
   Taylor, Charles
}

A famous bit of Internet-governance folklore expresses succinctly the
combination of moral and technical order that geeks share (attributed to IETF
member David Clark): "We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in
rough consensus and running code."~{ This is constantly repeated on the
Internet and attributed to David Clark, but no one really knows where or when
he stated it. It appears in a 1997 interview of David Clark by Jonathan
Zittrain, the transcript of which is available at
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/jzfallsem//trans/clark/ (accessed 18 August 2006).
}~ This quote emphasizes the necessity of arguing with and through technology,
the first aspect of a recursive public; the only argument that convinces is
working code. If it works, then it can be implemented; if it is implemented, it
will "route around" the legal damage done by the RIAA. The notion of "running
code" is central to an understanding of the relationship between argumentby-
technology and argument-by-talk for geeks. Very commonly, the response by geeks
to people who argued about Napster that summer—and the courts’ decisions
regarding it—was to dismiss their complaints as mere talk. Many suggested that
if Napster were shut down, thousands more programs like it would spring up in
its wake. As one mailing-list participant, Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, put it, "It
is precisely these totally unenforceable and mindless judicial decisions that
will start to look like self-satisfied wanking when there’s code out there
which will make the laws worth less than the paper they’re written on. When it
comes to fighting this shit in a way that counts, everything that isn’t code is
just talk."~{ Ashish "Hash" Gulhati, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9
September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3125. }~
={ Clark, David ;
   Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) ;
   Gulhati, Ashish ;
   recursive public :
     layers of +3
}

Such powerful rhetoric often collapses the process itself, for someone has to
write the code. It can even be somewhat paradoxical: there is a need to talk
forcefully about the need for less talk and more code, as demonstrated by Eugen
Leitl when I objected that Silk-listers were "just talking": "Of course we
should talk. Did my last post consist of some kickass Python code adding
sore-missed functionality to Mojonation? Nope. Just more meta-level waffle
about the importance of waffling less, coding more. I lack the ,{[pg 59]},
proper mental equipment upstairs for being a good coder, hence I attempt to
corrupt young impressionable innocents into contributing to the cause.
Unashamedly so. So sue me."~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9
September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3127. Python is
a programming language. Mojonation was a very promising peer-to-peer
application in 2000 that has since ceased to exist. }~
={ Leitl, Eugene ;
   programming +1
}

Eugen’s flippancy reveals a recognition that there is a political component to
coding, even if, in the end, talk disappears and only code remains. Though
Eugen and others might like to adopt a rhetoric that suggests "it will just
happen," in practice none of them really act that way. Rather, the activities
of coding, writing software, or improving and diversifying the software that
exists are not inevitable or automatic but have specific characteristics. They
require time and "the proper mental equipment." The inevitability they refer to
consists not in some fantasy of machine intelligence, but in a social imaginary
shared by many people in loosely connected networks who spend all their free
time building, downloading, hacking, testing, installing, patching, coding,
arguing, blogging, and proselytizing—in short, creating a recursive public
enabled by the Internet.

Jeff Bone’s op-ed piece, which is typically enthusiastic about the
inevitability of new technologies, still takes time to reference one of
thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of projects as worthy of attention and
support, a project called Fling, which is an attempt to rewrite the core
protocols of the Internet.~{ In particular, this project focuses on the
Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the
Domain Name System (DNS). The first two have remained largely stable over the
last thirty years, but the DNS system has been highly politicized (see Mueller,
Ruling the Root). }~ The goal of the project is to write a software
implementation of these protocols with the explicit goal of making them
"anonymous, untraceable, and untappable." Fling is not a corporation, a
start-up, or a university research project (though some such projects are); it
is only a Web site. The core protocols of the Internet, contained in the RFCs,
are little more than documents describing how computers should interact with
each other. They are standards, but of an unusual kind.~{ On Internet
standards, see Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology; Abbate and Kahin,
Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure. }~ Bone’s leap from a
discussion about Napster to one about the core protocols of the Internet is not
unusual. It represents the second aspect of a recursive public: the importance
of understanding the Internet as a set of "layers," each enabling the next and
each requiring an openness that both prevents central control and leads to
maximum creativity.
={ protocols :
     TCP/IP +1 ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
}

% ={Domain Name System (DNS);Napster} ={Napster;Standards;Standards processes}

RFCs have developed from an informal system of memos into a formal
standardization process over the life of the Internet, as the IETF and the
Internet Society (ISOC) have become more bureaucratic entities. The process of
writing and maintaining these documents is particular to the Internet,
precisely because the Internet ,{[pg 60]}, is the kind of network experiment
that facilitates the sharing of resources across administratively bounded
networks. It is a process that has allowed all the experimenters to both share
the network and to propose changes to it, in a common space. RFCs are primarily
suggestions, not demands. They are "public domain" documents and thus available
to everyone with access to the Internet. As David Clark’s reference to
"consensus and running code" demonstrates, the essential component of setting
Internet standards is a good, working implementation of the protocols. Someone
must write software that behaves in the ways specified by the RFC, which is,
after all, only a document, not a piece of software. Different implementations
of, for example, the TCP/IP protocol or the File Transfer Protocol (ftp) depend
initially on individuals, groups, and/or corporations building them into an
operating-system kernel or a piece of user software and subsequently on the
existence of a large number of people using the same operating system or
application.
={ Internet Society (ISOC) ;
   Clark, David ;
   standards processes +2
}

In many cases, subsequent to an implementation that has been disseminated and
adopted, the RFCs have been amended to reflect these working implementations
and to ordain them as standards. So the current standards are actually
bootstrapped, through a process of writing RFCs, followed by a process of
creating implementations that adhere loosely to the rules in the RFC, then
observing the progress of implementations, and then rewriting RFCs so that the
process begins all over again. The fact that geeks can have a discussion via
e-mail depends on the very existence of both an RFC to define the e-mail
protocol and implementations of software to send the e-mails.

This standardization process essentially inverts the process of planning.
Instead of planning a system, which is then standardized, refined, and finally
built according to specification, the RFC process allows plans to be proposed,
implemented, refined, reproposed, rebuilt, and so on until they are adopted by
users and become the standard approved of by the IETF. The implication for most
geeks is that this process is permanently and fundamentally open: changes to it
can be proposed, implemented, and adopted without end, and the better a
technology becomes, the more difficult it becomes to improve on it, and
therefore the less reason there is to subvert it or reinvent it.
Counterexamples, in which a standard emerges but no one adopts it, are also
plentiful, and they suggest that the standardization process extends beyond the
proposal-implementation-proposal-standard ,{[pg 61]}, circle to include the
problem of actually convincing users to switch from one working technology to a
better one. However, such failures of adoption are also seen as a kind of
confirmation of the quality or ease of use of the current solution, and they
are all the more likely to be resisted when some organization or political
entity tries to force users to switch to the new standard—something the IETF
has refrained from doing for the most part.
={ planning }

2~ Conclusion: Recursive Public
={ public +7 }

Napster was a familiar and widely discussed instance of the "reorientation of
power and knowledge" (or in this case, power and music) wrought by the Internet
and the practices of geeks. Napster was not, however, a recursive public or a
Free Software project, but a dot-com-inspired business plan in which
proprietary software was given away for free in the hopes that revenue would
flow from the stock market, from advertising, or from enhanced versions of the
software. Therefore, geeks did not defend Napster as much as they experienced
its legal restriction as a wake-up call: the Internet enables Napster and will
enable many other things, but laws, corporations, lobbyists, money, and
governments can destroy all of it.
={ music ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge
}

I started this chapter by asking what draws geeks together: what constitutes
the chain that binds geeks like Sean and Adrian to hipsters in Berlin and to
entrepreneurs and programmers in Bangalore? What constitutes their affinity if
it is not any of the conventional candidates like culture, nation, corporation,
or language? A colloquial answer might be that it is simply the Internet that
brings them together: cyberspace, virtual communities, online culture. But this
doesn’t answer the question of why? Because they can? Because Community Is
Good? If mere association is the goal, why not AOL or a vast private network
provided by Microsoft?
={ affinity (of geeks) +2 ;
   Berlin ;
   Doyle, Sean
}

My answer, by contrast, is that geeks’ affinity with one another is structured
by shared moral and technical understandings of order. They are a public, an
independent public that has the ability to build, maintain, and modify itself,
that is not restricted to the activities of speaking, writing, arguing, or
protesting. Recursive publics form through their experience with the Internet
precisely because the Internet is the kind of thing they can inhabit and
transform. Two ,{[pg 62]}, things make recursive publics distinctive: the
ability to include the practice of creating this infrastructure as part of the
activity of being public or contesting control; and the ability to "recurse"
through the layers of that infrastructure, maintaining its publicness at each
level without making it into an unchanging, static, unmodifiable thing.
={ moral and technical order ;
   Infrastructure +4
}

The affinity constituted by a recursive public, through the medium of the
Internet, creates geeks who understand clearly what association through the
Internet means. This affinity structures their imagination of what the Internet
is and enables: creation, distribution, modification of knowledge, music,
science, software. The infrastructure—this-infrastructure-here, the
Internet—must be understood as part of this imaginary (in addition to being a
pulsating tangle of computers, wires, waves, and electrons).
={ music }

The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for
example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets,
exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a
concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even
in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of
time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office
space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on.

The Internet is not the only medium for such association. A corporation, for
example, is also based on a shared imaginary of the economy, of how markets,
exchanges, and business cycles are supposed to work; it is the creation of a
concrete set of relations and practices, one that is generally inflexible—even
in this age of socalled flexible capitalism—because it requires a commitment of
time, humans, and capital. Even in fast capitalism one needs to rent office
space, buy toilet paper, install payroll software, and so on.

The urgency evidenced in the case of Napster (and repeated in numerous other
instances, such as the debate over net neutrality) is linked to a moral idea of
order in which there is a shared imaginary,{[pg 63]}, of The Public, and not
only a vast multiplicity of competing publics. It is an urgency linked directly
to the fact that the Internet provides geeks with a platform, an environment,
an infrastructure through which they not only associate, but create, and do so
in a manner that is widely felt to be autonomous, autotelic, and independent of
at least the most conventional forms of power: states and
corporations—independent enough, in fact, that both states and corporations can
make widespread use of this infrastructure (can become geeks themselves)
without necessarily endangering its independence.
={ Napster ;
   moral and technical order
}

% ={Public:autotelic and independent}

1~ 2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists
={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation +54 ;
   Protestant Reformation +54 ;
   transhumanism
}

% this Transhumanism ref not in original index

% [PAGE 64]

Geeks talk a lot. They don’t talk about recursive publics. They don’t often
talk about imaginations, infrastructures, moral or technical orders. But they
do talk a lot. A great deal of time and typing is necessary to create software
and networks: learning and talking, teaching and arguing, telling stories and
reading polemics, reflecting on the world in and about the infrastructure one
inhabits. In this chapter I linger on the stories geeks tell, and especially on
stories and reflections that mark out contemporary problems of knowledge and
power—stories about grand issues like progress, enlightenment, liberty, and
freedom.
={ moral and technical order ;
   enlightenment +3 ;
   Geeks +6 ;
   Progress +3
}

Issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are quite obviously still part
of a "social imaginary," especially imaginations of the relationship of
knowledge and enlightenment to freedom and autonomy so clearly at stake in the
notion of a public or public ,{[pg 65]}, sphere. And while the example of Free
Software illuminates how issues of enlightenment, progress, and freedom are
proposed, contested, and implemented in and through software and networks, this
chapter contains stories that are better understood as "usable pasts"—less
technical and more accessible narratives that make sense of the contemporary
world by reflecting on the past and its difference from today.
={ social imaginary ;
   usable pasts +2
}

Usable pasts is a more charitable term for what might be called modern myths
among geeks: stories that the tellers know to be a combination of fact and
fiction. They are told not in order to remember the past, but in order to make
sense of the present and of the future. They make sense of practices that are
not questioned in the doing, but which are not easily understood in available
intellectual or colloquial terms. The first set of stories I relate are those
about the Protestant Reformation: allegories that make use of Catholic and
Protestant churches, laity, clergy, high priests, and reformation-era images of
control and liberation. It might be surprising that geeks turn to the past (and
especially to religious allegory) in order to make sense of the present, but
the reason is quite simple: there are no "ready-to-narrate" stories that make
sense of the practices of geeks today. Precisely because geeks are "figuring
out" things that are not clear or obvious, they are of necessity bereft of
effective ways of talking about it. The Protestant Reformation makes for good
allegory because it separates power from control; it draws on stories of
catechism and ritual, alphabets, pamphlets and liturgies, indulgences and
self-help in order to give geeks a way to make sense of the distinction between
power and control, and how it relates to the technical and political economy
they occupy. The contemporary relationship among states, corporations, small
businesses, and geeks is not captured by familiar oppositions like
commercial/noncommercial, for/against private property, or
capitalist/socialist—it is a relationship of reform and conversion, not
revolution or overthrow.
={ figuring out }

Usable pasts are stories, but they are stories that reflect specific attitudes
and specific ways of thinking about the relationship between past, present, and
future. Geeks think and talk a lot about time, progress, and change, but their
conclusions and attitudes are by no means uniform. Some geeks are much more
aware of the specific historical circumstances and contexts in which they
operate, others less so. In this chapter I pose a question via Michel ,{[pg
66]}, Foucault’s famous short piece "What Is Enlightenment?" Namely, are geeks
modern? For Foucault, rereading Kant’s eponymous piece from 1784, the problem
of being modern (or of an age being "enlightened") is not one of a period or
epoch that people live through; rather, it involves a subjective relationship,
an attitude. Kant’s explanation of enlightenment does not suggest that it is
itself a universal, but that it occurs through a form of reflection on what
difference the changes of one’s immediate historical past make to one’s
understanding of the supposed universals of a much longer history—that is, one
must ask why it is necessary to think the way one does today about problems
that have been confronted in ages past. For Foucault, such reflections must be
rooted in the "historically unique forms in which the generalities of our
relations . . . have been problematized."~{ Foucault, "What Is Enlightenment,"
319. }~ Thus, I want to ask of geeks, how do they connect the historically
unique problems they confront—from the Internet to Napster to intellectual
property to sharing and reusing source code—to the generalities of relations in
which they narrate them as problems of liberty, knowledge, power, and
enlightenment? Or, as Foucault puts it, are they modern in this sense? Do they
"despise the present" or not?
={ Foucault, Michel ;
   geeks :
     as moderns ;
   intellectual property ;
   Kant, Immanuel ;
   Napster
}

The attitudes that geeks take in responding to these questions fall along a
spectrum that I have identified as ranging from "polymaths" to
"transhumanists." These monikers are drawn from real discussions with geeks,
but they don’t designate a kind of person. They are "subroutines," perhaps,
called from within a larger program of moral and technical imaginations of
order. It is possible for the same person to be a polymath at work and a
transhumanist at home, but generally speaking they are conflicting and opposite
mantles. In polymath routines, technology is an intervention into a
complicated, historically unique field of people, customs, organizations, other
technologies, and laws; in transhumanist routines, technology is seen as an
inevitable force—a product of human action, but not of human design—that is
impossible to control or resist through legal or customary means.
={ intervention, technology as ;
   moral and technical order ;
   transhumanism
}

2~ Protestant Reformation

Geeks love allegories about the Protestant Reformation; they relish stories of
Luther and Calvin, of popery and iconoclasm, of reformation ,{[pg 67]}, over
revolution. Allegories of Protestant revolt allow geeks to make sense of the
relationship between the state (the monarchy), large corporations (the Catholic
Church), the small start-ups, individual programmers, and adepts among whom
they spend most of their time (Protestant reformers), and the laity (known as
"lusers" and "sheeple"). It gives them a way to assert that they prefer
reformation (to save capitalism from the capitalists) over revolution.
Obviously, not all geeks tell stories of "religious wars" and the Protestant
Reformation, but these images reappear often enough in conversations that most
geeks will more or less instantly recognize them as a way of making sense of
modern corporate, state, and political power in the arena of information
technology: the figures of Pope, the Catholic Church, the Vatican, the monarchs
of various nations, the laity, the rebel adepts like Luther and Calvin, as well
as models of sectarianism, iconoclasm ("In the beginning was the Command
Line"), politicoreligious power, and arcane theological argumentation.~{
Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. }~ The allegories that
unfold provide geeks a way to make sense of a similarly complex modern
situation in which it is not the Church and the State that struggle, but the
Corporation and the State; and what geeks struggle over are not matters of
church doctrine and organization, but matters of information technology and its
organization as intellectual property and economic motor. I stress here that
this is not an analogy that I myself am making (though I happily make use of
it), but is one that is in wide circulation among the geeks I study. To the
historian or religious critic, it may seem incomplete, or absurd, or bizarre,
but it still serves a specific function, and this is why I highlight it as one
component of the practical and technical ideas of order that geeks share.
={ Intellectual property ;
   Luther, Martin +15 ;
   reformation vs. revolution ;
   religious wars +5
}

% this "intellectual property" reference not in original index

At the first level are allegories of "religious war" or "holy war" (and
increasingly, of "jihads"). Such stories reveal a certain cynicism: they
describe a technical war of details between two pieces of software that
accomplish the same thing through different means, so devotion to one or the
other is seen as a kind of arbitrary theological commitment, at once reliant on
a pure rationality and requiring aesthetic or political judgment. Such stories
imply that two technologies are equally good and equally bad and that one’s
choice of sect is thus an entirely nonrational one based in the vicissitudes of
background and belief. Some people are zealous proselytizers of a technology,
some are not. As one Usenet message explains: "Religious ‘wars’ have tended to
occur over theological and doctrinal ,{[pg 68]}, technicalities of one sort or
another. The parallels between that and the computing technicalities that
result in ‘computing wars’ are pretty strong."~{ Message-ID: {
tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com.
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com
}~

Perhaps the most familiar and famous of these wars is that between Apple and
Microsoft (formerly between Apple and IBM), a conflict that is often played out
in dramatic and broad strokes that imply fundamental differences, when in fact
the differences are extremely slight.~{ The Apple-Microsoft conflict was given
memorable expression by Umberto Eco in a widely read piece that compared the
Apple user interface ,{[pg 320]}, to Catholicism and the PC user interface to
Protestantism ("La bustina di Minerva," Espresso, 30 September 1994, back
page). }~ Geeks are also familiar with a wealth of less well-known "holy wars":
EMACS versus vi; KDE versus Gnome; Linux versus BSD; Oracle versus all other
databases.~{ One entry on Wikipedia differentiates religious wars from
run-of-the-mill "flame wars" as follows: "Whereas a flame war is usually a
particular spate of flaming against a non-flamy background, a holy war is a
drawn-out disagreement that may last years or even span careers" ("Flaming
[Internet]," http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_war [accessed 16 January
2006]). }~

Often the language of the Reformation creeps playfully into otherwise serious
attempts to make aesthetic judgments about technology, as in this analysis of
the programming language tcl/tk:
={ programming languages +2 }

_1 It’s also not clear that the primary design criterion in tcl, perl, or
Visual BASIC was visual beauty—nor, probably, should it have been. Ousterhout
said people will vote with their feet. This is important. While the High
Priests in their Ivory Towers design pristine languages of stark beauty and
balanced perfection for their own appreciation, the rest of the mundane world
will in blind and contented ignorance go plodding along using nasty little
languages like those enumerated above. These poor sots will be getting a great
deal of work done, putting bread on the table for their kids, and getting home
at night to share it with them. The difference is that the priests will shake
their fingers at the laity, and the laity won’t care, because they’ll be in bed
asleep.~{ Message-ID: { 369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu.
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu }~

In this instance, the "religious war" concerns the difference between academic
programming languages and regular programmers made equivalent to a distinction
between the insularity of the Catholic Church and the self-help of a protestant
laity: the heroes (such as tcl/tk, perl, and python—all Free Software) are the
"nasty little languages" of the laity; the High Priests design (presumably)
Algol, LISP, and other "academic" languages.
={ perl (programming language) ;
   python (programming language) ;
   tcl/tk (programming language)
}

At a second level, however, the allegory makes precise use of Protestant
Reformation details. For example, in a discussion about the various fights over
the Gnu C Compiler (gcc), a central component of the various UNIX operating
systems, Christopher Browne posted this counter-reformation allegory to a
Usenet group.
={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) +6 ;
   UNIX operating system
}

_1 The EGCS project was started around two years ago when G++ (and GCC)
development got pretty "stuck." EGCS sought to integrate together ,{[pg 69]}, a
number of the groups of patches that people were making to the GCC "family." In
effect, there had been a "Protestant Reformation," with split-offs of:

_2 a) The GNU FORTRAN Denomination;

_2 b) The Pentium Tuning Sect;

_2 c) The IBM Haifa Instruction Scheduler Denomination;

_2 d) The C++ Standard Acolytes.

_1 These groups had been unable to integrate their efforts (for various
reasons) with the Catholic Version, GCC 2.8. The Ecumenical GNU Compiler
Society sought to draw these groups back into the Catholic flock. The project
was fairly successful; GCC 2.8 was succeeded by GCC 2.9, which was not a direct
upgrade from 2.8, but rather the results of the EGCS project. EGCS is now
GCC.~{ Message-ID: { c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com.
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com
It should be noted, in case the reader is unsure how serious this is, that EGCS
stood for Extended GNU Compiler System, not Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society. }~

In addition to the obvious pleasure with which they deploy the sectarian
aspects of the Protestant Reformation, geeks also allow themselves to see their
struggles as those of Luther-like adepts, confronted by powerful worldly
institutions that are distinct but intertwined: the Catholic Church and
absolutist monarchs. Sometimes these comparisons are meant to mock theological
argument; sometimes they are more straightforwardly hagiographic. For instance,
a 1998 article in Salon compares Martin Luther and Linus Torvalds (originator
of the Linux kernel).
={ Linux (Free Software project) ;
   Torvalds, Linus +1
}

_1 In Luther’s Day, the Roman Catholic Church had a near-monopoly on the
cultural, intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. But the principal source
text informing that life—the Bible—was off limits to ordinary people. . . .
Linus Torvalds is an information-age reformer cut from the same cloth. Like
Luther, his journey began while studying for ordination into the modern
priesthood of computer scientists at the University of Helsinki—far from the
seats of power in Redmond and Silicon Valley. Also like Luther, he had a
divine, slightly nutty idea to remove the intervening bureaucracies and put
ordinary folks in a direct relationship to a higher power—in this case, their
computers. Dissolving the programmer-user distinction, he encouraged ordinary
people to participate in the development of their computing environment. And
just as Luther sought to make the entire sacramental shebang—the wine, the
bread and the translated Word—available to the hoi polloi, Linus seeks to
revoke the developer’s proprietary access to the OS, insisting that the full
operating system source code be delivered—without cost—to every ordinary Joe at
the desktop.~{ "Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds," Salon, 12 November 1998,
http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.html (accessed 5
February 2005). }~ ,{[pg 70]},

Adepts with strong convictions—monks and priests whose initiation and mastery
are evident—make the allegory work. Other uses of Christian iconography are
less, so to speak, faithful to the sources. Another prominent personality,
Richard Stallman, of the Free Software Foundation, is prone to dressing as his
alter-ego, St. IGNUcius, patron saint of the church of EMACS—a church with no
god, but intense devotion to a baroque text-processing program of undeniable,
nigh-miraculous power.~{ See http://www.stallman.org/saint.html (accessed 5
February 2005) and http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/ (accessed 5
February 2005). On EMACS, see chapter 6. }~
={ EMACS (text editor) ;
   Stallman, Richard
}

Often the appeal of Reformation-era rhetoric comes from a kind of indictment of
the present: despite all this high tech, super-fabulous computronic
wonderfulness, we are no less feudal, no less violent, no less arbitrary and
undemocratic; which is to say, geeks have progressed, have seen the light and
the way, but the rest of society—and especially management and marketing—have
not. In this sense, Reformation allegories are stories of how "things never
change."

But the most compelling use of the Protestant Reformation as usable past comes
in the more detailed understandings geeks have of the political economy of
information technology. The allegorization of the Catholic Church with
Microsoft, for instance, is a frequent component, as in this brief message
regarding start-up key combinations in the Be operating system: "These secret
handshakes are intended to reinforce a cabalistic high priesthood and should
not have been disclosed to the laity. Forget you ever saw this post and go by
[sic] something from Microsoft."~{ Message-ID:
6ms27l$6e1@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net. In one very humorous case the comparison
is literalized "Microsoft acquires Catholic Church" (Message-ID:
gaijin-870804300-dragonwing@sec.lia.net). }~
={ Microsoft :
     as Catholic Church +1 ;
   usable pasts
}

More generally, large corporations like IBM, Oracle, or Microsoft are made to
stand in for Catholicism, while bureaucratic congresses and parliaments with
their lobbyists take on the role of absolutist monarchs and their cronies.
Geeks can then see themselves as fighting to uphold Christianity (true
capitalism) against the church (corporations) and to be reforming a way of life
that is corrupted by church and monarchs, instead of overthrowing through
revolution a system they believe to be flawed. There is a historically and
technically specific component of this political economy in which it is in the
interest of corporations like IBM and Microsoft to keep users "locked as
securely to Big Blue as an manacled wretch in a medieval dungeon."~{ Paul
Fusco, "The Gospel According to Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday
Magazine, 28. }~
={ International Business Machines (IBM) }

Such stories appeal because they bypass the language of modern American
politics (liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican) in which there are only
two sides to any issue. They also bypass an ,{[pg 71]}, argument between
capitalism and socialism, in which if you are not pro-capitalism you must be a
communist. They are stories that allow the more pragmatist of the geeks to
engage in intervention and reformation, rather than revolution. Though I’ve
rarely heard it articulated so bluntly, the allegory often implies that one
must "save capitalism from the capitalists," a sentiment that implies at least
some kind of human control over capitalism.
={ control, relationship to power ;
   power, relationship to control ;
   Reformation vs. revolution
}

In fact, the allegorical use of the Reformation and the church generates all
kinds of clever comparisons. A typical description of such comparisons might go
like this: the Catholic Church stands in for large, publicly traded
corporations, especially those controlling large amounts of intellectual
property (the granting of which might roughly be equated with the ceremonies of
communion and confession) for which they depend on the assistance and support
of national governments. Naturally, it is the storied excesses of the
church—indulgences, liturgical complexity, ritualistic ceremony, and
corruption—which make for easy allegory. Modern corporations can be figured as
a small, elite papal body with theologians (executives and their lawyers,
boards of directors and their lawyers), who command a much larger clergy
(employees), who serve a laity (consumers) largely imagined to be sinful
(underspending on music and movies—indeed, even "stealing" them) and thus in
need of elaborate and ritualistic cleansing (advertising and lawsuits) by the
church. Access to grace (the American Dream) is mediated only by the church and
is given form through the holy acts of shopping and home improvement. The
executives preach messages of damnation to the government, messages most
government officials are all too willing to hear: do not tamper with our market
share, do not affect our pricing, do not limit our ability to expand these
markets. The executives also offer unaccountable promises of salvation in the
guise of deregulation and the American version of "reform"—the demolition of
state and national social services. Government officials in turn have developed
their own "divine right of kings," which justifies certain forms of
manipulation (once called "elections") of succession. Indulgences are sold left
and right by lobbyists or industry associations, and the decrees of the papacy
evidence little but full disconnection from the miserable everyday existence of
the flock.

In fact, it is remarkable how easy such comparisons become the more details of
the political economy of information one learns. But ,{[pg 72]}, allegories of
the Reformation and clerical power can lead easily to cynicism, which should
perhaps be read in this instance as evidence of political disenfranchisement,
rather than a lapse in faith. And yet the usable pasts of these
reformation-minded modern monks and priests crop up regularly not only because
they provide relief from technical chatter but because they explain a
political, technical, legal situation that does not have ready-to-narrate
stories. Geeks live in a world finely controlled by corporate organizations,
mass media, marketing departments, and lobbyists, yet they share a profound
distrust of government regulation—they need another set of just-so stories to
make sense of it. The standard unusable pasts of the freeing of markets, the
inevitability of capitalism and democracy, or more lately, the necessity of
security don’t do justice to their experience.

Allegories of Reformation are stories that make sense of the political economy
of information. But they also have a more precise use: to make sense of the
distinction between power and control. Because geeks are "closer to the
machine" than the rest of the laity, one might reasonably expect them to be the
ones in power. This is clearly not the case, however, and it is the
frustrations and mysteries by which states, corporations, and individuals
manipulate technical details in order to shift power that often earns the
deepest ire of geeks. Control, therefore, includes the detailed methods and
actual practices by which corporations, government agencies, or individuals
attempt to manipulate people (or enroll them to manipulate themselves and
others) into making technical choices that serve power, rather than
rationality, liberty, elegance, or any other geekly concern.
={ control, relationship to power }

Consider the subject of evil. During my conversations with Sean Doyle in the
late 1990s, as well as with a number of other geeks, the term evil was
regularly used to refer to some kind of design or technical problem. I asked
Sean what he meant.
={ Doyle, Sean +6 ;
   evil +6
}

!_ SD:
[Evil is] just a term I use to say that something’s wrong, but usually it means
something is wrong on purpose, there was agency behind it. I can’t remember
[the example you gave] but I think it may have been some GE equipment, where it
has this default where it likes to send things in its own private format rather
than in DICOM [the radiology industry standard for digital images], if you give
it a choice. I don’t know why they would have done something like that, ,{[pg
73]}, it doesn’t solve any backward compatibility problem, it’s really just an
exclusionary sort of thing. So I guess there’s Evil like that. . . .

!_ CK:
one of the other examples that you had . . . was something with Internet
Explorer 3.0?
={ Microsoft :
     Internet Explorer
}

!_ SD:
Yes, oh yes, there are so many things with IE3 that are completely Evil. Like
here’s one of them: in the http protocol there’s a thing called the "user agent
field" where a browser announces to the server who it is. If you look at IE, it
announces that it is Mozilla, which is the [code-name for] Netscape. Why did
they do this? Well because a lot of the web servers were sending out certain
code that said, if it were Mozilla they would serve the stuff down, [if not]
they would send out something very simple or stupid that would look very ugly.
But it turned out that [IE3, or maybe IE2] didn’t support things when it first
came out. Like, I don’t think they supported tables, and later on, their
versions of Javascript were so different that there was no way it was
compatible—it just added tremendous complexity. It was just a way of pissing on
the Internet and saying there’s no law that says we have to follow these
Internet standards. We can do as we damn well please, and we’re so big that you
can’t stop us. So I view it as Evil in that way. I mean they obviously have the
talent to do it. They obviously have the resources to do it. They’ve obviously
done the work, it’s just that they’ll have this little twitch where they won’t
support a certain MIME type or they’ll support some things differently than
others.
={ Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ;
   Mozilla ;
   standards :
     Internet
}

!_ CK:
But these kinds of incompatibility issues can happen as a result of a lack of
communication or coordination, which might involve agency at some level, right?

!_ SD:
Well, I think of that more as Stupidity than Evil [laughter]. No, Evil is when
there is an opportunity to do something, and an understanding that there is an
opportunity to, and resources and all that—and then you do something just to
spite the other person. You know I’m sure it’s like in messy divorces, where
you would rather sell the property at half its value rather than have it go to
the other person.

Sean relates control to power by casting the decisions of a large corporation
in a moral light. Although the specific allegory of the Protestant Reformation
does not operate here, the details do. Microsoft’s decision to manipulate
Internet Explorer’s behavior stems not from a lack of technical sophistication,
nor is it an "accident" of ,{[pg 74]}, complexity, according to Sean, but is a
deliberate assertion of economic and political power to corrupt the very
details by which software has been created and standardized and is expected to
function. The clear goal of this activity is conversion, the expansion of
Microsoft’s flock through a detailed control of the beliefs and practices
(browsers and functionality) of computer users. Calling Microsoft "Evil" in
this way has much the same meaning as questioning the Catholic Church’s use of
ritual, ceremony, literacy, and history—the details of the "implementation" of
religion, so to speak.
={ Microsoft :
     as Catholic Church +9 | Internet Explorer ;
   power, relationship to control :
     see also reorientation of power and knowledge
}

Or, in the terms of the Protestant Reformation itself, the practices of
conversion as well as those of liberation, learning, and self-help are central
to the story. It is not an accident that many historians of the Reformation
themselves draw attention to the promises of liberation through reformation
"information technologies."~{ See, for example, Matheson, The Imaginative World
of the Reformation. There is rigorous debate about the relation of print,
religion, and capitalism: one locus classicus is Eisenstein’s The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change, which was inspired by McLuhan, The Gutenberg
Galaxy. See also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England and
The Christian’s ABCs; Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, chaps.
1-3. }~ Colloquial (and often academic) assertions that the printing press was
technologically necessary or sufficient to bring the Reformation about appear
constantly as a parable of this new age of information. Often the printing
press is the only "technological" cause considered, but scholars of the real,
historical Reformation also pay close attention to the fact of widespread
literacy, to circulating devotional pamphlets, catechisms, and theological
tracts, as well as to the range of transformations of political and legal
relationships that occurred simultaneously with the introduction of the
printing press.

✠  ©

One final way to demonstrate the effectiveness of these allegories—their
ability to work on the minds of geeks—is to demonstrate how they have started
to work on me, to demonstrate how much of a geek I have become—a form of
participant allegorization, so to speak. The longer one considers the problems
that make up the contemporary political economy of information technology that
geeks inhabit, the more likely it is that these allegories will start to
present themselves almost automatically—as, for instance, when I read The Story
of A, a delightful book having nothing to do with geeks, a book about literacy
in early America. The author, Patricia Crain, explains that the Christ’s cross
(see above) was often used in the creation of hornbooks or battledores, small
leather-backed paddles inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and the alphabet, which
were used ,{[pg 75]}, to teach children their ABCs from as early as the
fifteenth century until as late as the nineteenth: "In its early print
manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by
the ‘Christ’s Cross’: ✠. . . . Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic
Iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological
system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet
away from the Catholic Church."~{ Crain, The Story of A, 16-17. }~
={ Crain, Patricia +1 }

Here, allegorically, the Catholic Church’s control of the alphabet (like
Microsoft’s programming of Internet Explorer to blur public standards for the
Internet) is not simply ideological; it is not just a fantasy of origin or
ownership planted in the fallow mental soil of believers, but in fact a very
specific, very nonsubjective, and very media-specific normative tool of
control. Crain explains further: "Today ✠ represents the imprimatur of the
Catholic Church on copyright pages. In its connection to the early modern
alphabet as well, this cross carries an imprimatur or licensing effect. This
‘let it be printed,’ however, is directed not to the artisan printer but to the
mind and memory of the young scholar. . . . Like modern copyright, the cross
authorizes the existence of the alphabet and associates the letters with sacred
authorship, especially since another long-lived function of ✠ in liturgical
missals is to mark gospel passages. The symbol both conveys information and
generates ritual behavior."~{ Ibid., 20-21. }~
={ Copyright +2 ;
   Microsoft :
     Internet Explorer ;
   authorship ;
   standards :
     Internet
}

% Internet Standards added

The © today carries as much if not more power, both ideologically and legally,
as the cross of the Catholic church. It is the very symbol of authorship, even
though in origin and in function it governs only ownership and rights. Magical
thinking about copyright abounds, but one important function of the symbol ©,
if not its legal implications, is to achieve the same thing as the Christ’s
cross: to associate in the mind of the reader the ownership of a particular
text (or in this case, piece of software) with a particular organization or
person. Furthermore, even though the symbol is an artifact of national and
international law, it creates an association not between a text and the state
or government, but between a text and particular corporations, publishers,
printers, or authors.

Like the Christ’s cross, the copyright symbol carries both a licensing effect
(exclusive, limited or nonexclusive) and an imprimatur on the minds of people:
"let it be imprinted in memory" that this is the work of such and such an
author and that this is the property of such and such a corporation.
={ intellectual property }

% ,{[pg 76]},

Without the allegory of the Protestant Reformation, the only available
narrative for such evil—whether it be the behavior of Microsoft or of some
other corporation—is that corporations are "competing in the marketplace
according to the rules of capitalism" and thus when geeks decry such behavior,
it’s just sour grapes. If corporations are not breaking any laws, why shouldn’t
they be allowed to achieve control in this manner? In this narrative there is
no room for a moral evaluation of competition—anything goes, it would seem.
Claiming for Microsoft that it is simply playing by the rules of capitalism
puts everyone else into either the competitor box or the noncompetitor box (the
state and other noncompetitive organizations). Using the allegory of the
Protestant Reformation, on the other hand, gives geeks a way to make sense of
an unequal distribution among competing powers—between large and small
corporations, and between market power and the details of control. It provides
an alternate imagination against which to judge the technically and legally
specific actions that corporations and individuals take, and to imagine forms
of justified action in return.
={ evil +1 }

Without such an allegory, geeks who oppose Microsoft are generally forced into
the position of being anticapitalist or are forced to adopt the stance that all
standards should be publicly generated and controlled, a position few wish to
take. Indeed, many geeks would prefer a different kind of imaginary
altogether—a recursive public, perhaps. Instead of an infrastructure subject to
unequal distributions of power and shot through with "evil" distortions of
technical control, there is, as geeks see it, the possibility for a
"self-leveling" level playing field, an autotelic system of rules, both
technical and legal, by which all participants are expected to compete equally.
Even if it remains an imaginary, the allegory of the Protestant Reformation
makes sense of (gives order to) the political economy of the contemporary
information-technology world and allows geeks to conceive of their interests
and actions according to a narrative of reformation, rather than one of
revolution or submission. In the Reformation the interpretation or truth of
Christian teaching was not primarily in question: it was not a doctrinal
revolution, but a bureaucratic one. Likewise, geeks do not question the
rightness of networks, software, or protocols and standards, nor are they
against capitalism or intellectual property, but they do wish to maintain a
space for critique and the moral evaluation of contemporary capitalism and
competition.
={ intellectual property ;
   infrastructure +4 ;
   public ;
   recursive public ;
   standards :
     Internet
}

% ,{[pg 77]},

2~ Polymaths and Transhumanists
={ Polymaths :
     transhumanists vs. +55 ;
   Transhumanism :
     polymaths vs. +55
}

Usable pasts articulate the conjunction of "operating systems and social
systems," giving narrative form to imaginations of moral and technical order.
To say that there are no ready-to-narrate stories about contemporary political
economy means only that the standard colloquial explanations of the state of
the modern world do not do justice to the kinds of moral and technical
imaginations of order that geeks possess by virtue of their practices. Geeks
live in, and build, one kind of world—a world of software, networks, and
infrastructures—but they are often confronted with stories and explanations
that simply don’t match up with their experience, whether in newspapers and on
television, or among nongeek friends. To many geeks, proselytization seems an
obvious route: why not help friends and neighbors to understand the hidden
world of networks and software, since, they are quite certain, it will come to
structure their lives as well?
={ moral and technical order ;
   usable pasts
}

Geeks gather through the Internet and, like a self-governing people, possess
nascent ideas of independence, contract, and constitution by which they wish to
govern themselves and resist governance by others.~{ At a populist level, this
was captured by John Perry Barlow’s "Declaration of Independence of the
Internet," http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html. }~ Conventional
political philosophies like libertarianism, anarchism, and (neo)liberalism only
partially capture these social imaginaries precisely because they make no
reference to the operating systems, software, and networks within which geeks
live, work, and in turn seek to build and extend.

Geeks live in specific ways in time and space. They are not just users of
technology, or a "network society," or a "virtual community," but embodied and
imagining actors whose affinity for one another is enabled in new ways by the
tools and technologies they have such deep affective connections to. They live
in this-network-here, a historically unique form grounded in particular social,
moral, national, and historical specificities which nonetheless relates to
generalities such as progress, technology, infrastructure, and liberty. Geeks
are by no means of one mind about such generalities though, and they often have
highly developed means of thinking about them.
={ affinity (of geeks) ;
   progress
}

Foucault’s article "What Is Enlightenment?" captures part of this problematic.
For Foucault, Kant’s understanding of modernity was an attempt to rethink the
relationship between the passage of historical time and the subjective
relationship that individuals have toward it.
={ enlightenment +3 ;
   Foucault, Michel +3 ;
   Kant, Immanuel +1 ;
   modernity +2
}

% ,{[pg 78]},

_1 Thinking back on Kant’s text, I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity
as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by "attitude," I mean a
mode of relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain
people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and
behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and
presents itself as a task. No doubt a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos.
And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the "modern era" from the
"premodern" or "postmodern," I think it would be more useful to try to find out
how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself
struggling with attitudes of "countermodernity."~{ Foucault, "What Is
Enlightenment," 309-10. }~

In thinking through how geeks understand the present, the past, and the future,
I pose the question of whether they are "modern" in this sense. Foucault makes
use of Baudelaire as his foil for explaining in what the attitude of modernity
consists: "For [Baudelaire,] being modern . . . consists in recapturing
something eternal that is not beyond the present, or behind it, but within
it."~{ Ibid., 310. }~ He suggests that Baudelaire’s understanding of modernity
is "an attitude that makes it possible to grasp the ‘heroic’ aspect of the
present moment . . . the will to ‘heroize’ the present."~{ Ibid., 310. }~
Heroic here means something like redescribing the seemingly fleeting events of
the present in terms that conjure forth the universal or eternal character that
animates them. In Foucault’s channeling of Baudelaire such an attitude is
incommensurable with one that sees in the passage of the present into the
future some version of autonomous progress (whether absolute spirit or decadent
degeneration), and the tag he uses for this is "you have no right to despise
the present." To be modern is to confront the present as a problem that can be
transformed by human action, not as an inevitable outcome of processes beyond
the scope of individual or collective human control, that is, "attitudes of
counter-modernity." When geeks tell stories of the past to make sense of the
future, it is often precisely in order to "heroize" the present in this
sense—but not all geeks do so. Within the spectrum from polymath to
transhumanist, there are attitudes of both modernity and countermodernity.
={ geeks :
     as moderns
}

% ={Progress}

The questions I raise here are also those of politics in a classical sense: Are
the geeks I discuss bound by an attitude toward the present that concerns such
things as the relationship of the public to the private and the social (à la
Hannah Arendt), the relationship ,{[pg 79]}, of economics to liberty (à la John
Stuart Mill and John Dewey), or the possibilities for rational organization of
society through the application of scientific knowledge (à la Friedrich Hayek
or Foucault)? Are geeks "enlightened"? Are they Enlightenment rationalists?
What might this mean so long after the Enlightenment and its vigorous,
wide-ranging critiques? How is their enlightenment related to the technical and
infrastructural commitments they have made? Or, to put it differently, what
makes enlightenment newly necessary now, in the milieu of the Internet, Free
Software, and recursive publics? What kinds of relationships become apparent
when one asks how these geeks relate their own conscious appreciation of the
history and politics of their time to their everyday practices and commitments?
Do geeks despise the present?
={ Dewey, John ;
   Mill, John Stuart ;
   Hayek, Friedrich ;
   time :
     technical progress and
}

Polymaths and transhumanists speak differently about concepts like technology,
infrastructure, networks, and software, and they have different ideas about
their temporality and relationship to progress and liberty. Some geeks see
technology as one kind of intervention into a constituted field of
organizations, money, politics, and people. Some see it as an autonomous force
made up of humans and impersonal forces of evolution and complexity. Different
geeks speak about the role of technology and its relationship to the present
and future in different ways, and how they understand this relationship is
related to their own rich understandings of the complex technical and political
environment they live and work in.

!_ Polymaths
Polymathy is "avowed dilettantism," not extreme intelligence. It results from a
curiosity that seems to grip a remarkable number of people who spend their time
on the Internet and from the basic necessity of being able to evaluate and
incorporate sometimes quite disparate fields of knowledge in order to build
workable software. Polymathy inevitably emerges in the context of large
software and networking projects; it is a creature of constraints, a process
bootstrapped by the complex sediment of technologies, businesses, people,
money, and plans. It might also be posed in the negative: bad software design
is often the result of not enough avowed dilettantism. Polymaths must know a
very large and wide range of things in order to intervene in an existing
distribution of machines, people, practices, and places. They must have a
detailed sense of the present, and the project of the present, in order to
imagine how the future might be different.
={ software development +3 }

% ,{[pg 80]},

My favorite polymath is Sean Doyle. Sean built the first versions of a piece of
software that forms the centerpiece of the radiological-image-management
company Amicas. In order to build it Sean learned the following: Java, to
program it; the mathematics of wavelets, to encode the images; the workflow of
hospital radiologists and the manner in which they make diagnoses from images,
to make the interface usable; several incompatible databases and the SQL
database language, to build the archive and repository; and manual after manual
of technical standards, the largest and most frightening of which was the
Digital Imaging and Communication (DICOM) standard for radiological images.
Sean also read Science and Nature regularly, looking for inspiration about
interface design; he read books and articles about imaging very small things
(mosquito knees), very large things (galaxies and interstellar dust), very old
things (fossils), and very pretty things (butterfly-wing patterns as a function
of developmental pathways). Sean also introduced me to Tibetan food, to Jan
Svankmeyer films, to Open Source Software, to cladistics and paleoherpetology,
to Disney’s scorched-earth policy with respect to culture, and to many other
awesome things.
={ Amicas (corporation) +17 ;
   Doyle, Sean +3 ;
   programming +3 ;
   standards
}

Sean is clearly an unusual character, but not that unusual. Over the years I
have met many people with a similar range and depth of knowledge (though rarely
with Sean’s humility, which does set him apart). Polymathy is an occupational
hazard for geeks. There is no sense in which a good programmer, software
architect, or information architect simply specializes in code. Specialization
is seen not as an end in itself, but rather as a kind of technical prerequisite
before other work—the real work—can be accomplished. The real work is the
design, the process of inserting usable software into a completely unfamiliar
amalgamation of people, organizations, machines, and practices. Design is hard
work, whereas the technical stuff—like choosing the right language or adhering
to a standard or finding a ready-made piece of code to plug in somewhere—is
not.
={ design +2 }

It is possible for Internet geeks and software architects to think this way in
part due to the fact that so many of the technical issues they face are both
extremely well defined and very easy to address with a quick search and
download. It is easy to be an avowed dilettante in the age of mailing lists,
newsgroups, and online scientific publishing. I myself have learned whole
swaths of technical practices in this manner, but I have designed no technology
of note. ,{[pg 81]},

Sean’s partner in Amicas, Adrian Gropper, also fits the bill of polymath,
though he is not a programmer. Adrian, a physician and a graduate of MIT’s
engineering program, might be called a "high-functioning polymath." He scans
the horizon of technical and scientific accomplishments, looking for ways to
incorporate them into his vision of medical technology qua intervention. Sean
mockingly calls these "delusions," but both agree that Amicas would be nowhere
without them. Adrian and Sean exemplify how the meanings of technology,
intervention, design, and infrastructure are understood by polymaths as a
particular form of pragmatic intervention, a progress achieved through
deliberate, piecemeal re-formation of existing systems. As Adrian comments:
={ entrepreneurialism +8 ;
   Gropper, Adrian +8 ;
   intervention, technology as +42
}

_1 I firmly believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and
improve healthcare is to add technology. I believe that more strongly than I
believe, for instance, that if people invent better pesticides they’ll be able
to grow more rice, and it’s for the universal good of the world to be able to
support more people. I have some doubt as to whether I support people doing
genetic engineering of crops and pesticides as being "to the good." But I do,
however, believe that healthcare is different in that in the long run you can
impact both the cost and quality of healthcare by adding technology. And you
can call that a religious belief if you want, it’s not rational. But I guess
what I’m willing to say is that traditional healthcare that’s not
technology-based has pretty much run out of steam.~{ Adrian Gropper, interview
by author, 28 November 1998. }~
={ healthcare :
     information technology in +7 ;
   religion
}

In this conversation, the "technological" is restricted to the novel things
that can make healthcare less costly (i.e., cost-reducing, not cost-cutting),
ease suffering, or extend life. Certain kinds of technological intervention are
either superfluous or even pointless, and Adrian can’t quite identify this
"class"—it isn’t "technology" in general, but it includes some kinds of things
that are technological. What is more important is that technology does not
solve anything by itself; it does not obviate the political problems of
healthcare rationing: "Now, however, you get this other problem, which is that
the way that healthcare is rationed is through the fear of pain, financial pain
to some extent, but physical pain; so if you have a technology that, for
instance, makes it relatively painless to fix . . . I guess, bluntly put, it’s
cheaper to let people die in most cases, and that’s just undeniable. So what I
find interesting in all of this, is that most people who are dealing with the
politics of healthcare ,{[pg 82]}, resource management don’t want to have this
discussion, nobody wants to talk about this, the doctors don’t want to talk
about it, because it’s too depressing to talk about the value of. . . . And
they don’t really have a mandate to talk about technology."~{ Adrian Gropper,
interview by author, 28 November 1998. }~

Adrian’s self-defined role in this arena is as a nonpracticing physician who is
also an engineer and an entrepreneur—hence, his polymathy has emerged from his
attempts to translate between doctors, engineers, and businesspeople. His goal
is twofold: first, create technologies that save money and improve the
allocation of healthcare (and the great dream of telemedicine concerns
precisely this goal: the reallocation of the most valuable asset, individuals
and their expertise); second, to raise the level of discussion in the
business-cum-medical world about the role of technology in managing healthcare
resources. Polymathy is essential, since Adrian’s twofold mission requires
understanding the language and lives of at least three distinct groups who work
elbow-to-elbow in healthcare: engineers and software architects; doctors and
nurses; and businessmen.
={ healthcare :
     allocation of +5
}

Technology has two different meanings according to Adrian’s two goals: in the
first case technology refers to the intervention by means of new technologies
(from software, to materials, to electronics, to pharmaceuticals) in specific
healthcare situations wherein high costs or limited access to care can be
affected. Sometimes technology is allocated, sometimes it does the allocating.
Adrian’s goal is to match his knowledge of state-of-the-art technology—in
particular, Internet technology—with a specific healthcare situation and
thereby effect a reorganization of practices, people, tools, and information.
The tool Amicas created was distinguished by its clever use of compression,
Internet standards, and cheap storage media to compete with much larger, more
expensive, much more entrenched "legacy" and "turnkey" systems. Whether Amicas
invented something "new" is less interesting than the nature of this
intervention into an existing milieu. This intervention is what Adrian calls
"technology." For Amicas, the relevant technology—the important
intervention—was the Internet, which Amicas conceived as a tool for changing
the nature of the way healthcare was organized. Their goal was to replace the
infrastructure of the hospital radiology department (and potentially the other
departments as well) with the Internet. Amicas was able to confront and reform
the practices of powerful, entrenched entities, from the administration of
large ,{[pg 83]}, hospitals to their corporate bedfellows, like HBOC, Agfa,
Siemens, and GE.
={ technology :
     meanings of +7
}

With regard to raising the level of discussion, however, technology refers to a
kind of political-rhetorical argument: technology does not save the world (nor
does it destroy it); it only saves lives—and it does this only when one makes
particular decisions about its allocation. Or, put differently, the means is
technology, but the ends are still where the action is at. Thus, the hype
surrounding information technology in healthcare is horrifying to Adrian:
promises precede technologies, and the promises suggest that the means can
replace the ends. Large corporations that promise "technology," but offer no
real hard interventions (Adrian’s first meaning of technology) that can be
concretely demonstrated to reduce costs or improve allocation are simply a
waste of resources. Such companies are doubly frustrating because they use
"technology" as a blinder that allows people to not think about the hard
problems (the ends) of allocation, equity, management, and organization; that
is, they treat "technology" (the means) as if it were a solution as such.

Adrian routinely analyzes the rhetorical and practical uses of technology in
healthcare with this kind of subtlety; clearly, such subtlety of thought is
rare, and it sets Adrian apart as someone who understands that intervention
into, and reform of, modern organizations and styles of thought has to happen
through reformation—through the clever use of technology by people who
understand it intimately—not through revolution. Reformation through technical
innovation is opposed here to control through the consolidation of money and
power.
={ reformation vs. revolution }

In my observations, Adrian always made a point of making the technology—the
software tools and picture-archiving system—easily accessible, easily
demonstrable to customers. When talking to hospital purchasers, he often said
something like "I can show you the software, and I can tell you the price, and
I can demonstrate the problem it will solve." In contrast, however, an array of
enormous corporations with salesmen and women (usually called consultants) were
probably saying something more like "Your hospital needs more technology, our
corporation is big and stable—give us this much money and we will solve your
problem." For Adrian, the decision to "hold hands," as he put it, with the
comfortably large corporation was irrational if the hospital could instead
purchase a specific technology that did a specific thing, for a real price.
,{[pg 84]},

Adrian’s reflections on technology are also reflections on the nature of
progress. Progress is limited intervention structured by goals that are not set
by the technology itself, even if entrepreneurial activity is specifically
focused on finding new uses and new ideas for new technologies. But discussions
about healthcare allocation—which Adrian sees as a problem amenable to certain
kinds of technical solutions—are instead structured as if technology did not
matter to the nature of the ends. It is a point Adrian resists: "I firmly
believe that in the long run the only way you can save money and improve
healthcare is to add technology."

Sean is similarly frustrated by the homogenization of the concept of
technology, especially when it is used to suggest, for instance, that hospitals
"lag behind" other industries with regard to computerization, a complaint
usually made in order to either instigate investment or explain failures. Sean
first objects to such a homogenous notion of "technological."
={ Doyle, Sean +5 ;
   Technology :
     lag +2 ;
   time :
     technical progress and +2 ;
   lag, technological +2
}

_1 I actually have no idea what that means, that it’s lagging behind. Because
certainly in many ways in terms of image processing or some very high-tech
things it’s probably way ahead. And if that means what’s on people’s desktops,
ever since 19-maybe-84 or so when I arrived at MGH [Massachusetts General
Hospital] there’s been a computer on pretty much everyone’s desktop. . . . It
seems like most hospitals that I have been to seem to have a serious commitment
to networks and automation, etcetera. . . . I don’t know about a lot of
manufacturing industries—they might have computer consoles there, but it’s a
different sort of animal. Farms probably lag really far behind, I won’t even
talk about amusement parks. In some sense, hospitals are very complicated
little communities, and so to say that this thing as a whole is lagging behind
doesn’t make much sense.~{ Sean Doyle, interview by author, 30 March 1999. }~

He also objects to the notion that such a lag results in failures caused by
technology, rather than by something like incompetence or bad management. In
fact, it might be fair to say that, for the polymath, sometimes technology
actually dissolves. Its boundaries are not easily drawn, nor are its uses, nor
are its purported "unintended consequences." On one side there are rules,
regulations, protocols, standards, norms, and forms of behavior; on the other
there are organizational structures, business plans and logic, human skills,
and other machines. This complex milieu requires reform from within: it cannot
be replaced wholesale; it cannot leap-frog ,{[pg 85]}, other industries in
terms of computerization, as intervention is always local and strategic; and it
involves a more complex relationship to the project of the present than simply
"lagging behind" or "leaping ahead."

Polymathy—inasmuch as it is a polymathy of the lived experience of the
necessity for multiple expertise to suit a situation—turns people into
pragmatists. Technology is never simply a solution to a problem, but always
part of a series of factors. The polymath, unlike the technophobe, can see when
technology matters and when it doesn’t. The polymath has a very this-worldly
approach to technology: there is neither mystery nor promise, only human
ingenuity and error. In this manner, polymaths might better be described as
Feyerabendians than as pragmatists (and, indeed, Sean turned out to be an avid
reader of Feyerabend). The polymath feels there is no single method by which
technology works its magic: it is highly dependent on rules, on patterned
actions, and on the observation of contingent and contextual factors.
Intervention into this already instituted field of people, machines, tools,
desires, and beliefs requires a kind of scientific-technical genius, but it is
hardly single, or even autonomous. This version of pragmatism is, as Feyerabend
sometimes refers to it, simply a kind of awareness: of standards, of rules, of
history, of possibility.~{ Feyerabend, Against Method, 215-25. }~ The polymath
thus does not allow himself or herself to despise the present, but insists on
both reflecting on it and intervening in it.
={ Feyerabend, Paul +1 ;
   pragmatism
}

Sean and Adrian are avowedly scientific and technical people; like Feyerabend,
they assume that their interlocutors believe in good science and the benefits
of progress. They have little patience for Luddites, for new-agers, for
religious intolerance, or for any other non-Enlightenment-derived attitude.
They do not despise the present, because they have a well-developed sense of
how provisional the conventions of modern technology and business are. Very
little is sacred, and rules, when they exist, are fragile. Breaking them
pointlessly is immodest, but innovation is often itself seen as a way of
transforming a set of accepted rules or practices to other ends. Progress is
limited intervention.~{ One of the ways Adrian discusses innovation is via the
argument of the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s The
Innovator’s Dilemma. It describes "sustaining vs. disruptive" technologies as
less an issue of how technologies work or what they are made of, and more an
issue of how their success and performance are measured. See Adrian Gropper,
"The Internet as a Disruptive Technology," Imaging Economics, December 2001,
http://www.imagingeconomics.com/library/200112-10.asp (accessed 19 September
2006). }~
={ enlightenment +1 }

How ironic, and troubling, then, to realize that Sean’s and Adrian’s company
would eventually become the kind of thing they started Amicas in order to
reform. Outside of the limited intervention, certain kinds of momentum seem
irresistible: the demand for investment and funding rounds, the need for
"professional management," ,{[pg 86]}, and the inertia of already streamlined
and highly conservative purchasing practices in healthcare. For Sean and
Adrian, Amicas became a failure in its success. Nonetheless, they remain
resolutely modern polymaths: they do not despise the present. As described in
Kant’s "What Is Enlightenment?" the duty of the citizen is broken into public
and private: on the one hand, a duty to carry out the responsibilities of an
office; on the other, a duty to offer criticism where criticism is due, as a
"scholar" in a reading public. Sean’s and Adrian’s endeavor, in the form of a
private start-up company, might well be understood as the expression of the
scholar’s duty to offer criticism, through the creation of a particular kind of
technical critique of an existing (and by their assessment) ethically suspect
healthcare system. The mixture of private capital, public institutions,
citizenship, and technology, however, is something Kant could not have
known—and Sean and Adrian’s technical pursuits must be understood as something
more: a kind of modern civic duty, in the service of liberty and responding to
the particularities of contemporary technical life.~{ On kinds of civic duty,
see Fortun and Fortun, "Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in
Contemporary U.S. Toxicology." }~
={ Kant, Immanuel }

!_ Transhumanists
Polymathy is born of practical and pragmatic engagement with specific
situations, and in some ways is demanded by such exigencies. Opposite
polymathy, however, and leaning more toward a concern with the whole, with
totality and the universal, are attitudes that I refer to by the label
transhumanism, which concerns the mode of belief in the Timeline of Technical
Progress.~{ There is, in fact, a very specific group of people called
transhumanists, about whom I will say very little. I invoke the label here
because I think certain aspects of transhumanism are present across the
spectrum of engineers, scientists, and geeks. }~
={ time :
     technical progress and +20 ;
   futurology +20
}

Transhumanism, the movement and the philosophy, focuses on the power of
technology to transcend the limitations of the human body as currently evolved.
Subscribers believe—but already this is the wrong word—in the possibility of
downloading consciousness onto silicon, of cryobiological suspension, of the
near emergence of strong artificial intelligence and of various other forms of
technical augmentation of the human body for the purposes of achieving
immortality—or at least, much more life.~{ See the World Transhumanist
Association, http://transhumanism.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003) or the
Extropy Institute, http://www.extropy.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003). See also
Doyle, Wetwares, and Battaglia, "For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future,"
for a sidelong glance. }~
={ artificial intelligence +6 }

Various groups could be reasonably included under this label. There are the
most ardent purveyors of the vision, the Extropians; there are a broad class of
people who call themselves transhumanists; there is a French-Canadian subclass,
the Raelians, who are more an alien-worshiping cult than a strictly scientific
one and are bitterly denounced by the first two; there are also the variety of
cosmologists and engineers who do not formally consider themselves ,{[pg 87]},
transhumanist, but whose beliefs participate in some way or another: Stephen
Hawking, Frank Tipler and John Barrow (famous for their anthropic cosmological
principle), Hans Moravic, Ray Kurzweil, Danny Hillis, and down the line through
those who embrace the cognitive sciences, the philosophy of artificial
intelligence, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of science, and so forth.
={ Extropians ;
   Raelians
}

Historically speaking, the line of descent is diffuse. Teilhard de Chardin is
broadly influential, sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not (depending on the
amount of mysticism allowed). A more generally recognized starting point is
Julian Huxley’s article "Transhumanism" in New Bottles for New Wine.~{ Huxley,
New Bottles for New Wine, 13-18. }~ Huxley’s transhumanism, like Teilhard’s,
has a strange whiff of Nietzsche about it, though it tends much more strongly
in the direction of the evolutionary emergence of the superman than in the more
properly moral sense Nietzsche gave it. After Huxley, the notion of
transhumanism is too easily identified with eugenics, and it has become one of
a series of midcentury subcultural currents which finds expression largely in
small, non-mainstream places, from the libertarians to Esalen.~{ The computer
scientist Bill Joy wrote a long piece in Wired warning of the outcomes of
research conducted without ethical safeguards and the dangers of eugenics in
the past, "Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us," Wired 8.4 [April 2000],
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (accessed 27 June 2005). }~
={ Huxley, Julian ;
   Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre ;
   transhumanism :
     Julian Huxley and
}

For many observers, transhumanists are a lunatic fringe, bounded on either side
by alien abductees and Ayn Rand-spouting objectivists. However, like so much of
the fringe, it merely represents in crystalline form attitudes that seem to
permeate discussions more broadly, whether as beliefs professed or as beliefs
attributed. Transhumanism, while probably anathema to most people, actually
reveals a very specific attitude toward technical innovation, technical
intervention, and political life that is widespread among technically adept
individuals. It is a belief that has everything to do also with the timeline of
progress and the role of technology in it.
={ progress +5 }

The transhumanist understanding of technological progress can best be
understood through the sometimes serious and sometimes playful concept of the
"singularity," popularized by the science-fiction writer and mathematician
Vernor Vinge.~{ Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity." }~ The
"singularity" is the point at which the speed of technical progress is faster
than human comprehension of that progress (and, by implication, than human
control over the course). It is a kind of cave-man parable, perhaps most
beautifully rendered by Stanley Kubrik’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey (in
particular, in the jump-cut early in the film that turns a hurled bone into a
spinning space station, recapitulating the remarkable adventure of technology
in two short seconds of an otherwise seemingly endless film).
={ singularity +9 ;
   transhumanism :
     singularity and +4 ;
   time :
     singularity and +4 ;
   Vinge, Vernor
}

% ,{[pg 88]},

{ 2bits_02_01-100.png }image ~[* Illustration © 2005 Ray Kurzweil. Modifications © 2007 by C. Kelty. Original work licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:PPTCountdowntoSingularityLog.jpg. ]~

In figure 1, on the left hand of the timeline, there is history, or rather,
there is a string of technological inventions (by which is implied that
previous inventions set the stage for later ones) spaced such that they produce
a logarithmic curve that can look very much like the doomsday population curves
that started to appear in the 1960s. Each invention is associated with a name
or sometimes a nation. Beyond the edge of the graph to the right side is the
future: history changes here from a series of inventions to an autonomous
self-inventing technology associated not with individual inventors but with a
complex system of evolutionary adaptation that includes technological as well
as biological forms. It is a future in which "humans" are no longer necessary
to the progress of science and technology: technology-as-extension-of-humans on
the left, a Borg-like autonomous technical intelligence on the right. The
fundamental ,{[pg 89]}, operation in constructing the "singularity" is the
"reasoned extrapolation" familiar to the "hard science fiction" writer or the
futurist. One takes present technology as the initial condition for future
possibilities and extrapolates based on the (haphazardly handled) evidence of
past technical speed-up and change.

The position of the observer is always a bit uncertain, since he or she is
naturally projected at the highest (or lowest, depending on your orientation)
point of this curve, but one implication is clear: that the function or
necessity of human reflection on the present will disappear at the same time
that humans do, rendering enlightenment a quaint, but necessary, step on the
route to superrational, transhuman immortality.

Strangely, the notion that technical progress has acceleration seems to precede
any sense of what the velocity of progress might mean in the first instance;
technology is presumed to exist in absolute time—from the Big Bang to the heat
death of the universe—and not in any relationship with human life or
consciousness. The singularity is always described from the point of view of a
god who is not God. The fact of technological speed-up is generally treated as
the most obvious thing in the world, reinforced by the constant refrain in the
media of the incredible pace of change in contemporary society.

Why is the singularity important? Because it always implies that the absolute
fact of technical acceleration—this knowing glance into the future—should order
the kinds of interventions that occur in the present. It is not mute waiting or
eschatological certainty that governs this attitude; rather, it is a mode of
historical consciousness that privileges the inevitability of technological
progress over the inevitability of human power. Only by looking into the future
can one manipulate the present in a way that will be widely meaningful, an
attitude that could be expressed as something like "Those who do not learn from
the future are condemned to suffer in it." Since it is a philosophy based on
the success of human rationality and ingenuity, rationality and ingenuity are
still clearly essential in the future. They lead, however, to a kind of
posthuman state of constant technological becoming which is inconceivable to
the individual human mind—and can only be comprehended by a transcendental
intelligence that is not God.

Such is a fair description of some strands of transhumanism, and the reason I
highlight them is to characterize the kinds of attitudes ,{[pg 90]}, toward
technology-as-intervention and the ideas of moral and technical order that
geeks can evince. On the far side of polymathy, geeks are too close to the
machine to see a big picture or to think about imponderable philosophical
issues; on the transhuman side, by contrast, one is constantly reassessing the
arcane details of everyday technical change with respect to a vision of the
whole—a vision of the evolution of technology and its relationship to the
humans that (for the time being) must create and attempt to channel it.
={ moral and technical order }

My favorite transhumanist is Eugen Leitl (who is, in fact, an authentic
transhumanist and has been vice-chair of the World Transhumanist Association).
Eugen is Russian-born, lives in Munich, and once worked in a cryobiology
research lab. He is well versed in chemistry, nanotechnology,
artificial-intelligence (AI) research, computational- and network-complexity
research, artificial organs, cryobiology, materials engineering, and science
fiction. He writes, for example,
={ artificial intelligence ;
   Leitl, Eugene +8
}

_1 If you consider AI handcoded by humans, yes. However, given considerable
computational resources (~cubic meter of computronium), and using suitable
start population, you can coevolve machine intelligence on a time scale of much
less than a year. After it achieves about a human level, it is potentially
capable of entering an autofeedback loop. Given that even autoassembly-grade
computronium is capable of running a human-grade intellect in a volume ranging
from a sugar cube to an orange at a speed ranging from 10^4 . . . 10^6 it is
easy to see that the autofeedback loop has explosive dynamics.

_1 (I hope above is intelligible, I’ve been exposed to weird memes for far too
long).~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 16 May 2000,
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2410. }~

Eugen is also a polymath (and an autodidact to boot), but in the conventional
sense. Eugen’s polymathy is an avocational necessity: transhumanists need to
keep up with all advances in technology and science in order to better assess
what kinds of human-augmenting or human-obsolescing technologies are out there.
It is not for work in this world that the transhumanist expands his or her
knowledge, nor quite for the next, but for a "this world" yet to arrive.

Eugen and I were introduced during the Napster debates of 2001, which seemed at
the time to be a knock-down, drag-out conflagration, but Eugen has been
involved in so many online flame wars that he probably experienced it as a mere
blip in an otherwise constant struggle with less-evolved intelligences like
mine. Nonetheless, ,{[pg 91]}, it was one of the more clarifying examples of
how geeks think, and think differently, about technology, infrastructure,
networks, and software. Transhumanism has no truck with old-fashioned humanism.
={ Napster }

group{

    > >From: Ramu Narayan . . .
    > >I don’t like the
    > >notion of technology as an unstoppable force with a will of its own that
    > >has nothing to do with the needs of real people.

}group

_1 [Eugen Leitl:] Emergent large-scale behaviour is nothing new. How do you
intend to control individual behaviour of a large population of only partially
rational agents? They don’t come with too many convenient behaviour-modifying
hooks (pheromones as in social insects, but notice menarche-synch in females
sharing quarters), and for a good reason. The few hooks we have (mob, war,
politics, religion) have been notoriously abused, already. Analogous to
apoptosis, metaindividuals may function using processes deletorious[sic] to its
components (us).~{ Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 7 August
2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2932. }~
={ gender }

Eugen’s understanding of what "technological progress" means is sufficiently
complex to confound most of his interlocutors. For one surprising thing, it is
not exactly inevitable. The manner in which Leitl argues with people is usually
a kind of machine-gun prattle of coevolutionary, game-theoretic, cryptographic
sorites. Eugen piles on the scientific and transhumanist reasoning, and his
interlocutors slowly peel away from the discussion. But it isn’t craziness,
hype, or half-digested popular science—Eugen generally knows his stuff—it just
fits together in a way that almost no one else can quite grasp. Eugen sees the
large-scale adoption and proliferation of technologies (particularly
self-replicating molecular devices and evolutionary software algorithms) as a
danger that transcends all possibility of control at the individual or state
level. Billions of individual decisions do not "average" into one will, but
instead produce complex dynamics and hang perilously on initial conditions. In
discussing the possibility of the singularity, Eugen suggests, "It could
literally be a science-fair project [that causes the singularity]." If Francis
Bacon’s understanding of the relation between Man and Nature was that of master
and possessor, Eugen’s is its radicalization: Man is a powerful but ultimately
arbitrary force in the progress of Life-Intelligence. Man is fully incorporated
into Nature in this story, ,{[pg 92]}, so much so that he dissolves into it.
Eugen writes, when "life crosses over into this petri dish which is getting
readied, things will become a lot more lively. . . . I hope we’ll make it."
={ progress +7 ;
   time :
     initial conditions and +1 ;
   geeks :
     as moderns +3
}

% check "geeks as moderns, problem pinpointing

For Eugen, the arguments about technology that the polymaths involve themselves
in couldn’t be more parochial. They are important only insofar as they will set
the "initial conditions" for the grand coevolutionary adventure of technology
ahead of us. For the transhumanist, technology does not dissolve. Instead, it
is the solution within which humans are dissolved. Suffering, allocation,
decision making—all these are inessential to the ultimate outcome of
technological progress; they are worldly affairs, even if they concern life and
death, and as such, they can be either denounced or supported, but only with
respect to fine-tuning the acceleration toward the singularity. For the
transhumanist, one can’t fight the inevitability of technical evolution, but
one certainly can contribute to it. Technical progress is thus both law-like
and subject to intelligent manipulation; technical progress is inevitable, but
only because of the power of massively parallel human curiosity.
={ technology :
     as argument +1 ;
   usable pasts +6
}

% check on usable pasts, appears in conclusion

Considered as one of the modes of thought present in this-worldly political
discussion, the transhumanist (like the polymath) turns technology into a
rhetorical argument. Technology is the more powerful political argument because
"it works." It is pointless to argue "about" technology, but not pointless to
argue through and with it. It is pointless to talk about whether stopping
technology is good or bad, because someone will simply build a technology that
will invalidate your argument.

There is still a role for technical invention, but it is strongly distinguished
from political, legal, cultural, or social interventions. For most
transhumanists, there is no rhetoric here, no sophistry, just the pure truth of
"it works": the pure, undeniable, unstoppable, and undeconstructable reality of
technology. For the transhumanist attitude, the reality of "working code" has a
reality that other assertions about the world do not. Extreme transhumanism
replaces the life-world with the world of the computer, where bad (ethically
bad) ideas won’t compile. Less-staunch versions of transhumanism simply allow
the confusion to operate opportunistically: the progress of technology is
unquestionable (omniscient), and only its effects on humans are worth
investigating.

The pure transhumanist, then, is a countermodern. The transhumanist despises
the present for its intolerably slow descent into the ,{[pg 93]}, future of
immortality and superhuman self-improvement, and fears destruction because of
too much turbulent (and ignorant) human resistance. One need have no individual
conception of the present, no reflection on or synthetic understanding of it.
One only need contribute to it correctly. One might even go so far as to
suggest that forms of reflection on the present that do not contribute to
technical progress endanger the very future of life-intelligence. Curiosity and
technical innovation are not historical features of Western science, but
natural features of a human animal that has created its own conditions for
development. Thus, the transhumanists’ historical consciousness consists
largely of a timeline that makes ordered sense of our place on the progress
toward the Singularity.

The moral of the story is not just that technology determines history, however.
Transhumanism is a radically antihumanist position in which human agency or
will—if it even exists—is not ontologically distinct from the agency of
machines and animals and life itself. Even if it is necessary to organize, do
things, make choices, participate, build, hack, innovate, this does not amount
to a belief in the ability of humans to control their destiny, individually or
collectively. In the end, the transhumanist cannot quite pinpoint exactly what
part of this story is inevitable—except perhaps the story itself. Technology
does not develop without millions of distributed humans contributing to it;
humans cannot evolve without the explicit human adoption of life-altering and
identity-altering technologies; evolution cannot become inevitable without the
manipulation of environments and struggles for fitness. As in the dilemma of
Calvinism (wherein one cannot know if one is saved by one’s good works), the
transhumanist must still create technology according to the particular and
parochial demands of the day, but this by no means determines the eventual
outcome of technological progress. It is a sentiment well articulated by Adam
Ferguson and highlighted repeatedly by Friederich Hayek with respect to human
society: "the result of human action, but not the execution of any human
design."~{ Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1:20. }~
={ Calvinism ;
   Hayek, Friedrich
}

2~ Conclusion

To many observers, geeks exhibit a perhaps bewildering mix of liberalism,
libertarianism, anarchism, idealism, and pragmatism, ,{[pg 94]}, yet tend to
fall firmly into one or another constituted political category (liberal,
conservative, socialist, capitalist, neoliberal, etc.). By showing how geeks
make use of the Protestant Reformation as a usable past and how they occupy a
spectrum of beliefs about progress, liberty, and intervention, I hope to resist
this urge to classify. Geeks are an interesting case precisely because they are
involved in the creation of new things that change the meaning of our
constituted political categories. Their politics are mixed up and combined with
the technical details of the Internet, Free Software, and the various and
sundry organizations, laws, people, and practices that they deal with on a
regular basis: operating systems and social systems. But such mixing does not
make Geeks merely technoliberals or technoconservatives. Rather, it reveals how
they think through the specific, historically unique situation of the Internet
to the general problems of knowledge and power, liberty and enlightenment,
progress and intervention.
={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation ;
   geeks +1
}

Geeks are not a kind of person: geeks are geeks only insofar as they come
together in new, technically mediated forms of their own creation and in ways
that are not easy to identify (not language, not culture, not markets, not
nations, not telephone books or databases). While their affinity is very
clearly constituted through the Internet, the Internet is not the only reason
for that affinity. It is this collective affinity that I refer to as a
recursive public. Because it is impossible to understand this affinity by
trying to identify particular types of people, it is necessary to turn to
historically specific sets of practices that form the substance of their
affinity. Free Software is an exemplary case—perhaps the exemplar—of a
recursive public. To understand Free Software through its changing practices
not only gives better access to the life-world of the geek but also reveals how
the structure of a recursive public comes into being and manages to persist and
transform, how it can become a powerful form of life that extends its
affinities beyond technophile geeks into the realms of ordinary life.
={ affinity (of geeks) }

:B~ Part II free software

1~ 3. The Movement
={ Free Software +55 }

Part II of Two Bits describes what Free Software is and where it came from,
with each of its five chapters detailing the historical narrative of a
particular kind of practice: creating a movement, sharing source code,
conceptualizing openness or open systems, writing copyright (and copyleft)
licenses, and coordinating collaborations. Taken together, the stories describe
Free Software. The stories have their endpoint (or starting point,
genealogically speaking) in the years 1998-99, when Free Software burst onto
the scene: on the cover of Forbes magazine, as part of the dotcom boom, and in
the boardrooms of venture-capital firms and corporations like IBM and Netscape.
While the chapters that make up part II can be read discretely to understand
the practices that are the sine qua non of Free Software, they can also be read
continuously, as a meandering story of the history of software and networks
stretching from the late 1950s to the present.
={ Free Software :
     as experimental system +1 ;
   movement (component of Free Software) +3 ;
   practices :
     five components of Free Software
}

% ,{[pg 98]},

Rather than define what makes Free Software free or Open Source open, Two Bits
treats the five practices as parts of a collective technical experimental
system: each component has its own history, development, and temporality, but
they come together as a package and emerge as a recognizable thing around
1998-99. As with any experimental system, changing the components changes the
operation and outcomes of the whole. Free Software so conceived is a kind of
experimental system: its practices can be adopted, adapted, and modulated in
new contexts and new places, but it is one whose rules are collectively
determined and frequently modified. It is possible to see in each of the five
practices where choices about how to do Free Software reached, or surpassed,
certain limits, but nonetheless remained part of a system whose identity
finally firmed up in the period 1998-99 and after.
={ experiment, collective technical }

The first of these practices—the making of Free Software into a movement—is
both the most immediately obvious and the most difficult to grasp. By the term
movement I refer to the practice, among geeks, of arguing about and discussing
the structure and meaning of Free Software: what it consists of, what it is
for, and whether or not it is a movement. Some geeks call Free Software a
movement, and some don’t; some talk about the ideology and goals of Free
Software, and some don’t; some call it Free Software, while others call it Open
Source. Amid all this argument, however, Free Software geeks recognize that
they are all doing the same thing: the practice of creating a movement is the
practice of talking about the meaning and necessity of the other four
practices. It was in 1998-99 that geeks came to recognize that they were all
doing the same thing and, almost immediately, to argue about why.~{ For
instance, Richard Stallman writes, "The Free Software movement and the Open
Source movement are like two political camps within the free software
community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism:
organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then
treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the ,{[pg 322]}, image
people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the
Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of
that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on
the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific
projects. We don’t think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is
proprietary software" ("Why ‘Free Software’ Is Better than ‘Open Source,’"
GNU’s Not Unix! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html
[accessed 9 July 2006]). By contrast, the Open Source Initiative characterizes
the relationship as follows: "How is ‘open source’ related to ‘free software’?
The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It’s a
pitch for ‘free software’ because it works, not because it’s the only right
thing to do. We’re selling freedom on its merits"
(http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php [accessed 9 July 2006]). There are
a large number of definitions of Free Software: canonical definitions include
Richard Stallman’s writings on the Free Software Foundation’s Web site,
www.fsf.org, including the "Free Software Definition" and "Confusing Words and
Phrases that Are Worth Avoiding." From the Open Source side there is the "Open
Source Definition" (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/). Unaffiliated
definitions can be found at www.freedomdefined.org. }~

One way to understand the movement is through the story of Netscape and the
Mozilla Web browser (now known as Firefox). Not only does this story provide
some context for the stories of geeks presented in part I—and I move here from
direct participant observation to historical and archival research on a
phenomenon that was occurring at roughly the same time—but it also contains all
the elements necessary to understand Free Software. It is full of discussion
and argument about the practices that make up Free Software: sharing source
code, conceiving of openness, writing licenses, and coordinating
collaborations.
={ Firefox ;
   Netscape +26 ;
   Netscape Navigator (application) +26
}

% ,{[pg 99]},

2~ Forking Free Software, 1997-2000

Free Software forked in 1998 when the term Open Source suddenly appeared (a
term previously used only by the CIA to refer to unclassified sources of
intelligence). The two terms resulted in two separate kinds of narratives: the
first, regarding Free Software, stretched back into the 1980s, promoting
software freedom and resistance to proprietary software "hoarding," as Richard
Stallman, the head of the Free Software Foundation, refers to it; the second,
regarding Open Source, was associated with the dotcom boom and the evangelism
of the libertarian pro-business hacker Eric Raymond, who focused on the
economic value and cost savings that Open Source Software represented,
including the pragmatic (and polymathic) approach that governed the everyday
use of Free Software in some of the largest online start-ups (Amazon, Yahoo!,
HotWired, and others all "promoted" Free Software by using it to run their
shops).
={ Free Software :
     open source vs. +1 ;
   Free Software Foundation +1 ;
   Open Source :
     Free Software vs. ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   Stallman, Richard +1
}

A critical point in the emergence of Free Software occurred in 1998-99: new
names, new narratives, but also new wealth and new stakes. "Open Source" was
premised on dotcom promises of cost-cutting and "disintermediation" and various
other schemes to make money on it (Cygnus Solutions, an early Free Software
company, playfully tagged itself as "Making Free Software More Affordable"). VA
Linux, for instance, which sold personal-computer systems pre-installed with
Open Source operating systems, had the largest single initial public offering
(IPO) of the stock-market bubble, seeing a 700 percent share-price increase in
one day. "Free Software" by contrast fanned kindling flames of worry over
intellectual-property expansionism and hitched itself to a nascent legal
resistance to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act and Sonny Bono
Copyright Term Extension Act. Prior to 1998, Free Software referred either to
the Free Software Foundation (and the watchful, micromanaging eye of Stallman)
or to one of thousands of different commercial, avocational, or
university-research projects, processes, licenses, and ideologies that had a
variety of names: sourceware, freeware, shareware, open software, public domain
software, and so on. The term Open Source, by contrast, sought to encompass
them all in one movement.
={ Cygnus Solutions (corporation) ;
   Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) ;
   intellectual property ;
   VA Linux (corporation)
}

The event that precipitated this attempted semantic coup d’état was the release
of the source code for Netscape’s Communicator ,{[pg 100]}, Web browser. It’s
tough to overestimate the importance of Netscape to the fortunes of Free
Software. Netscape is justly famous for its 1995 IPO and its decision to offer
its core product, Netscape Navigator, for free (meaning a compiled, binary
version could be downloaded and installed "for zero dollars"). But Netscape is
far more famous among geeks for giving away something else, in 1998: the source
code to Netscape Communicator (née Navigator). Giving away the Navigator
application endeared Netscape to customers and confused investors. Giving away
the Communicator source code in 1998 endeared Netscape to geeks and confused
investors; it was ignored by customers.
={ geeks +3 }

Netscape is important from a number of perspectives. Businesspeople and
investors knew Netscape as the pet project of the successful businessman Jim
Clarke, who had founded the specialty computer manufacturer, Silicon Graphics
Incorporated (SGI). To computer scientists and engineers, especially in the
small university town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, Netscape was known as the
highest bidder for the WWW team at the National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. That team—Marc Andreessen,
Rob McCool, Eric Bina, Jon Mittelhauser, Aleks Totic, and Chris Houck—had
created Mosaic, the first and most fondly remembered "graphical browser" for
surfing the World Wide Web. Netscape was thus first known as Mosaic
Communications Corporation and switched its name only after legal threats from
NCSA and a rival firm, Spyglass. Among geeks, Netscape was known as home to a
number of Free Software hackers and advocates, most notably Jamie Zawinski, who
had rather flamboyantly broken rank with the Free Software Foundation by
forking the GNU EMACS code to create what was first known as Lucid Emacs and
later as XEmacs. Zawinski would go on to lead the newly free Netscape browser
project, now known as Mozilla.
={ Andreessen, Marc +3 ;
   McCool, Rob ;
   Mosaic (web browser) +3 ;
   Mozilla +23 ;
   National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) +3 ;
   Zawinski, Jamie +5
}

Meanwhile, most regular computer users remember Netscape both as an emblem of
the dotcom boom’s venture-fed insanity and as yet another of Microsoft’s
victims. Although Netscape exploded onto the scene in 1995, offering a
feature-rich browser that was an alternative to the bare-bones Mosaic browser,
it soon began to lose ground to Microsoft, which relatively quickly adopted the
strategy of giving away its browser, Internet Explorer, as if it were part of
the Windows operating system; this was a practice that the U.S. Department of
Justice eventually found to be in violation of ,{[pg 101]}, antitrust laws and
for which Microsoft was convicted, but never punished.
={ Justice, Department of ;
   Microsoft :
     Internet Explorer +1
}

The nature of Netscape’s decision to release the source code differs based on
which perspective it is seen from. It could appear to be a business plan
modeled on the original success: give away your product and make money in the
stock market. It could appear to be a strategic, last-gasp effort to outcompete
Microsoft. It could also appear, and did appear to many geeks, to be an attempt
to regain some of that "hacker-cred" it once had acquired by poaching the NCSA
team, or even to be an attempt to "do the right thing" by making one of the
world’s most useful tools into Free Software. But why would Netscape reach such
a conclusion? By what reasoning would such a decision seem to be correct? The
reasons for Netscape’s decision to "free the source" recapitulate the five core
practices of Free Software—and provided key momentum for the new movement.

!_ Sharing Source Code
Netscape’s decision to share its source code could only seem surprising in the
context of the widespread practice of keeping source code secret; secrecy was a
practice followed largely in order to prevent competitors from copying a
program and competing with it, but also as a means to control the market
itself. The World Wide Web that Andreessen’s team at NCSA had cut their teeth
on was itself designed to be "platform independent" and accessible by any
device on the network. In practice, however, this meant that someone needed to
create "browsers" for each different computer or device. Mosaic was initially
created for UNIX, using the Motif library of the X11 Window System—in short, a
very specific kind of access. Netscape, by contrast, prided itself on "porting"
Netscape Navigator to nearly all available computer architectures. Indeed, by
1997, plans were under way to create a version of the browser—written in Java,
the programming language created by Sun Microsystems to "write once, run
anywhere"—that would be completely platform independent.
={ secrecy +6 ;
   Sun Microsystems ;
   World Wide Web (www)
}

The Java-based Navigator (called Javagator, of course) created a problem,
however, with respect to the practice of keeping source code secret. Whenever a
program in Java was run, it created a set of "bytecodes" that were easy to
reverse-engineer because they had to be transmitted from the server to the
machine that ran the program and were thus visible to anyone who might know how
and where to look. Netscape engineers flirted with the idea of deliberately
,{[pg 102]}, obfuscating these bytecodes to deter competitors from copying
them. How can one compete, the logic goes, if anyone can copy your program and
make their own ersatz version?

Zawinski, among others, suggested that this was a bad idea: why not just share
the source code and get people to help make it better? As a longtime
participant in Free Software, Zawinski understood the potential benefits of
receiving help from a huge pool of potential contributors. He urged his peers
at Netscape to see the light. However, although he told them stories and showed
them successes, he could never make the case that this was an intelligent
business plan, only that it was an efficient software-engineering plan. From
the perspective of management and investors, such a move seemed tantamount to
simply giving away the intellectual property of the company itself.
={ intellectual property }

Frank Hecker, a sales manager, made the link between the developers and
management: "It was obvious to [developers] why it was important. It wasn’t
really clear from a senior management level why releasing the source code could
be of use because nobody ever made the business case."~{ Moody, Rebel Code,
193. }~ Hecker penned a document called "Netscape Source Code as Netscape
Product" and circulated it to various people, including Andreessen and Netscape
CEO Jim Barksdale. As the title suggests, the business case was that the source
code could also be a product, and in the context of Netscape, whose business
model was "give it away and make it up on the stock market," such a proposal
seemed less insane than it otherwise might have: "When Netscape first made
Navigator available for unrestricted download over the Internet, many saw this
as flying in the face of conventional wisdom for the commercial software
business, and questioned how we could possibly make money ‘giving our software
away.’ Now of course this strategy is seen in retrospect as a successful
innovation that was a key factor in Netscape’s rapid growth, and rare is the
software company today that does not emulate our strategy in one way or
another. Among other things, this provokes the following question: What if we
were to repeat this scenario, only this time with source code?"~{ Frank Hecker,
quoted in Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing the Source," 198. }~
={ Hecker, Frank +1 }

Under the influence of Hecker, Zawinski, and CTO Eric Hahn (who had also
written various internal "heresy documents" suggesting similar approaches),
Netscape eventually made the decision to share their source code with the
outside world, a decision that resulted in a famous January 1998 press release
describing the aims ,{[pg 103]}, and benefits of doing so. The decision, at
that particular point in Netscape’s life, and in the midst of the dotcom boom,
was certainly momentous, but it did not lead either to a financial windfall or
to a suddenly superior product.~{ See Moody, Rebel Code, chap. 11, for a more
detailed version of the story. }~
={ Hahn, Eric }

!_ Conceptualizing Open Systems
Releasing the source code was, in a way, an attempt to regain the trust of the
people who had first imagined the www. Tim Berners-Lee, the initial architect
of the www, was always adamant that the protocol and all its implementations
should be freely available (meaning either "in the public domain" or "released
as Free Software"). Indeed, Berners-Lee had done just that with his first
bare-bones implementations of the www, proudly declaring them to be in the
public domain.
={ Berners-Lee, Tim +1 ;
   Open Systems +2 ;
   public domain ;
   World Wide Web (www)
}

Over the course of the 1990s, the "browser wars" caused both Netscape and
Microsoft to stray far from this vision: each had implemented its own
extensions and "features" to the browsers and servers, extensions not present
in the protocol that Berners-Lee had created or in the subsequent standards
created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Included in the implementations
were various kinds of "evil" that could make browsers fail to work on certain
operating systems or with certain kinds of servers. The "browser wars" repeated
an open-systems battle from the 1980s, one in which the attempt to standardize
a network operating system (UNIX) was stymied by competition and secrecy, at
the same time that consortiums devoted to "openness" were forming in order to
try to prevent the spread of evil. Despite the fact that both Microsoft and
Netscape were members of the W3C, the noncompatibility of their browsers
clearly represented the manipulation of the standards process in the name of
competitive advantage.
={ evil ;
   Microsoft ;
   World Wide Web consortium (w3c) ;
   standards :
     ownership of
}

Releasing the source code for Communicator was thus widely seen as perhaps the
only way to bypass the poisoned well of competitively tangled, nonstandard
browser implementations. An Open Source browser could be made to comply with
the standards—if not by the immediate members involved with its creation, then
by creating a "fork" of the program that was standards compliant—because of the
rights of redistribution associated with an Open Source license. Open Source
would be the solution to an open-systems problem that had never been solved
because it had never confronted the issue of intellectual property directly.
Free Software, by contrast, had a well-developed solution in the GNU General
Public License, ,{[pg 104]}, also known as copyleft license, that would allow
the software to remain free and revive hope for maintaining open standards.
={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +4 ;
   General Public License (GPL) +3 ;
   intellectual property
}

!_ Writing Licenses
Herein lies the rub, however: Netscape was immediately embroiled in controversy
among Free Software hackers because it chose to write its own bespoke licenses
for distributing the source code. Rather than rely on one of the existing
licenses, such as the GNU GPL or the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) or MIT
licenses, they created their own: the Netscape Public License (NPL) and the
Mozilla Public License. The immediate concerns of Netscape had to do with their
existing network of contracts and agreements with other, third-party
developers—both those who had in the past contributed parts of the existing
source code that Netscape might not have the rights to redistribute as Free
Software, and those who were expecting in the future to buy and redistribute a
commercial version. Existing Free Software licenses were either too permissive,
giving to third parties rights that Netscape itself might not have, or too
restrictive, binding Netscape to make source code freely available (the GPL)
when it had already signed contracts with buyers of the nonfree code.
={ BSD License ;
   Mozilla Public License (MPL) +2 ;
   Netscape Public License (NPL)
}

It was a complex and specific business situation—a network of existing
contracts and licensed code—that created the need for Netscape to write its own
license. The NPL thus contained a clause that allowed Netscape special
permission to relicense any particular contribution to the source code as a
proprietary product in order to appease its third-party contracts; it
essentially gave Netscape special rights that no other licensee would have.
While this did not necessarily undermine the Free Software licenses—and it was
certainly Netscape’s prerogative—it was contrary to the spirit of Free
Software: it broke the "recursive public" into two halves. In order to appease
Free Software geeks, Netscape wrote one license for existing code (the NPL) and
a different license for new contributions: the Mozilla Public License.
={ recursive public }

Neither Stallman nor any other Free Software hacker was entirely happy with
this situation. Stallman pointed out three flaws: "One flaw sends a bad
philosophical message, another puts the free software community in a weak
position, while the third creates a major practical problem within the free
software community. Two of the flaws apply to the Mozilla Public License as
well." He urged people ,{[pg 105]}, not to use the NPL. Similarly, Bruce Perens
suggested, "Many companies have adopted a variation of the MPL [sic] for their
own programs. This is unfortunate, because the NPL was designed for the
specific business situation that Netscape was in at the time it was written,
and is not necessarily appropriate for others to use. It should remain the
license of Netscape and Mozilla, and others should use the GPL or the BSD or X
licenses."~{ Bruce Perens, "The Open Source Definition," 184. }~
={ BSD License ;
   Stallman, Richard ;
   Perens, Bruce
}

Arguments about the fine details of licenses may seem scholastic, but the
decision had a huge impact on the structure of the new product. As Steven Weber
has pointed out, the choice of license tracks the organization of a product and
can determine who and what kinds of contributions can be made to a project.~{
Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. }~ It is not an idle choice; every
new license is scrutinized with the same intensity or denounced with the same
urgency.
={ Weber, Steven }

!_ Coordinating Collaborations
One of the selling points of Free Software, and especially of its marketing as
Open Source, is that it leverages the work of thousands or hundreds of
thousands of volunteer contributors across the Internet. Such a claim almost
inevitably leads to spurious talk of "self-organizing" systems and emergent
properties of distributed collaboration. The Netscape press release promised to
"harness the creative power of thousands of programmers on the Internet by
incorporating their best enhancements," and it quoted CEO Jim Barksdale as
saying, "By giving away the source code for future versions, we can ignite the
creative energies of the entire Net community and fuel unprecedented levels of
innovation in the browser market."~{ "Netscape Announces Plans to Make
Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net," Netscape
press release, 22 January 1998,
http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html (accessed 25 Sept 2007).
}~ But as anyone who has ever tried to start or run a Free Software project
knows, it never works out that way.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) +6 }

Software engineering is a notoriously hard problem.~{ On the history of
software development methodologies, see Mahoney, "The Histories of
Computing(s)" and "The Roots of Software Engineering." }~ The halls of the
software industry are lined with the warning corpses of dead software
methodologies. Developing software in the dotcom boom was no different, except
that the speed of release cycles and the velocity of funding (the "burn rate")
was faster than ever before. Netscape’s in-house development methodologies were
designed to meet these pressures, and as many who work in this field will
attest, that method is some version of a semistructured, deadline-driven,
caffeine- and smart-drink-fueled race to "ship."~{ Especially good descriptions
of what this cycle is like can be found in Ullman, Close to the Machine and The
Bug. }~
={ software development +2 }

Releasing the Mozilla code, therefore, required a system of coordination that
would differ from the normal practice of in-house ,{[pg 106]}, software
development by paid programmers. It needed to incorporate the contributions of
outsiders—developers who didn’t work for Netscape. It also needed to entice
people to contribute, since that was the bargain on which the decision to free
the source was based, and to allow them to track their contributions, so they
could verify that their contributions were included or rejected for legitimate
reasons. In short, if any magical Open Source self-organization were to take
place, it would require a thoroughly transparent, Internet-based coordination
system.

% no reference here to firefox or netscape, rather to mozilla

At the outset, this meant practical things: obtaining the domain name
mozilla.org; setting up (and in turn releasing the source code for) the
version-control system (the Free Software standard cvs), the version-control
interface (Bonsai), the "build system" that managed and displayed the various
trees and (broken) branches of a complex software project (Tinderbox), and a
bug-reporting system for tracking bugs submitted by users and developers
(Bugzilla). It required an organizational system within the Mozilla project, in
which paid developers would be assigned to check submissions from inside and
outside, and maintainers or editors would be designated to look at and verify
that these contributions should be used.
={ bugs ;
   Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ;
   software tools
}

In the end, the release of the Mozilla source code was both a success and a
failure. Its success was long in coming: by 2004, the Firefox Web browser,
based on Mozilla, had started to creep up the charts of most popular browsers,
and it has become one of the most visible and widely used Free Software
applications. The failure, however, was more immediate: Mozilla failed to reap
the massive benefits for Netscape that the 1995 give-away of Netscape Navigator
had. Zawinski, in a public letter of resignation in April 1999 (one year after
the release), expressed this sense of failure. He attributed Netscape’s decline
after 1996 to the fact that it had "stopped innovating" and become too large to
be creative, and described the decision to free the Mozilla source code as a
return to this innovation: "[The announcement] was a beacon of hope to me. . .
. [I]t was so crazy, it just might work. I took my cue and ran with it,
registering the domain that night, designing the structure of the organization,
writing the first version of the web site, and, along with my co-conspirators,
explaining to room after room of Netscape employees and managers how free
software worked, and what we had to do to make it work."~{ Jamie Zawinski,
"resignation and postmortem," 31 March 1999,
http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html. }~ For Zawinski, the decision was both a
chance for Netscape to return to its glory and an opportunity ,{[pg 107]}, to
prove the power of Free Software: "I saw it as a chance for the code to
actually prosper. By making it not be a Netscape project, but rather, be a
public project to which Netscape was merely a contributor, the fact that
Netscape was no longer capable of building products wouldn’t matter: the
outsiders would show Netscape how it’s done. By putting control of the web
browser into the hands of anyone who cared to step up to the task, we would
ensure that those people would keep it going, out of their own
self-interest."~{ Ibid. }~
={ Zawinski, Jamie +3 ;
   Firefox +1 :
     see also Netscape Navigator ;
   Netscape Navigator +1
}

% netscape navigator index link added

But this promise didn’t come true—or, at least, it didn’t come true at the
speed that Zawinski and others in the software world were used to. Zawinski
offered various reasons: the project was primarily made up of Netscape
employees and thus still appeared to be a Netscape thing; it was too large a
project for outsiders to dive into and make small changes to; the code was too
"crufty," that is, too complicated, overwritten, and unclean. Perhaps most
important, though, the source code was not actually working: "We never
distributed the source code to a working web browser, more importantly, to the
web browser that people were actually using."~{ Ibid. }~

Netscape failed to entice. As Zawinski put it, "If someone were running a web
browser, then stopped, added a simple new command to the source, recompiled,
and had that same web browser plus their addition, they would be motivated to
do this again, and possibly to tackle even larger projects."~{ Ibid. }~ For
Zawinski, the failure to "ship" a working browser was the biggest failure, and
he took pains to suggest that this failure was not an indictment of Free
Software as such: "Let me assure you that whatever problems the Mozilla project
is having are not because open source doesn’t work. Open source does work, but
it is most definitely not a panacea. If there’s a cautionary tale here, it is
that you can’t take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of
‘open source,’ and have everything magically work out. Software is hard. The
issues aren’t that simple."~{ Ibid. }~

!_ Fomenting Movements
The period from 1 April 1998, when the Mozilla source code was first released,
to 1 April 1999, when Zawinski announced its failure, couldn’t have been a
headier, more exciting time for participants in Free Software. Netscape’s
decision to release the source code was a tremendous opportunity for geeks
involved in Free Software. It came in the midst of the rollicking dotcom
bubble. It also came in the midst of the widespread adoption of ,{[pg 108]},
key Free Software tools: the Linux operating system for servers, the Apache Web
server for Web pages, the perl and python scripting languages for building
quick Internet applications, and a number of other lower-level tools like Bind
(an implementation of the DNS protocol) or sendmail for e-mail.
={ movement (component of Free Software) +24 ;
   Apache (Free Software project) ;
   Domain Name System (DNS) ;
   Linux (Free Software project)
}

Perhaps most important, Netscape’s decision came in a period of fevered and
intense self-reflection among people who had been involved in Free Software in
some way, stretching back to the mid-1980s. Eric Raymond’s article "The
Cathedral and The Bazaar," delivered at the Linux Kongress in 1997 and the
O’Reilly Perl Conference the same year, had started a buzz among Free Software
hackers. It was cited by Frank Hecker and Eric Hahn at Netscape as one of the
sources for their thinking about the decision to free Mozilla; Raymond and
Bruce Perens had both been asked to consult with Netscape on Free Software
strategy. In April of the same year Tim O’Reilly, a publisher of handbooks for
Free Software, organized a conference called the Freeware Summit.
={ Freeware summit +5 ;
   Hahn, Eric ;
   Hecker, Frank ;
   O’Reilly, Tim ;
   O’Reilly Press +1 ;
   Perens, Bruce ;
   perl (programming language) ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   Cathedral and the Bazaar
}

The Freeware Summit’s very name indicated some of the concern about definition
and direction. Stallman, despite his obvious centrality, but also because of
it, was not invited to the Freeware Summit, and the Free Software Foundation
was not held up as the core philosophical guide of this event. Rather,
according to the press release distributed after the meeting, "The meeting’s
purpose was to facilitate a high-level discussion of the successes and
challenges facing the developers. While this type of software has often been
called ‘freeware’ or ‘free software’ in the past, the developers agreed that
commercial development of the software is part of the picture, and that the
terms ‘open source’ or ‘sourceware’ best describe the development method they
support."~{ "Open Source Pioneers Meet in Historic Summit," press release, 14
April 1998, O’Reilly Press, http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/796. }~
={ Open Source :
     "Open Source Definition" +1 ;
   Stallman, Richard ;
   Free Software Foundation
}

It was at this summit that Raymond’s suggestion of "Open Source" as an
alternative name was first publicly debated.~{ See Hamerly and Paquin, "Freeing
the Source." The story is elegantly related in Moody, Rebel Code, 182-204.
Raymond gives Christine Petersen of the Foresight Institute credit for the term
open source. }~ Shortly thereafter, Raymond and Perens created the Open Source
Initiative and penned "The Open Source Definition." All of this self-reflection
was intended to capitalize on the waves of attention being directed at Free
Software in the wake of Netscape’s announcement.
={ Open Source Initiative ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven
}

The motivations for these changes came from a variety of sources—ranging from a
desire to be included in the dotcom boom to a powerful (ideological) resistance
to being ideological. Linus Torvalds loudly proclaimed that the reason to do
Free Software was because it was "fun"; others insisted that it made better
business ,{[pg 109]}, sense or that the stability of infrastructures like the
Internet depended on a robust ability to improve them from any direction. But
none of them questioned how Free Software got done or proposed to change it.
={ Torvalds, Linus }

Raymond’s paper "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" quickly became the most widely
told story of how Open Source works and why it is important; it emphasizes the
centrality of novel forms of coordination over the role of novel copyright
licenses or practices of sharing source code. "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"
reports Raymond’s experiments with Free Software (the bazaar model) and
reflects on the difference between it and methodologies adopted by industry
(the cathedral model). The paper does not truck with talk of freedom and has no
denunciations of software hoarding à la Stallman. Significantly, it also has no
discussion of issues of licensing. Being a hacker, however, Raymond did give
his paper a "revision-history," which proudly displays revision 1.29, 9
February 1998: "Changed ‘free software’ to ‘open source.’"~{ From Raymond, The
Cathedral and the Bazaar. The changelog is available online only:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/. }~
={ Stallman, Richard +3 ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven +3 ;
   Cathedral and the Bazaar +3 ;
   Software development +7
}

Raymond was determined to reject the philosophy of liberty that Stallman and
the Free Software Foundation represented, but not in order to create a
political movement of his own. Rather, Raymond (and the others at the Freeware
Summit) sought to cash in on the rising tide of the Internet economy by turning
the creation of Free Software into something that made more sense to investors,
venture capitalists, and the stock-buying public. To Raymond, Stallman and the
Free Software Foundation represented not freedom or liberty, but a kind of
dogmatic, impossible communism. As Raymond was a committed libertarian, one
might expect his core beliefs in the necessity of strong property rights to
conflict with the strange communalism of Free Software—and, indeed, his
rhetoric was focused on pragmatic, business-minded, profit-driven, and
market-oriented uses of Free Software. For Raymond, the essentially interesting
component of Free Software was not its enhancement of human liberty, but the
innovation in software production that it represented (the "development
model"). It was clear that Free Software achieved something amazing through a
clever inversion of strong property rights, an inversion which could be
expected to bring massive revenue in some other form, either through
cost-cutting or, Netscape-style, through the stock market.
={ Free Software Foundation ;
   intellectual property +1 ;
   libertarianism
}

Raymond wanted the business world and the mainstream industry to recognize Free
Software’s potential, but he felt that Stallman’s ,{[pg 110]}, rhetoric was
getting in the way. Stallman’s insistence, for example, on calling corporate
intellectual-property protection of software "hoarding" was doing more damage
than good in terms of Free Software’s acceptance among businesses, as a
practice, if not exactly a product.

Raymond’s papers channeled the frustration of an entire generation of Free
Software hackers who may or may not have shared Stallman’s dogmatic
philosophical stance, but who nonetheless wanted to participate in the creation
of Free Software. Raymond’s paper, the Netscape announcement, and the Freeware
Summit all played into a palpable anxiety: that in the midst of the single
largest creation of paper wealth in U.S. history, those being enriched through
Free Software and the Internet were not those who built it, who maintained it,
or who got it.
={ hackers +4 ;
   Netscape +1
}

The Internet giveaway was a conflict of propriety: hackers and geeks who had
built the software that made it work, under the sign of making it free for all,
were seeing that software generate untold wealth for people who had not built
it (and furthermore, who had no intention of keeping it free for all).
Underlying the creation of wealth was a commitment to a kind of permanent
technical freedom—a moral order—not shared by those who were reaping the most
profit. This anxiety regarding the expropriation of work (even if it had been a
labor of love) was ramified by Netscape’s announcement.
={ moral and technical order }

All through 1998 and 1999, buzz around Open Source built. Little-known
companies such as Red Hat, VA Linux, Cygnus, Slackware, and SuSe, which had
been providing Free Software support and services to customers, suddenly
entered media and business consciousness. Articles in the mainstream press
circulated throughout the spring and summer of 1998, often attempting to make
sense of the name change and whether it meant a corresponding change in
practice. A front-cover article in Forbes, which featured photos of Stallman,
Larry Wall, Brian Behlendorf, and Torvalds (figure 2), was noncommittal,
cycling between Free Software, Open Source, and Freeware.~{ Josh McHugh, "For
the Love of Hacking," Forbes, 10 August 1998, 94-100. }~
={ Behlendorf, Brian +2 ;
   Cygnus Solutions (corporation) ;
   dotcom era +4 ;
   Red Hat (corporation) ;
   VA Linux (corporation) +3 ;
   Wall, Larry ;
   Stallman, Richard +2 ;
   Torvalds, Linus
}

{ 2bits_03_02-100.png }image ~[* "Peace, Love and Software," cover of Forbes, 10 August 1998. Used with permission of Forbes and Nathaniel Welch. ]~

By early 1999, O’Reilly Press published Open Sources: Voices from the Open
Source Revolution, a hastily written but widely read book. It included a number
of articles—this time including one by Stallman—that cobbled together the first
widely available public history of Free Software, both the practice and the
technologies ,{[pg 111]}, involved. Kirk McKusick’s article detailed the
history of important technologies like the BSD version of UNIX, while an
article by Brian Behlendorf, of Apache, detailed the practical challenges of
running Free Software projects. Raymond provided a history of hackers and a
self-aggrandizing article about his own importance in creating the movement,
while Stallman’s contribution told his own version of the rise of Free
Software.
={ Apache (Free Software project) ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ;
   Open Sources ;
   O’Reilly Press ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven +1 ;
   usable pasts
}

By December 1999, the buzz had reached a fever pitch. When VA Linux, a
legitimate company which actually made something real—computers with Linux
installed on them—went public, its shares’ value gained 700 percent in one day
and was the single ,{[pg 112]}, most valuable initial public offering of the
era. VA Linux took the unconventional step of allowing contributors to the
Linux kernel to buy into the stock before the IPO, thus bringing at least a
partial set of these contributors into the mainstream Ponzi scheme of the
Internet dotcom economy. Those who managed to sell their stock ended up
benefiting from the boom, whether or not their contributions to Free Software
truly merited it. In a roundabout way, Raymond, O’Reilly, Perens, and others
behind the name change had achieved recognition for the central role of Free
Software in the success of the Internet—and now its true name could be known:
Open Source.
={ Linux (Free Software project) ;
   Open Source :
     Free Software vs. +11
}

Yet nothing much changed in terms of the way things actually got done. Sharing
source code, conceiving openness, writing licenses, coordinating projects—all
these continued as before with no significant differences between those
flashing the heroic mantle of freedom and those donning the pragmatic tunic of
methodology. Now, however, stories proliferated; definitions, distinctions,
details, and detractions filled the ether of the Internet, ranging from the
philosophical commitments of Free Software to the parables of science as the
"original open source" software. Free Software proponents refined their message
concerning rights, while Open Source advocates refined their claims of
political agnosticism or nonideological commitments to "fun." All these stories
served to create movements, to evangelize and advocate and, as Eugen Leitl
would say, to "corrupt young minds" and convert them to the cause. The fact
that there are different narratives for identical practices is an advantageous
fact: regardless of why people think they are doing what they are doing, they
are all nonetheless contributing to the same mysterious thing.
={ Leitl, Eugene }

2~ A Movement?

To most onlookers, Free Software and Open Source seem to be overwhelmed with
frenzied argument; the flame wars and disputes, online and off, seem to
dominate everything. To attend a conference where geeks—especially high-profile
geeks like Raymond, Stallman, and Torvalds—are present, one might suspect that
the very detailed practices of Free Software are overseen by the brow-beating,
histrionic antics of a few charismatic leaders and that ideological commitments
result in divergent, incompatible, and affect-laden ,{[pg 113]}, opposition
which must of necessity take specific and incompatible forms. Strangely, this
is far from the case: all this sound and fury doesn’t much change what people
do, even if it is a requirement of apprenticeship. It truly is all over but for
the shouting.
={ Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   Stallman, Richard ;
   Torvalds, Linus ;
   Free Software :
     open source vs. +8 ;
   practices +4
}

According to most of the scholarly literature, the function of a movement is to
narrate the shared goals and to recruit new members. But is this what happens
in Free Software or Open Source?~{ On social movements—the closest analog,
developed long ago—see Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, and Freeman and
Johnson, Waves of Protest. However, the Free Software and Open Source Movements
do not have "causes" of the kind that conventional movements do, other than the
perpetuation of Free and Open Source Software (see Coleman, "Political
Agnosticism"; Chan, "Coding Free Software"). Similarly, there is no single
development methodology that would cover only Open Source. Advocates of Open
Source are all too willing to exclude those individuals or organizations who
follow the same "development methodology" but do not use a Free Software
license—such as Microsoft’s oft-mocked "shared-source" program. The list of
licenses approved by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source
Initiative is substantially the same. Further, the Debian Free Software
Guidelines and the "Open Source Definition" are almost identical (compare
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html with
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ [both accessed 30 June 2006]). }~ To begin
with, movement is an awkward word; not all participants would define their
participation this way. Richard Stallman suggests that Free Software is social
movement, while Open Source is a development methodology. Similarly some Open
Source proponents see it as a pragmatic methodology and Free Software as a
dogmatic philosophy. While there are specific entities like the Free Software
Foundation and the Open Source Initiative, they do not comprise all Free
Software or Open Source. Free Software and Open Source are neither corporations
nor organizations nor consortia (for there are no organizations to consort);
they are neither national, subnational, nor international; they are not
"collectives" because no membership is required or assumed—indeed to hear
someone assert "I belong" to Free Software or Open Source would sound absurd to
anyone who does. Neither are they shady bands of hackers, crackers, or thieves
meeting in the dead of night, which is to say that they are not an "informal"
organization, because there is no formal equivalent to mimic or annul. Nor are
they quite a crowd, for a crowd can attract participants who have no idea what
the goal of the crowd is; also, crowds are temporary, while movements extend
over time. It may be that movement is the best term of the lot, but unlike
social movements, whose organization and momentum are fueled by shared causes
or broken by ideological dispute, Free Software and Open Source share practices
first, and ideologies second. It is this fact that is the strongest
confirmation that they are a recursive public, a form of public that is as
concerned with the material practical means of becoming public as it is with
any given public debate.
={ affinity (of geeks) +1 ;
   movement (component of Free Software) :
     function of +3 ;
   social movement, theories of ;
   Software development +1
}

The movement, as a practice of argument and discussion, is thus centered around
core agreements about the other four kinds of practices. The discussion and
argument have a specific function: to tie together divergent practices
according to a wide consensus which tries to capture the why of Free Software.
Why is it different from normal software development? Why is it necessary? Why
now? ,{[pg 114]}, Why do people do it? Why do people use it? Can it be
preserved and enhanced? None of these questions address the how: how should
source code circulate? How should a license be written? Who should be in
charge? All of these "hows" change slowly and experimentally through the
careful modulation of the practices, but the "whys" are turbulent and often
distracting. Nonetheless, people engaged in Free Software—users, developers,
supporters, and observers—could hardly remain silent on this point, despite the
frequent demand to just "shut up and show me the code." "Figuring out" Free
Software also requires a practice of reflecting on what is central to it and
what is outside of it.
={ figuring out +2 }

The movement, as a practice of discussion and argument, is made up of stories.
It is a practice of storytelling: affect- and intellect-laden lore that orients
existing participants toward a particular problem, contests other histories,
parries attacks from outside, and draws in new recruits.~{ It is, in the terms
of Actor Network Theory, a process of "enrollment" in which participants find
ways to rhetorically align—and to disalign—their interests. It does not
constitute the substance of their interest, however. See Latour, Science in
Action; Callon, "Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation." }~ This includes
proselytism and evangelism (and the usable pasts of protestant reformations,
singularities, rebellion and iconoclasm are often salient here), whether for
the reform of intellectual-property law or for the adoption of Linux in the
trenches of corporate America. It includes both heartfelt allegiance in the
name of social justice as well as political agnosticism stripped of all
ideology.~{ Coleman, "Political Agnosticism." }~ Every time Free Software is
introduced to someone, discussed in the media, analyzed in a scholarly work, or
installed in a workplace, a story of either Free Software or Open Source is
used to explain its purpose, its momentum, and its temporality. At the extremes
are the prophets and proselytes themselves: Eric Raymond describes Open Source
as an evolutionarily necessary outcome of the natural tendency of human
societies toward economies of abundance, while Richard Stallman describes it as
a defense of the fundamental freedoms of creativity and speech, using a variety
of philosophical theories of liberty, justice, and the defense of freedom.~{
See, respectively, Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Williams, Free as
in Freedom. }~ Even scholarly analyses must begin with a potted history drawn
from the self-narration of geeks who make or advocate free software.~{ For
example, Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and Weber, The Success of Open Source
both tell versions of the same story of origins and development. }~ Indeed, as
a methodological aside, one reason it is so easy to track such stories and
narratives is because geeks like to tell and, more important, like to archive
such stories—to create Web pages, definitions, encyclopedia entries,
dictionaries, and mini-histories and to save every scrap of correspondence,
every fight, and every resolution related to their activities. This "archival
hubris" yields a very peculiar and specific kind of fieldsite: one in which a
kind ,{[pg 115]}, of "as-it-happens" ethnographic observation is possible not
only through "being there" in the moment but also by being there in the
massive, proliferating archives of moments past. Understanding the movement as
a changing entity requires constantly glancing back at its future promises and
the conditions of their making.
={ Actor Network Theory ;
   allegory, of Protestant Reformation ;
   ethnography +1 ;
   geeks :
     self-representation +1 ;
   practices :
     "archival hubris" | stories as ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   Stallman, Richard
}

Stories of the movement are also stories of a recursive public. The fact that
movement isn’t quite the right word is evidence of a kind of grasping, a
figuring out of why these practices make sense to all these geeks, in this
place and time; it is a practice that is not so different from my own
ethnographic engagement with it. Note that both Free Software and Open Source
tell stories of movement(s): they are not divided by a commercial-noncommercial
line, even if they are divided by ill-defined and hazy notions of their
ultimate goals. The problem of a recursive public (or, in an alternate
language, a recursive market) as a social imaginary of moral and technical
order is common to both of them as part of their practices. Thus, stories about
"the movement" are detailed stories about the technical and moral order that
geeks inhabit, and they are bound up with the functions and fates of the
Internet. Often these stories are themselves practices of inclusion and
exclusion (e.g., "this license is not a Free Software license" or "that
software is not an open system"); sometimes the stories are normative
definitions about how Free Software should look. But they are, always, stories
that reveal the shared moral and technical imaginations that make up Free
Software as a recursive public.
={ moral and technical order ;
   recursive public ;
   social imaginary }

2~ Conclusion

Before 1998, there was no movement. There was the Free Software Foundation,
with its peculiar goals, and a very wide array of other projects, people,
software, and ideas. Then, all of a sudden, in the heat of the dotcom boom,
Free Software was a movement. Suddenly, it was a problem, a danger, a job, a
calling, a dogma, a solution, a philosophy, a liberation, a methodology, a
business plan, a success, and an alternative. Suddenly, it was Open Source or
Free Software, and it became necessary to choose sides. After 1998, debates
about definition exploded; denunciations and manifestos and journalistic
hagiography proliferated. Ironically, the creation of two names allowed people
to identify one thing, for ,{[pg 116]}, these two names referred to identical
practices, licenses, tools, and organizations. Free Software and Open Source
shared everything "material," but differed vocally and at great length with
respect to ideology. Stallman was denounced as a kook, a communist, an
idealist, and a dogmatic holding back the successful adoption of Open Source by
business; Raymond and users of "open source" were charged with selling out the
ideals of freedom and autonomy, with the dilution of the principles and the
promise of Free Software, as well as with being stooges of capitalist
domination. Meanwhile, both groups proceeded to create objects—principally
software—using tools that they agreed on, concepts of openness that they agreed
on, licenses that they agreed on, and organizational schemes that they agreed
on. Yet never was there fiercer debate about the definition of Free Software.
={ Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   Stallman, Richard ;
   usable pasts
}

On the one hand, the Free Software Foundation privileges the liberty and
creativity of individual geeks, geeks engaged in practices of self-fashioning
through the creation of software. It gives precedence to the liberal claim that
without freedom of expression, individuals are robbed of their ability to
self-determine. On the other hand, Open Source privileges organizations and
processes, that is, geeks who are engaged in building businesses, nonprofit
organizations, or governmental and public organizations of some form or
another. It gives precedence to the pragmatist (or polymathic) view that
getting things done requires flexible principles and negotiation, and that the
public practice of building and running things should be separate from the
private practice of ethical and political beliefs. Both narratives give geeks
ways of making sense of a practice that they share in almost all of its
details; both narratives give geeks a way to understand how Free Software or
Open Source Software is different from the mainstream, proprietary software
development that dominates their horizons. The narratives turn the haphazard
participation and sharing that existed before 1998 into meaningful,
goal-directed practices in the present, turning a class-in-itself into a
class-for-itself, to use a terminology for the most part unwelcome among geeks.
={ geeks }

If two radically opposed ideologies can support people engaged in identical
practices, then it seems obvious that the real space of politics and
contestation is at the level of these practices and their emergence. These
practices emerge as a response to a reorientation of power and knowledge, a
reorientation somewhat impervious to ,{[pg 117]}, conventional narratives of
freedom and liberty, or to pragmatic claims of methodological necessity or
market-driven innovation. Were these conventional narratives sufficient, the
practices would be merely bureaucratic affairs, rather than the radical
transformations they are.
={ reorientation of power and knowledge }

1~ 4. Sharing Source Code

% ,{[pg 118]},

Free Software would be nothing without shared source code. The idea is built
into the very name "Open Source," and it is a requirement of all Free Software
licenses that source code be open to view, not "welded shut." Perhaps
ironically, source code is the most material of the five components of Free
Software; it is both an expressive medium, like writing or speech, and a tool
that performs concrete actions. It is a mnemonic that translates between the
illegible electron-speed doings of our machines and our lingering ability to
partially understand and control them as human agents. Many Free Software
programmers and advocates suggest that "information wants to be free" and that
sharing is a natural condition of human life, but I argue something contrary:
sharing produces its own kind of moral and technical order, that is,
"information makes people want freedom" and how they want it is related to how
that information is created and circulated. In this chapter I explore the ,{[pg
119]}, twisted and contingent history of how source code and its sharing have
come to take the technical, legal, and pedagogical forms they have today, and
how the norms of sharing have come to seem so natural to geeks.
={ moral and technical order ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) +50 ;
   pedagogy :
     operating systems and +2
}

Source code is essential to Free Software because of the historically specific
ways in which it has come to be shared, "ported," and "forked." Nothing about
the nature of source code requires that it be shared, either by corporations
for whom secrecy and jealous protection are the norm or by academics and geeks
for whom source code is usually only one expression, or implementation, of a
greater idea worth sharing. However, in the last thirty years, norms of sharing
source code—technical, legal, and pedagogical norms—have developed into a
seemingly natural practice. They emerged through attempts to make software into
a product, such as IBM’s 1968 "unbundling" of software and hardware, through
attempts to define and control it legally through trade secret, copyright, and
patent law, and through attempts to teach engineers how to understand and to
create more software.
={ implementation of software ;
   Secrecy +7 ;
   unbundling ;
   Intellectual property ;
   International Business Machines (IBM)
}

The story of the norms of sharing source code is, not by accident, also the
history of the UNIX operating system.~{ "Sharing" source code is not the only
kind of sharing among geeks (e.g., informal sharing to communicate ideas), and
UNIX is not the only ,{[pg 324]}, shared software. Other examples that exhibit
this kind of proliferation (e.g., the LISP programming language, the TeX
text-formatting system) are as ubiquitous as UNIX today. The inverse of my
argument here is that selling produces a different kind of order: many products
that existed in much larger numbers than UNIX have since disappeared because
they were never ported or forked; they are now part of dead-computer museums
and collections, if they have survived at all. }~ The UNIX operating system is
a monstrous academic-corporate hybrid, an experiment in portability and sharing
whose impact is widely and reverently acknowledged by geeks, but
underappreciated more generally. The story of UNIX demonstrates the details of
how source code has come to be shared, technically, legally, and pedagogically.
In technical terms UNIX and the programming language C in which it was written
demonstrated several key ideas in operating-systems theory and practice, and
they led to the widespread "porting" of UNIX to virtually every kind of
hardware available in the 1970s, all around the world. In legal terms UNIX’s
owner, AT&T, licensed it widely and liberally, in both binary and source-code
form; the legal definition of UNIX as a product, however, was not the same as
the technical definition of UNIX as an evolving experiment in portable
operating systems—a tension that has continued throughout its lifetime. In
pedagogical terms UNIX became the very paradigm of an "operating system" and
was thereby ported not only in the technical sense from one machine to another,
but from machines to minds, as computer-science students learning the meaning
of "operating system" studied the details of the quasi-legally shared UNIX
source code.~{ The story of UNIX has not been told, and yet it has been told
hundreds of thousands of times. Every hacker, programmer, computer scientist,
and geek tells a version of UNIX history—a usable past. Thus, the sources for
this chapter include these stories, heard and recorded throughout my fieldwork,
but also easily accessible in academic work on Free Software, which
enthusiastically participates in this potted-history retailing. See, for
example, Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source; Castells, The Internet
Galaxy; Himanen, The Hacker Ethic; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. To date
there is but one detailed history of UNIX—A Quarter Century of UNIX, by Peter
Salus—which I rely on extensively. Matt Ratto’s dissertation, "The Pressure of
Openness," also contains an excellent analytic history of the events told in
this chapter. }~
={ operating systems, history of +40 ;
   programming languages +46 ;
   UNIX operating system +3 ;
   AT&T +2 ;
   C (programming language) ;
   programming +11
}

% ,{[pg 120]},

The proliferation of UNIX was also a hybrid commercial-academic undertaking: it
was neither a "public domain" object shared solely among academics, nor was it
a conventional commercial product. Proliferation occurred through novel forms
of academic sharing as well as through licensing schemes constrained by the
peculiar status of AT&T, a regulated monopoly forbidden to enter the computer
and software industry before 1984. Thus proliferation was not mere replication:
it was not the sale of copies of UNIX, but a complex web of shared and
re-shared chunks of source code, and the reimplementation of an elegant and
simple conceptual scheme. As UNIX proliferated, it was stabilized in multiple
ways: by academics seeking to keep it whole and self-compatible through
contributions of source code; by lawyers at AT&T seeking to define boundaries
that mapped onto laws, licenses, versions, and regulations; and by professors
seeking to define it as an exemplar of the core concepts of operating-system
theory. In all these ways, UNIX was a kind of primal recursive public, drawing
together people for whom the meaning of their affiliation was the use,
modification, and stabilization of UNIX.
={ public domain ;
   recursive public :
     precursors of ;
   monopoly ;
   proliferation of software +1
}

The obverse of proliferation is differentiation: forking. UNIX is admired for
its integrity as a conceptual thing and despised (or marveled at) for its truly
tangled genealogical tree of ports and forks: new versions of UNIX, some based
directly on the source code, some not, some licensed directly from AT&T, some
sublicensed or completely independent.
={ differentiation of software }

Forking, like random mutation, has had both good and bad effects; on the one
hand, it ultimately created versions of UNIX that were not compatible with
themselves (a kind of autoimmune response), but it also allowed the merger of
UNIX and the Arpanet, creating a situation wherein UNIX operating systems came
to be not only the paradigm of operating systems but also the paradigm of
networked computers, through its intersection with the development of the
TCP/IP protocols that are at the core of the Internet.~{ The intersection of
UNIX and TCP/IP occurred around 1980 and led to the famous switch from the
Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet
Protocol that occurred on 1 January 1983 (see Salus, Casting the Net). }~ By
the mid-1980s, UNIX was a kind of obligatory passage point for anyone
interested in networking, operating systems, the Internet, and especially,
modes of creating, sharing, and modifying source code—so much so that UNIX has
become known among geeks not just as an operating system but as a philosophy,
an answer to a very old question in new garb: how shall we live, among a new
world of machines, software, and networks?
={ Arpanet (network) ;
   protocols :
     distinguished from standards and implementation ;
   Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) :
     TCP/IP ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) ;
   UNIX operating system :
     relationship to Arpanet ;
   UNIX philosophy
}

% ,{[pg 121]},

2~ Before Source

In the early days of computing machinery, there was no such thing as source
code. Alan Turing purportedly liked to talk to the machine in binary. Grace
Hopper, who invented an early compiler, worked as close to the Harvard Mark I
as she could get: flipping switches and plugging and unplugging relays that
made up the "code" of what the machine would do. Such mechanical and meticulous
work hardly merits the terms reading and writing; there were no GOTO
statements, no line numbers, only calculations that had to be translated from
the pseudo-mathematical writing of engineers and human computers to a physical
or mechanical configuration.~{ Light, "When Computers Were Women"; Grier, When
Computers Were Human. }~ Writing and reading source code and programming
languages was a long, slow development that became relatively widespread only
by the mid-1970s. So-called higher-level languages began to appear in the late
1950s: FORTRAN, COBOL, Algol, and the "compilers" which allowed for programs
written in them to be transformed into the illegible mechanical and valvular
representations of the machine. It was in this era that the terms source
language and target language emerged to designate the activity of translating
higher to lower level languages.~{ There is a large and growing scholarly
history of software: Wexelblat, History of Programming Languages and Bergin and
Gibson, History of Programming Languages 2 are collected papers by historians
and participants. Key works in history include Campbell-Kelly, From Airline
Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog; Akera and Nebeker, From 0 to 1; Hashagen,
Keil-Slawik, and Norberg, History of Computing—Software Issues; Donald A.
MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof. Michael Mahoney has written by far the most about
the early history of software; his relevant works include "The Roots of
Software Engineering," "The Structures of Computation," "In Our Own Image," and
"Finding a History for Software Engineering." On UNIX in particular, there is
shockingly little historical work. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray
devote a mere two pages in their general history Computer. As early as 1978,
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were reflecting on the "history" of UNIX in
"The UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective." Ritchie maintains a Web site
that contains a valuable collection of early documents and his own
reminiscences (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/ ,{[pg 325]}, ). Mahoney has
also conducted interviews with the main participants in the development of UNIX
at Bell Labs. These interviews have not been published anywhere, but are drawn
on as background in this chapter (interviews are in Mahoney’s personal files).
}~
={ FORTRAN (programming language) ;
   Hopper, Grace ;
   Turing, Alan +2 ;
   translation of source code +5 ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     before Software +5 ;
   source code :
     translation of +5
}

There is a certain irony about the computer, not often noted: the unrivaled
power of the computer, if the ubiquitous claims are believed, rests on its
general programmability; it can be made to do any calculation, in principle.
The so-called universal Turing machine provides the mathematical proof.~{
Turing, "On Computable Numbers." See also Davis, Engines of Logic, for a basic
explanation. }~ Despite the abstract power of such certainty, however, we do
not live in the world of The Computer—we live in a world of computers. The
hardware systems that manufacturers created from the 1950s onward were so
specific and idiosyncratic that it was inconceivable that one might write a
program for one machine and then simply run it on another. "Programming" became
a bespoke practice, tailored to each new machine, and while programmers of a
particular machine may well have shared programs with each other, they would
not have seen much point in sharing with users of a different machine.
Likewise, computer scientists shared mathematical descriptions of algorithms
and ideas for automation with as much enthusiasm as corporations jealously
guarded theirs, but this sharing, or secrecy, did not extend to the sharing of
the program itself. The need to "rewrite" a program for each machine was not
just a historical accident, but ,{[pg 122]}, was determined by the needs of
designers and engineers and the vicissitudes of the market for such expensive
machines.~{ Sharing programs makes sense in this period only in terms of user
groups such as SHARE (IBM) and USE (DEC). These groups were indeed sharing
source code and sharing programs they had written (see Akera, "Volunteerism and
the Fruits of Collaboration"), but they were constituted around specific
machines and manufacturers; brand loyalty and customization were familiar
pursuits, but sharing source code across dissimilar computers was not. }~

In the good old days of computers-the-size-of-rooms, the languages that humans
used to program computers were mnemonics; they did not exist in the computer,
but on a piece of paper or a specially designed code sheet. The code sheet gave
humans who were not Alan Turing a way to keep track of, to share with other
humans, and to think systematically about the invisible light-speed
calculations of a complicated device. Such mnemonics needed to be "coded" on
punch cards or tape; if engineers conferred, they conferred over sheets of
paper that matched up with wires, relays, and switches—or, later, printouts of
the various machine-specific codes that represented program and data.

With the introduction of programming languages, the distinction between a
"source" language and a "target" language entered the practice: source
languages were "translated" into the illegible target language of the machine.
Such higher-level source languages were still mnemonics of sorts—they were
certainly easier for humans to read and write, mostly on yellowing tablets of
paper or special code sheets—but they were also structured enough that a source
language could be input into a computer and translated into a target language
which the designers of the hardware had specified. Inputting commands and cards
and source code required a series of actions specific to each machine: a
particular card reader or, later, a keypunch with a particular "editor" for
entering the commands. Properly input and translated source code provided the
machine with an assembled binary program that would, in fact, run (calculate,
operate, control). It was a separation, an abstraction that allowed for a
certain division of labor between the ingenious human authors and the fast and
mechanical translating machines.
={ text editors +1 }

Even after the invention of programming languages, programming "on" a
computer—sitting at a glowing screen and hacking through the night—was still a
long time in coming. For example, only by about 1969 was it possible to sit at
a keyboard, write source code, instruct the computer to compile it, then run
the program—all without leaving the keyboard—an activity that was all but
unimaginable in the early days of "batch processing."~{ See Waldrop, The Dream
Machine, 142-47. }~ Very few programmers worked in such a fashion before the
mid-1970s, when text editors that allowed programmers to see the text on a
screen rather ,{[pg 123]}, than on a piece of paper started to proliferate.~{ A
large number of editors were created in the 1970s; Richard Stallman’s EMACS and
Bill Joy’s vi remain the most well known. Douglas Engelbart is somewhat too
handsomely credited with the creation of the interactive computer, but the work
of Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch in Berkeley, as well as that of the Multics
team, Ken Thompson, and others on early on-screen editors is surely more
substantial in terms of the fundamental ideas and problems of manipulating text
files on a screen. This story is largely undocumented, save for in the
computer-science literature itself. On Engelbart, see Bardini, Bootstrapping.
}~ We are, by now, so familiar with the image of the man or woman sitting at a
screen interacting with this device that it is nearly impossible to imagine how
such a seemingly obvious practice was achieved in the first place—through the
slow accumulation of the tools and techniques for working on a new kind of
writing—and how that practice exploded into a Babel of languages and machines
that betrayed the promise of the general-purpose computing machine.
={ proliferation of software +2 ;
   source code :
     batch processing ;
   standards :
     programming languages +3
}

The proliferation of different machines with different architectures drove a
desire, among academics especially, for the standardization of programming
languages, not so much because any single language was better than another, but
because it seemed necessary to most engineers and computer users to share an
emerging corpus of algorithms, solutions, and techniques of all kinds,
necessary to avoid reinventing the wheel with each new machine. Algol, a
streamlined language suited to algorithmic and algebraic representations,
emerged in the early 1960s as a candidate for international standardization.
Other languages competed on different strengths: FORTRAN and COBOL for general
business use; LISP for symbolic processing. At the same time, the desire for a
standard "higher-level" language necessitated a bestiary of translating
programs: compilers, parsers, lexical analyzers, and other tools designed to
transform the higher-level (human-readable) language into a machine-specific
lower-level language, that is, machine language, assembly language, and
ultimately the mystical zeroes and ones that course through our machines. The
idea of a standard language and the necessity of devising specific tools for
translation are the origin of the problem of portability: the ability to move
software—not just good ideas, but actual programs, written in a standard
language—from one machine to another.
={ COBOL (programming language) ;
   FORTRAN (programming language) ;
   LISP (programming language) ;
   portability, of operating systems +8
}

A standard source language was seen as a way to counteract the proliferation of
different machines with subtly different architectures. Portable source code
would allow programmers to imagine their programs as ships, stopping in at
ports of call, docking on different platforms, but remaining essentially mobile
and unchanged by these port-calls. Portable source code became the Esperanto of
humans who had wrought their own Babel of tribal hardware machines.
={ source code +7 }

Meanwhile, for the computer industry in the 1960s, portable source code was
largely a moot point. Software and hardware were ,{[pg 124]}, two sides of
single, extremely expensive coin—no one, except engineers, cared what language
the code was in, so long as it performed the task at hand for the customer.
Each new machine needed to be different, faster, and, at first, bigger, and
then smaller, than the last. The urge to differentiate machines from each other
was not driven by academic experiment or aesthetic purity, but by a demand for
marketability, competitive advantage, and the transformation of machines and
software into products. Each machine had to do something really well, and it
needed to be developed in secret, in order to beat out the designs and
innovations of competitors. In the 1950s and 1960s the software was a core
component of this marketable object; it was not something that in itself was
differentiated or separately distributed—until IBM’s famous decision in 1968 to
"unbundle" software and hardware.
={ unbundling +2 }

Before the 1970s, employees of a computer corporation wrote software in-house.
The machine was the product, and the software was just an extra line-item on
the invoice. IBM was not the first to conceive of software as an independent
product with its own market, however. Two companies, Informatics and Applied
Data Research, had explored the possibilities of a separate market in
software.~{ See Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the
Hedgehog. }~ Informatics, in particular, developed the first commercially
successful software product, a business-management system called Mark IV, which
in 1967 cost $30,000. Informatics’ president Walter Bauer "later recalled that
potential buyers were ‘astounded’ by the price of Mark IV. In a world
accustomed to free software the price of $30,000 was indeed high."~{ Ibid.,
107. }~
={ Applied Data Research (corporation) ;
   Informatics (corporation)
}

IBM’s unbundling decision marked a watershed, the point at which "portable"
source code became a conceivable idea, if not a practical reality, to many in
the industry.~{ Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 203-5. }~ Rather than
providing a complete package of hardware and software, IBM decided to
differentiate its products: to sell software and hardware separately to
consumers.~{ Ultimately, the Department of Justice case against IBM used
bundling as evidence of monopolistic behavior, in addition to claims about the
creation of so-called Plug Compatible Machines, devices that were
reverse-engineered by meticulously constructing both the mechanical interface
and the software that would communicate with IBM mainframes. See Franklin M.
Fischer, Folded, Spindled, and Mutilated; Brock, The Second Information
Revolution. }~ But portability was not simply a technical issue; it was a
political-economic one as well. IBM’s decision was driven both by its desire to
create IBM software that ran on all IBM machines (a central goal of the famous
OS/360 project overseen and diagnosed by Frederick Brooks) and as response to
an antitrust suit filed by the U.S. Department of Justice.~{ The story of this
project and the lessons Brooks learned are the subject of one of the most
famous software-development handbooks, The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick
Brooks. }~ The antitrust suit included as part of its claims the suggestion
that the close tying of software and hardware represented a form of
monopolistic behavior, and it prompted IBM to consider strategies to "unbundle"
its product.
={ antitrust ;
   Brooks, Frederick ;
   Justice, Department of ;
   monopoly
}

% ,{[pg 125]},

Portability in the business world meant something specific, however. Even if
software could be made portable at a technical level—transferable between two
different IBM machines—this was certainly no guarantee that it would be
portable between customers. One company’s accounting program, for example, may
not suit another’s practices. Portability was therefore hindered both by the
diversity of machine architectures and by the diversity of business practices
and organization. IBM and other manufacturers therefore saw no benefit to
standardizing source code, as it could only provide an advantage to
competitors.~{ The computer industry has always relied heavily on trade secret,
much less so on patent and copyright. Trade secret also produces its own form
of order, access, and circulation, which was carried over into the early
software industry as well. See Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine for a classic
account of secrecy and competition in the computer industry. }~

Portability was thus not simply a technical problem—the problem of running one
program on multiple architectures—but also a kind of political-economic
problem. The meaning of product was not always the same as the meaning of
hardware or software, but was usually some combination of the two. At that
early stage, the outlines of a contest over the meaning of portable or
shareable source code are visible, both in the technical challenges of creating
high-level languages and in the political-economic challenges that corporations
faced in creating distinctive proprietary products.

2~ The UNIX Time-Sharing System
={ UNIX operating system :
     history of +18
}

Set against this backdrop, the invention, success, and proliferation of the
UNIX operating system seems quite monstrous, an aberration of both academic and
commercial practice that should have failed in both realms, instead of becoming
the most widely used portable operating system in history and the very paradigm
of an "operating system" in general. The story of UNIX demonstrates how
portability became a reality and how the particular practice of sharing UNIX
source code became a kind of de facto standard in its wake.

UNIX was first written in 1969 by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell
Telephone Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. UNIX was the dénouement of the MIT
project Multics, which Bell Labs had funded in part and to which Ken Thompson
had been assigned. Multics was one of the earliest complete time-sharing
operating systems, a demonstration platform for a number of early innovations
in time-sharing (multiple simultaneous users on one computer).~{ On time
sharing, see Lee et al., "Project MAC." Multics makes an appearance in nearly
all histories of computing, the best resource by far being Tom van Vleck’s Web
site http://www.multicians.org/. }~ By 1968, Bell Labs had pulled its
support—including Ken Thompson—from the project and placed him back in Murray
Hill, where he and ,{[pg 126]}, Dennis Ritchie were stuck without a machine,
without any money, and without a project. They were specialists in operating
systems, languages, and machine architecture in a research group that had no
funding or mandate to pursue these areas. Through the creative use of some
discarded equipment, and in relative isolation from the rest of the lab,
Thompson and Ritchie created, in the space of about two years, a complete
operating system, a programming language called C, and a host of tools that are
still in extremely wide use today. The name UNIX (briefly, UNICS) was, among
other things, a puerile pun: a castrated Multics.
={ C (programming language) ;
   Multics +1 ;
   Ritchie, Dennis +19 ;
   Thompson, Ken +16
}

The absence of an economic or corporate mandate for Thompson’s and Ritchie’s
creativity and labor was not unusual for Bell Labs; researchers were free to
work on just about anything, so long as it possessed some kind of vague
relation to the interests of AT&T. However, the lack of funding for a more
powerful machine did restrict the kind of work Thompson and Ritchie could
accomplish. In particular, it influenced the design of the system, which was
oriented toward a super-slim control unit (a kernel) that governed the basic
operation of the machine and an expandable suite of small, independent tools,
each of which did one thing well and which could be strung together to
accomplish more complex and powerful tasks.~{ Some widely admired technical
innovations (many of which were borrowed from Multics) include: the
hierarchical file system, the command shell for interacting with the system;
the decision to treat everything, including external devices, as the same kind
of entity (a file), the "pipe" operator which allowed the output of one tool to
be "piped" as input to another tool, facilitating the easy creation of complex
tasks from simple tools. }~ With the help of Joseph Ossana, Douglas McIlroy,
and others, Thompson and Ritchie eventually managed to agitate for a new
PDP-11/20 based not on the technical merits of the UNIX operating system
itself, but on its potential applications, in particular, those of the
text-preparation group, who were interested in developing tools for formatting,
typesetting, and printing, primarily for the purpose of creating patent
applications, which was, for Bell Labs, and for AT&T more generally, obviously
a laudable goal.~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 33-37. }~
={ AT&T +14 ;
   McIlroy, Douglas
}

UNIX was unique for many technical reasons, but also for a specific economic
reason: it was never quite academic and never quite commercial. Martin
Campbell-Kelly notes that UNIX was a "non-proprietary operating system of major
significance."~{ Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the
Hedgehog, 143. }~ Kelly’s use of "non-proprietary" is not surprising, but it is
incorrect. Although business-speak regularly opposed open to proprietary
throughout the 1980s and early 1990s (and UNIX was definitely the former),
Kelly’s slip marks clearly the confusion between software ownership and
software distribution that permeates both popular and academic understandings.
UNIX was indeed proprietary—it was copyrighted and wholly owned by Bell Labs
and in turn by Western Electric ,{[pg 127]}, and AT&T—but it was not exactly
commercialized or marketed by them. Instead, AT&T allowed individuals and
corporations to install UNIX and to create UNIX-like derivatives for very low
licensing fees. Until about 1982, UNIX was licensed to academics very widely
for a very small sum: usually royalty-free with a minimal service charge (from
about $150 to $800).~{ Ritchie’s Web site contains a copy of a 1974 license
(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/licenses.html) and a series of ads that
exemplify the uneasy positioning of UNIX as a commercial product
(http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/unixad.html). According to Don Libes and
Sandy Ressler, "The original licenses were source licenses. . . . [C]ommercial
institutions paid fees on the order of $20,000. If you owned more than one
machine, you had to buy binary licenses for every additional machine [i.e., you
were not allowed to copy the source and install it] you wanted to install UNIX
on. They were fairly pricey at $8000, considering you couldn’t resell them. On
the other hand, educational institutions could buy source licenses for several
hundred dollars—just enough to cover Bell Labs’ administrative overhead and the
cost of the tapes" (Life with UNIX, 20-21). }~ The conditions of this license
allowed researchers to do what they liked with the software so long as they
kept it secret: they could not distribute or use it outside of their university
labs (or use it to create any commercial product or process), nor publish any
part of it. As a result, throughout the 1970s UNIX was developed both by
Thompson and Ritchie inside Bell Labs and by users around the world in a
relatively informal manner. Bell Labs followed such a liberal policy both
because it was one of a small handful of industry-academic research and
development centers and because AT&T was a government monopoly that provided
phone service to the country and was therefore forbidden to directly enter the
computer software market.~{ According to Salus, this licensing practice was
also a direct result of Judge Thomas Meaney’s 1956 antitrust consent decree
which required AT&T to reveal and to license its patents for nominal fees (A
Quarter Century of UNIX, 56); see also Brock, The Second Information
Revolution, 116-20. }~
={ AT&T :
     Bell Laboratories +13 ;
   licensing, of UNIX +6 ;
   proprietary systems :
     open vs. ;
   monopoly
}

Being on the border of business and academia meant that UNIX was, on the one
hand, shielded from the demands of management and markets, allowing it to
achieve the conceptual integrity that made it so appealing to designers and
academics. On the other, it also meant that AT&T treated it as a potential
product in the emerging software industry, which included new legal questions
from a changing intellectual-property regime, novel forms of marketing and
distribution, and new methods of developing, supporting, and distributing
software.

Despite this borderline status, UNIX was a phenomenal success. The reasons why
UNIX was so popular are manifold; it was widely admired aesthetically, for its
size, and for its clever design and tools. But the fact that it spread so
widely and quickly is testament also to the existing community of eager
computer scientists and engineers (and a few amateurs) onto which it was
bootstrapped, users for whom a powerful, flexible, low-cost, modifiable, and
fast operating system was a revelation of sorts. It was an obvious alternative
to the complex, poorly documented, buggy operating systems that routinely
shipped standard with the machines that universities and research organizations
purchased. "It worked," in other words.

A key feature of the popularity of UNIX was the inclusion of the source code.
When Bell Labs licensed UNIX, they usually provided a tape that contained the
documentation (i.e., documentation that ,{[pg 128]}, was part of the system,
not a paper technical manual external to it), a binary version of the software,
and the source code for the software. The practice of distributing the source
code encouraged people to maintain it, extend it, document it—and to contribute
those changes to Thompson and Ritchie as well. By doing so, users developed an
interest in maintaining and supporting the project precisely because it gave
them an opportunity and the tools to use their computer creatively and
flexibly. Such a globally distributed community of users organized primarily by
their interest in maintaining an operating system is a precursor to the
recursive public, albeit confined to the world of computer scientists and
researchers with access to still relatively expensive machines. As such, UNIX
was not only a widely shared piece of quasi-commercial software (i.e.,
distributed in some form other than through a price-based retail market), but
also the first to systematically include the source code as part of that
distribution as well, thus appealing more to academics and engineers.~{ Even in
computer science, source code was rarely formally shared, and more likely
presented in the form of theorems and proofs, or in various idealized
higher-level languages such as Donald Knuth’s MIX language for presenting
algorithms (Knuth, The Art of Computer Programming). Snippets of actual source
code are much more likely to be found in printed form in handbooks, manuals,
how-to guides, and other professional publications aimed at training
programmers. }~
={ recursive public :
     precursors of
}

Throughout the 1970s, the low licensing fees, the inclusion of the source code,
and its conceptual integrity meant that UNIX was ported to a remarkable number
of other machines. In many ways, academics found it just as appealing, if not
more, to be involved in the creation and improvement of a cutting-edge system
by licensing and porting the software themselves, rather than by having it
provided to them, without the source code, by a company. Peter Salus, for
instance, suggests that people experienced the lack of support from Bell Labs
as a kind of spur to develop and share their own fixes. The means by which
source code was shared, and the norms and practices of sharing, porting,
forking, and modifying source code were developed in this period as part of the
development of UNIX itself—the technical design of the system facilitates and
in some cases mirrors the norms and practices of sharing that developed:
operating systems and social systems.~{ The simultaneous development of the
operating system and the norms for creating, sharing, documenting, and
extending it are often referred to as the "UNIX philosophy." It includes the
central idea that one should build on the ideas (software) of others (see
Gancarz, The Unix Philosophy and Linux and the UNIX Philosophy). See also
Raymond, The Art of UNIX Programming. }~
={ Salus, Peter +6 }

2~ Sharing UNIX

Over the course of 1974-77 the spread and porting of UNIX was phenomenal for an
operating system that had no formal system of distribution and no official
support from the company that owned it, and that evolved in a piecemeal way
through the contributions ,{[pg 129]}, of people from around the world. By
1975, a user’s group had developed: USENIX.~{ Bell Labs threatened the nascent
UNIX NEWS newsletter with trademark infringement, so "USENIX" was a concession
that harkened back to the original USE users’ group for DEC machines, but
avoided explicitly using the name UNIX. Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 9.
}~ UNIX had spread to Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan, and a number of new
tools and applications were being both independently circulated and,
significantly, included in the frequent releases by Bell Labs itself. All
during this time, AT&T’s licensing department sought to find a balance between
allowing this circulation and innovation to continue, and attempting to
maintain trade-secret status for the software. UNIX was, by 1980, without a
doubt the most widely and deeply understood trade secret in computing history.
={ Free Software :
     passim ;
   software tools +2 ;
   trade secret law ;
   Usenix (user group)
}

The manner in which the circulation of and contribution to UNIX occurred is not
well documented, but it includes both technical and pedagogical forms of
sharing. On the technical side, distribution took a number of forms, both in
resistance to AT&T’s attempts to control it and facilitated by its unusually
liberal licensing of the software. On the pedagogical side, UNIX quickly became
a paradigmatic object for computer-science students precisely because it was a
working operating system that included the source code and that was simple
enough to explore in a semester or two.
={ sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     pedagogical aspects
}

In A Quarter Century of UNIX Salus provides a couple of key stories (from Ken
Thompson and Lou Katz) about how exactly the technical sharing of UNIX worked,
how sharing, porting, and forking can be distinguished, and how it was neither
strictly legal nor deliberately illegal in this context. First, from Ken
Thompson: "The first thing to realize is that the outside world ran on releases
of UNIX (V4, V5, V6, V7) but we did not. Our view was a continuum. V5 was what
we had at some point in time and was probably out of date simply by the
activity required to put it in shape to export. After V6, I was preparing to go
to Berkeley to teach for a year. I was putting together a system to take. Since
it was almost a release, I made a diff with V6 [a tape containing only the
differences between the last release and the one Ken was taking with him]. On
the way to Berkeley I stopped by Urbana-Champaign to keep an eye on Greg
Chesson. . . . I left the diff tape there and I told him that I wouldn’t mind
if it got around."~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of Unix, 138. }~
={ diff (software tool) +2 ;
   Katz, Lou +3 ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     legal aspects +4 | technical aspects +5
}

The need for a magnetic tape to "get around" marks the difference between the
1970s and the present: the distribution of software involved both the material
transport of media and the digital copying of information. The desire to
distribute bug fixes (the "diff " tape) resonates with the future emergence of
Free Software: the ,{[pg 130]}, fact that others had fixed problems and
contributed them back to Thompson and Ritchie produced an obligation to see
that the fixes were shared as widely as possible, so that they in turn might be
ported to new machines. Bell Labs, on the other hand, would have seen this
through the lens of software development, requiring a new release, contract
renegotiation, and a new license fee for a new version. Thompson’s notion of a
"continuum," rather than a series of releases also marks the difference between
the idea of an evolving common set of objects stewarded by multiple people in
far-flung locales and the idea of a shrink-wrapped "productized" software
package that was gaining ascendance as an economic commodity at the same time.
When Thompson says "the outside world," he is referring not only to people
outside of Bell Labs but to the way the world was seen from within Bell Labs by
the lawyers and marketers who would create a new version. For the lawyers, the
circulation of source code was a problem because it needed to be stabilized,
not so much for commercial reasons as for legal ones—one license for one piece
of software. Distributing updates, fixes, and especially new tools and
additions written by people who were not employed by Bell Labs scrambled the
legal clarity even while it strengthened the technical quality. Lou Katz makes
this explicit.

_1 A large number of bug fixes was collected, and rather than issue them one at
a time, a collection tape ("the 50 fixes") was put together by Ken [the same
"diff tape," presumably]. Some of the fixes were quite important, though I
don’t remember any in particular. I suspect that a significant fraction of the
fixes were actually done by non-Bell people. Ken tried to send it out, but the
lawyers kept stalling and stalling and stalling. Finally, in complete disgust,
someone "found a tape on Mountain Avenue" [the location of Bell Labs] which had
the fixes. When the lawyers found out about it, they called every licensee and
threatened them with dire consequences if they didn’t destroy the tape, after
trying to find out how they got the tape. I would guess that no one would
actually tell them how they came by the tape (I didn’t).~{ Ibid., emphasis
added. }~

Distributing the fixes involved not just a power struggle between the engineers
and management, but was in fact clearly motivated by the fact that, as Katz
says, "a significant fraction of the fixes were done by non-Bell people." This
meant two things: first, that there was an obvious incentive to return the
updated system to these ,{[pg 131]}, people and to others; second, that it was
not obvious that AT&T actually owned or could claim rights over these fixes—or,
if they did, they needed to cover their legal tracks, which perhaps in part
explains the stalling and threatening of the lawyers, who may have been buying
time to make a "legal" version, with the proper permissions.

The struggle should be seen not as one between the rebel forces of UNIX
development and the evil empire of lawyers and managers, but as a struggle
between two modes of stabilizing the object known as UNIX. For the lawyers,
stability implied finding ways to make UNIX look like a product that would meet
the existing legal framework and the peculiar demands of being a regulated
monopoly unable to freely compete with other computer manufacturers; the
ownership of bits and pieces, ideas and contributions had to be strictly
accountable. For the programmers, stability came through redistributing the
most up-to-date operating system and sharing all innovations with all users so
that new innovations might also be portable. The lawyers saw urgency in making
UNIX legally stable; the engineers saw urgency in making UNIX technically
stable and compatible with itself, that is, to prevent the forking of UNIX, the
death knell for portability. The tension between achieving legal stability of
the object and promoting its technical portability and stability is one that
has repeated throughout the life of UNIX and its derivatives—and that has
ramifications in other areas as well.
={ ontology :
     of UNIX operating system +2
}

The identity and boundaries of UNIX were thus intricately formed through its
sharing and distribution. Sharing produced its own form of moral and technical
order. Troubling questions emerged immediately: were the versions that had been
fixed, extended, and expanded still UNIX, and hence still under the control of
AT&T? Or were the differences great enough that something else (not-UNIX) was
emerging? If a tape full of fixes, contributed by non-Bell employees, was
circulated to people who had licensed UNIX, and those fixes changed the system,
was it still UNIX? Was it still UNIX in a legal sense or in a technical sense
or both? While these questions might seem relatively scholastic, the history of
the development of UNIX suggests something far more interesting: just about
every possible modification has been made, legally and technically, but the
concept of UNIX has remained remarkably stable.
={ moral and technical order }

% ,{[pg 132]},

2~ Porting UNIX

Technical portability accounts for only part of UNIX’s success. As a
pedagogical resource, UNIX quickly became an indispensable tool for academics
around the world. As it was installed and improved, it was taught and learned.
The fact that UNIX spread first to university computer-science departments, and
not to businesses, government, or nongovernmental organizations, meant that it
also became part of the core pedagogical practice of a generation of
programmers and computer scientists; over the course of the 1970s and 1980s,
UNIX came to exemplify the very concept of an operating system, especially
time-shared, multi-user operating systems. Two stories describe the porting of
UNIX from machines to minds and illustrate the practice as it developed and how
it intersected with the technical and legal attempts to stabilize UNIX as an
object: the story of John Lions’s Commentary on Unix 6th Edition and the story
of Andrew Tanenbaum’s Minix.
={ Lions, John +10 ;
   Tanenbaum, Andrew +1 ;
   UNIX philosophy +1
}

The development of a pedagogical UNIX lent a new stability to the concept of
UNIX as opposed to its stability as a body of source code or as a legal entity.
The porting of UNIX was so successful that even in cases where a ported version
of UNIX shares none of the same source code as the original, it is still
considered UNIX. The monstrous and promiscuous nature of UNIX is most clear in
the stories of Lions and Tanenbaum, especially when contrasted with the
commercial, legal, and technical integrity of something like Microsoft Windows,
which generally exists in only a small number of forms (NT, ME, XP, 95, 98,
etc.), possessing carefully controlled source code, immured in legal
protection, and distributed only through sales and service packs to customers
or personal-computer manufacturers. While Windows is much more widely used than
UNIX, it is far from having become a paradigmatic pedagogical object; its
integrity is predominantly legal, not technical or pedagogical. Or, in
pedagogical terms, Windows is to fish as UNIX is to fishing lessons.
={ Microsoft :
     Windows operating system ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     pedagogical aspects +9 ;
   UNIX operating system :
     Windows operating system vs.
}

Lions’s Commentary is also known as "the most photocopied document in computer
science." Lions was a researcher and senior lecturer at the University of New
South Wales in the early 1970s; after reading the first paper by Ritchie and
Thompson on UNIX, he convinced his colleagues to purchase a license from
AT&T.~{ Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, "The Unix Operating System," Bell
Systems Technical Journal (1974). }~ Lions, like many researchers, was
impressed by the quality of the system, and he was, like all of the UNIX users
of that period, intimately ,{[pg 133]}, familiar with the UNIX source code—a
necessity in order to install, run, or repair it. Lions began using the system
to teach his classes on operating systems, and in the course of doing so he
produced a textbook of sorts, which consisted of the entire source code of UNIX
version 6 (V6), along with elaborate, line-by-line commentary and explanation.
The value of this textbook can hardly be underestimated. Access to machines and
software that could be used to understand how a real system worked was very
limited: "Real computers with real operating systems were locked up in machine
rooms and committed to processing twenty four hours a day. UNIX changed
that."~{ Greg Rose, quoted in Lions, Commentary, n.p. }~ Berny Goodheart, in an
appreciation of Lions’s Commentary, reiterated this sense of the practical
usefulness of the source code and commentary: "It is important to understand
the significance of John’s work at that time: for students studying computer
science in the 1970s, complex issues such as process scheduling, security,
synchronization, file systems and other concepts were beyond normal
comprehension and were extremely difficult to teach—there simply wasn’t
anything available with enough accessibility for students to use as a case
study. Instead a student’s discipline in computer science was earned by
punching holes in cards, collecting fan-fold paper printouts, and so on.
Basically, a computer operating system in that era was considered to be a huge
chunk of inaccessible proprietary code."~{ Lions, Commentary, n.p. }~
={ intellectual property +3 }

Lions’s commentary was a unique document in the world of computer science,
containing a kind of key to learning about a central component of the computer,
one that very few people would have had access to in the 1970s. It shows how
UNIX was ported not only to machines (which were scarce) but also to the minds
of young researchers and student programmers (which were plentiful). Several
generations of both academic computer scientists and students who went on to
work for computer or software corporations were trained on photocopies of UNIX
source code, with a whiff of toner and illicit circulation: a distributed
operating system in the textual sense.

Unfortunately, Commentary was also legally restricted in its distribution. AT&T
and Western Electric, in hopes that they could maintain trade-secret status for
UNIX, allowed only very limited circulation of the book. At first, Lions was
given permission to distribute single copies only to people who already
possessed a license for UNIX V6; later Bell Labs itself would distribute
Commentary ,{[pg 134]}, briefly, but only to licensed users, and not for sale,
distribution, or copying. Nonetheless, nearly everyone seems to have possessed
a dog-eared, nth-generation copy. Peter Reintjes writes, "We soon came into
possession of what looked like a fifth generation photocopy and someone who
shall remain nameless spent all night in the copier room spawning a sixth, an
act expressly forbidden by a carefully worded disclaimer on the first page.
Four remarkable things were happening at the same time. One, we had discovered
the first piece of software that would inspire rather than annoy us; two, we
had acquired what amounted to a literary criticism of that computer software;
three, we were making the single most significant advancement of our education
in computer science by actually reading an entire operating system; and four,
we were breaking the law."~{ Ibid. }~
={ trade secret law +1 }

Thus, these generations of computer-science students and academics shared a
secret—a trade secret become open secret. Every student who learned the
essentials of the UNIX operating system from a photocopy of Lions’s commentary,
also learned about AT&T’s attempt to control its legal distribution on the
front cover of their textbook. The parallel development of photocopying has a
nice resonance here; together with home cassette taping of music and the
introduction of the video-cassette recorder, photocopying helped drive the
changes to copyright law adopted in 1976.
={ copyright :
     changes in 1976
}

Thirty years later, and long after the source code in it had been completely
replaced, Lions’s Commentary is still widely admired by geeks. Even though Free
Software has come full circle in providing students with an actual operating
system that can be legally studied, taught, copied, and implemented, the kind
of "literary criticism" that Lions’s work represents is still extremely rare;
even reading obsolete code with clear commentary is one of the few ways to
truly understand the design elements and clever implementations that made the
UNIX operating system so different from its predecessors and even many of its
successors, few, if any of which have been so successfully ported to the minds
of so many students.
={ design +2 }

Lions’s Commentary contributed to the creation of a worldwide community of
people whose connection to each other was formed by a body of source code, both
in its implemented form and in its textual, photocopied form. This nascent
recursive public not only understood itself as belonging to a technical elite
which was constituted by its creation, understanding, and promotion of a
particular ,{[pg 135]}, technical tool, but also recognized itself as "breaking
the law," a community constituted in opposition to forms of power that governed
the circulation, distribution, modification, and creation of the very tools
they were learning to make as part of their vocation. The material connection
shared around the world by UNIX-loving geeks to their source code is not a mere
technical experience, but a social and legal one as well.
={ recursive public +6 }

Lions was not the only researcher to recognize that teaching the source code
was the swiftest route to comprehension. The other story of the circulation of
source code concerns Andrew Tanenbaum, a well-respected computer scientist and
an author of standard textbooks on computer architecture, operating systems,
and networking.~{ Tanenbaum’s two most famous textbooks are Operating Systems
and Computer Networks, which have seen three and four editions respectively. }~
In the 1970s Tanenbaum had also used UNIX as a teaching tool in classes at the
Vrije Universiteit, in Amsterdam. Because the source code was distributed with
the binary code, he could have his students explore directly the
implementations of the system, and he often used the source code and the Lions
book in his classes. But, according to his Operating Systems: Design and
Implementation (1987), "When AT&T released Version 7 [ca. 1979], it began to
realize that UNIX was a valuable commercial product, so it issued Version 7
with a license that prohibited the source code from being studied in courses,
in order to avoid endangering its status as a trade secret. Many universities
complied by simply dropping the study of UNIX, and teaching only theory" (13).
For Tanenbaum, this was an unacceptable alternative—but so, apparently, was
continuing to break the law by teaching UNIX in his courses. And so he
proceeded to create a completely new UNIX-like operating system that used not a
single line of AT&T source code. He called his creation Minix. It was a
stripped-down version intended to run on personal computers (IBM PCs), and to
be distributed along with the textbook Operating Systems, published by Prentice
Hall.~{ Tanenbaum was not the only person to follow this route. The other
acknowledged giant in the computer-science textbook world, Douglas Comer,
created Xinu and Xinu-PC (UNIX spelled backwards) in Operating Systems Design
in 1984. }~
={ Minix (operating system) +2 ;
   Tanenbaum, Andrew :
     Minix and +5 ;
   textbooks :
     on operating systems and networks +1 ;
   UNIX operating system :
     as commercial product
}

Minix became as widely used in the 1980s as a teaching tool as Lions’s source
code had been in the 1970s. According to Tanenbaum, the Usenet group
comp.os.minix had reached 40,000 members by the late 1980s, and he was
receiving constant suggestions for changes and improvements to the operating
system. His own commitment to teaching meant that he incorporated few of these
suggestions, an effort to keep the system simple enough to be printed in a
textbook and understood by undergraduates. Minix ,{[pg 136]}, was freely
available as source code, and it was a fully functioning operating system, even
a potential alternative to UNIX that would run on a personal computer. Here was
a clear example of the conceptual integrity of UNIX being communicated to
another generation of computer-science students: Tanenbaum’s textbook is not
called "UNIX Operating Systems"—it is called Operating Systems. The clear
implication is that UNIX represented the clearest example of the principles
that should guide the creation of any operating system: it was, for all intents
and purposes, state of the art even twenty years after it was first conceived.
={ ontology :
     of UNIX operating system
}

Minix was not commercial software, but nor was it Free Software. It was
copyrighted and controlled by Tanenbaum’s publisher, Prentice Hall. Because it
used no AT&T source code, Minix was also legally independent, a legal object of
its own. The fact that it was intended to be legally distinct from, yet
conceptually true to UNIX is a clear indication of the kinds of tensions that
govern the creation and sharing of source code. The ironic apotheosis of Minix
as the pedagogical gold standard for studying UNIX came in 1991-92, when a
young Linus Torvalds created a "fork" of Minix, also rewritten from scratch,
that would go on to become the paradigmatic piece of Free Software: Linux.
Tanenbaum’s purpose for Minix was that it remain a pedagogically useful
operating system—small, concise, and illustrative—whereas Torvalds wanted to
extend and expand his version of Minix to take full advantage of the kinds of
hardware being produced in the 1990s. Both, however, were committed to
source-code visibility and sharing as the swiftest route to complete
comprehension of operating-systems principles.
={ Linux (Free Software project) :
     origins in Minix
}

2~ Forking UNIX
={ forking +13 }

Tanenbaum’s need to produce Minix was driven by a desire to share the source
code of UNIX with students, a desire AT&T was manifestly uncomfortable with and
which threatened the trade-secret status of their property. The fact that Minix
might be called a fork of UNIX is a key aspect of the political economy of
operating systems and social systems. Forking generally refers to the creation
of new, modified source code from an original base of source code, resulting in
two distinct programs with the same parent. Whereas the modification of an
engine results only in a modified engine, the ,{[pg 137]}, modification of
source code implies differentiation and reproduction, because of the ease with
which it can be copied.
={ Minix (operating system) +1 ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) +15 ;
   trade secret law +1
}

How could Minix—a complete rewrite—still be considered the same object?
Considered solely from the perspective of trade-secret law, the two objects
were distinct, though from the perspective of copyright there was perhaps a
case for infringement, although AT&T did not rely on copyright as much as on
trade secret. From a technical perspective, the functions and processes that
the software accomplishes are the same, but the means by which they are coded
to do so are different. And from a pedagogical standpoint, the two are
identical—they exemplify certain core features of an operating system
(file-system structure, memory paging, process management)—all the rest is
optimization, or bells and whistles. Understanding the nature of forking
requires also that UNIX be understood from a social perspective, that is, from
the perspective of an operating system created and modified by user-developers
around the world according to particular and partial demands. It forms the
basis for the emergence of a robust recursive public.

One of the more important instances of the forking of UNIX’s perambulatory
source code and the developing community of UNIX co-developers is the story of
the Berkeley Software Distribution and its incorporation of the TCP/IP
protocols. In 1975 Ken Thompson took a sabbatical in his hometown of Berkeley,
California, where he helped members of the computer-science department with
their installations of UNIX, arriving with V6 and the "50 bug fixes" diff tape.
Ken had begun work on a compiler for the Pascal programming language that would
run on UNIX, and this work was taken up by two young graduate students: Bill
Joy and Chuck Hartley. (Joy would later co-found Sun Microsystems, one of the
most successful UNIX-based workstation companies in the history of the
industry.)
={ diff (software tool) ;
   Joy, Bill +9 ;
   Sun Microsystems ;
   Thompson, Ken +1 ;
   Pascal (programming language) +2 ;
   protocols :
     distinguished from standards and implementation ;
   Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) :
     TCP/IP +6 ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) :
     included in BSD +6
}

Joy, above nearly all others, enthusiastically participated in the informal
distribution of source code. With a popular and well-built Pascal system, and a
new text editor called ex (later vi), he created the Berkeley Software
Distribution (BSD), a set of tools that could be used in combination with the
UNIX operating system. They were extensions to the original UNIX operating
system, but not a complete, rewritten version that might replace it. By all
accounts, Joy served as a kind of one-man software-distribution house, making
tapes and posting them, taking orders and cashing checks—all in ,{[pg 138]},
addition to creating software.~{ McKusick, "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix," 32.
}~ UNIX users around the world soon learned of this valuable set of extensions
to the system, and before long, many were differentiating between AT&T UNIX and
BSD UNIX.
={ AT&T :
     version of UNIX +1 ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) +9 ;
   differentiation of software ;
   text editors +1 ;
   UNIX operating system :
     relationship to Arpanet +7 ;
   vi (text editor) +1
}

According to Don Libes, Bell Labs allowed Berkeley to distribute its extensions
to UNIX so long as the recipients also had a license from Bell Labs for the
original UNIX (an arrangement similar to the one that governed Lions’s
Commentary).~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 16-17. }~ From about 1976
until about 1981, BSD slowly became an independent distribution—indeed, a
complete version of UNIX—well-known for the vi editor and the Pascal compiler,
but also for the addition of virtual memory and its implementation on DEC’s VAX
machines.~{ A recent court case between the Utah-based SCO—the current owner of
the legal rights to the original UNIX source code—and IBM raised yet again the
question of how much of the original UNIX source code exists in the BSD
distribution. SCO alleges that IBM (and Linus Torvalds) inserted SCO-owned UNIX
source code into the Linux kernel. However, the incredibly circuitous route of
the "original" source code makes these claims hard to ferret out: it was
developed at Bell Labs, licensed to multiple universities, used as a basis for
BSD, sold to an earlier version of the company SCO (then known as the Santa
Cruz Operation), which created a version called Xenix in cooperation with
Microsoft. See the diagram by Eric Lévénez at http://www.levenez.com/unix/. For
more detail on this case, see www.groklaw.com. }~ It should be clear that the
unusual quasi-commercial status of AT&T’s UNIX allowed for this situation in a
way that a fully commercial computer corporation would never have allowed.
Consider, for instance, the fact that many UNIX users—students at a university,
for instance—could not essentially know whether they were using an AT&T product
or something called BSD UNIX created at Berkeley. The operating system
functioned in the same way and, except for the presence of copyright notices
that occasionally flashed on the screen, did not make any show of asserting its
brand identity (that would come later, in the 1980s). Whereas a commercial
computer manufacturer would have allowed something like BSD only if it were
incorporated into and distributed as a single, marketable, and identifiable
product with a clever name, AT&T turned something of a blind eye to the
proliferation and spread of AT&T UNIX and the result were forks in the project:
distinct bodies of source code, each an instance of something called UNIX.

As BSD developed, it gained different kinds of functionality than the UNIX from
which it was spawned. The most significant development was the inclusion of
code that allowed it to connect computers to the Arpanet, using the TCP/IP
protocols designed by Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. The TCP/IP protocols were a
key feature of the Arpanet, overseen by the Information Processing and
Techniques Office (IPTO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
(DARPA) from its inception in 1967 until about 1977. The goal of the protocols
was to allow different networks, each with its own machines and administrative
boundaries, to be connected to each other.~{ See Vinton G. Cerf and Robert
Kahn, "A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection." For the history, see
Abbate, Inventing the Internet; Norberg and O’Neill, A History of the
Information Techniques Processing Office. Also see chapters 1 and 5 herein for
more detail on the role of these protocols and the RFC process. }~ Although
there is a common heritage—in the form of J. C. R. Licklider—which ties the
imagination of the time-sharing operating ,{[pg 139]}, system to the creation
of the "galactic network," the Arpanet initially developed completely
independent of UNIX.~{ Waldrop, The Dream Machine, chaps. 5 and 6. }~ As a
time-sharing operating system, UNIX was meant to allow the sharing of resources
on a single computer, whether mainframe or minicomputer, but it was not
initially intended to be connected to a network of other computers running
UNIX, as is the case today.~{ The exception being a not unimportant tool called
Unix to Unix Copy Protocol, or uucp, which was widely used to transmit data by
phone and formed the bases for the creation of the Usenet. See Hauben and
Hauben, Netizens. }~ The goal of Arpanet, by contrast, was explicitly to
achieve the sharing of resources located on diverse machines across diverse
networks.
={ Arpanet (network) +7 ;
   Cerf, Vinton ;
   Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) +7 ;
   Kahn, Robert ;
   Licklider, J. C. R.
}

To achieve the benefits of TCP/IP, the resources needed to be implemented in
all of the different operating systems that were connected to the
Arpanet—whatever operating system and machine happened to be in use at each of
the nodes. However, by 1977, the original machines used on the network were
outdated and increasingly difficult to maintain and, according to Kirk
McKusick, the greatest expense was that of porting the old protocol software to
new machines. Hence, IPTO decided to pursue in part a strategy of achieving
coordination at the operating-system level, and they chose UNIX as one of the
core platforms on which to standardize. In short, they had seen the light of
portability. In about 1978 IPTO granted a contract to Bolt, Beranek, and Newman
(BBN), one of the original Arpanet contractors, to integrate the TCP/IP
protocols into the UNIX operating system.
={ Bolt, Beranek, and Newman (BBN) }

But then something odd happened, according to Salus: "An initial prototype was
done by BBN and given to Berkeley. Bill [Joy] immediately started hacking on it
because it would only run an Ethernet at about 56K/sec utilizing 100% of the
CPU on a 750. . . . Bill lobotomized the code and increased its performance to
on the order of 700KB/sec. This caused some consternation with BBN when they
came in with their ‘finished’ version, and Bill wouldn’t accept it. There were
battles for years after, about which version would be in the system. The
Berkeley version ultimately won."~{ Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 161. }~
={ Salus, Peter }

Although it is not clear, it appears BBN intended to give Joy the code in order
to include it in his BSD version of UNIX for distribution, and that Joy and
collaborators intended to cooperate with Rob Gurwitz of BBN on a final
implementation, but Berkeley insisted on "improving" the code to make it
perform more to their needs, and BBN apparently dissented from this.~{ TCP/IP
Digest 1.6 (11 November 1981) contains Joy’s explanation of Berkeley’s
intentions (Message-ID: { anews.aucbvax.5236
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=anews.aucbvax.5236 ). }~ One result of
this scuffle between BSD and BBN was a genuine fork: two bodies of code that
did the same thing, competing with each other to become the standard UNIX
implementation of TCP/IP. Here, then, was a ,{[pg 140]}, case of sharing source
code that led to the creation of different versions of software—sharing without
collaboration. Some sites used the BBN code, some used the Berkeley code.

Forking, however, does not imply permanent divergence, and the continual
improvement, porting, and sharing of software can have odd consequences when
forks occur. On the one hand, there are particular pieces of source code: they
must be identifiable and exact, and prepended with a copyright notice, as was
the case of the Berkeley code, which was famously and vigorously policed by the
University of California regents, who allowed for a very liberal distribution
of BSD code on the condition that the copyright notice was retained. On the
other hand, there are particular named collections of code that work together
(e.g., UNIX™, or DARPA-approved UNIX, or later, Certified Open Source [sm]) and
are often identified by a trademark symbol intended, legally speaking, to
differentiate products, not to assert ownership of particular instances of a
product.
={ BSD License +2 ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) ;
   intellectual property +2 ;
   trademark law
}

The odd consequence is this: Bill Joy’s specific TCP/IP code was incorporated
not only into BSD UNIX, but also into other versions of UNIX, including the
UNIX distributed by AT&T (which had originally licensed UNIX to Berkeley) with
the Berkeley copyright notice removed. This bizarre, tangled bank of licenses
and code resulted in a famous suit and countersuit between AT&T and Berkeley,
in which the intricacies of this situation were sorted out.~{ See Andrew
Leonard, "BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code," Salon, 16 May 2000,
http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/. }~ An
innocent bystander, expecting UNIX to be a single thing, might be surprised to
find that it takes different forms for reasons that are all but impossible to
identify, but the cause of which is clear: different versions of sharing in
conflict with one another; different moral and technical imaginations of order
that result in complex entanglements of value and code.
={ moral and technical order +5 }

The BSD fork of UNIX (and the subfork of TCP/IP) was only one of many to come.
By the early 1980s, a proliferation of UNIX forks had emerged and would be
followed shortly by a very robust commercialization. At the same time, the
circulation of source code started to slow, as corporations began to compete by
adding features and creating hardware specifically designed to run UNIX (such
as the Sun Sparc workstation and the Solaris operating system, the result of
Joy’s commercialization of BSD in the 1980s). The question of how to make all
of these versions work together eventually became the subject of the
open-systems discussions that would dominate the workstation and networking
sectors of the computer ,{[pg 141]}, market from the early 1980s to 1993, when
the dual success of Windows NT and the arrival of the Internet into public
consciousness changed the fortunes of the UNIX industry.
={ Microsoft :
     Windows operating system ;
   Solaris (operating system) ;
   Sparc (computer workstation)
}

A second, and more important, effect of the struggle between BBN and BSD was
simply the widespread adoption of the TCP/IP protocols. An estimated 98 percent
of computer-science departments in the United States and many such departments
around the world incorporated the TCP/IP protocols into their UNIX systems and
gained instant access to Arpanet.~{ Norberg and O’Neill, A History of the
Information Techniques Processing Office, 184-85. They cite Comer,
Internetworking with TCP/IP, 6 for the figure. }~ The fact that this occurred
when it did is important: a few years later, during the era of the
commercialization of UNIX, these protocols might very well not have been widely
implemented (or more likely implemented in incompatible, nonstandard forms) by
manufacturers, whereas before 1983, university computer scientists saw every
benefit in doing so if it meant they could easily connect to the largest single
computer network on the planet. The large, already functioning, relatively
standard implementation of TCP/IP on UNIX (and the ability to look at the
source code) gave these protocols a tremendous advantage in terms of their
survival and success as the basis of a global and singular network.

2~ Conclusion

The UNIX operating system is not just a technical achievement; it is the
creation of a set of norms for sharing source code in an unusual environment:
quasi-commercial, quasi-academic, networked, and planetwide. Sharing UNIX
source code has taken three basic forms: porting source code (transferring it
from one machine to another); teaching source code, or "porting" it to students
in a pedagogical setting where the use of an actual working operating system
vastly facilitates the teaching of theory and concepts; and forking source code
(modifying the existing source code to do something new or different). This
play of proliferation and differentiation is essential to the remarkably stable
identity of UNIX, but that identity exists in multiple forms: technical (as a
functioning, self-compatible operating system), legal (as a
license-circumscribed version subject to intellectual property and commercial
law), and pedagogical (as a conceptual exemplar, the paradigm of an operating
system). Source code shared in this manner is essentially unlike any other kind
of ,{[pg 142]}, source code in the world of computers, whether academic or
commercial. It raises troubling questions about standardization, about control
and audit, and about legitimacy that haunts not only UNIX but the Internet and
its various "open" protocols as well.
={ differentiation of software +1 ;
   ontology :
     of UNIX operating system +1 ;
   pedagogy :
     operating systems and +1 ;
   proliferation of software +1 ;
   openness (component of Free Software) ;
   standards processes
}

Sharing source code in Free Software looks the way it does today because of
UNIX. But UNIX looks the way it does not because of the inventive genius of
Thompson and Ritchie, or the marketing and management brilliance of AT&T, but
because sharing produces its own kind of order: operating systems and social
systems. The fact that geeks are wont to speak of "the UNIX philosophy" means
that UNIX is not just an operating system but a way of organizing the complex
relations of life and work through technical means; a way of charting and
breaching the boundaries between the academic, the aesthetic, and the
commercial; a way of implementing ideas of a moral and technical order. What’s
more, as source code comes to include more and more of the activities of
everyday communication and creation—as it comes to replace writing and
supplement thinking—the genealogy of its portability and the history of its
forking will illuminate the kinds of order emerging in practices and
technologies far removed from operating systems—but tied intimately to the UNIX
philosophy.
={ Ritchie, Dennis ;
   Thompson, Ken ;
   UNIX philosophy
}

1~ 5. Conceiving Open Systems
={ Open Systems +99 ;
   openness (component of Free Software) +28
}

% ,{[pg 143]},

_1 The great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.~{
Quoted in Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 67, and also in Critchley and
Batty, Open Systems, 17. I first heard it in an interview with Sean Doyle in
1998. }~
={ standards +2 }

Openness is an unruly concept. While free tends toward ambiguity (free as in
speech, or free as in beer?), open tends toward obfuscation. Everyone claims to
be open, everyone has something to share, everyone agrees that being open is
the obvious thing to do—after all, openness is the other half of "open
source"—but for all its obviousness, being "open" is perhaps the most complex
component of Free Software. It is never quite clear whether being open is a
means or an end. Worse, the opposite of open in this case (specifically, "open
systems") is not closed, but "proprietary"—signaling the complicated
imbrication of the technical, the legal, and the commercial.
={ proprietary systems :
     open vs. +2
}

In this chapter I tell the story of the contest over the meaning of "open
systems" from 1980 to 1993, a contest to create a simultaneously moral and
technical infrastructure within the computer ,{[pg 144]}, industry.~{ Moral in
this usage signals the "moral and social order" I explored through the concept
of social imaginaries in chapter 1. Or, in the Scottish Enlightenment sense of
Adam Smith, it points to the right organization and relations of exchange among
humans. }~ The infrastructure in question includes technical components—the
UNIX operating system and the TCP/IP protocols of the Internet as open
systems—but it also includes "moral" components, including the demand for
structures of fair and open competition, antimonopoly and open markets, and
open-standards processes for high-tech networked computers and software in the
1980s.~{ There is, of course, a relatively robust discourse of open systems in
biology, sociology, systems theory, and cybernetics; however, that meaning of
open systems is more or less completely distinct from what openness and open
systems came to mean in the computer industry in the period book-ended by the
arrivals of the personal computer and the explosion of the Internet (ca.
1980-93). One relevant overlap between these two meanings can be found in the
work of Carl Hewitt at the MIT Media Lab and in the interest in "agorics" taken
by K. Eric Drexler, Bernardo Huberman, and Mark S. Miller. See Huberman, The
Ecology of Computation. }~ By moral, I mean imaginations of the proper order of
collective political and commercial action; referring to much more than simply
how individuals should act, moral signifies a vision of how economy and society
should be ordered collectively.
={ infrastructure ;
   moral and technical order +3 ;
   monopoly +1 ;
}

The open-systems story is also a story of the blind spot of open systems—in
that blind spot is intellectual property. The story reveals a tension between
incompatible moral-technical orders: on the one hand, the promise of multiple
manufacturers and corporations creating interoperable components and selling
them in an open, heterogeneous market; on the other, an intellectual-property
system that encouraged jealous guarding and secrecy, and granted monopoly
status to source code, designs, and ideas in order to differentiate products
and promote competition. The tension proved irresolvable: without shared source
code, for instance, interoperable operating systems are impossible. Without
interoperable operating systems, internetworking and portable applications are
impossible. Without portable applications that can run on any system, open
markets are impossible. Without open markets, monopoly power reigns.
={ intellectual property ;
   interoperability +21 ;
   openness (component of Free Software) :
     intellectual property and
}

Standardization was at the heart of the contest, but by whom and by what means
was never resolved. The dream of open systems, pursued in an entirely
unregulated industry, resulted in a complicated experiment in novel forms of
standardization and cooperation. The creation of a "standard" operating system
based on UNIX is the story of a failure, a kind of "figuring out" gone haywire,
which resulted in huge consortia of computer manufacturers attempting to work
together and compete with each other at the same time. Meanwhile, the
successful creation of a "standard" networking protocol—known as the Open
Systems Interconnection Reference Model (OSI)—is a story of failure that hides
a larger success; OSI was eclipsed in the same period by the rapid and ad hoc
adoption of the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), which
used a radically different standardization process and which succeeded for a
number of surprising reasons, allowing the Internet ,{[pg 145]}, to take the
form it did in the 1990s and ultimately exemplifying the moral-technical
imaginary of a recursive public—and one at the heart of the practices of Free
Software.
={ figuring out ;
   Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) :
     as reference model ;
   Openness (component of Free Software) :
     standardization and ;
   protocols :
     Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) | TCP/IP ;
   standards organizations ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol)
}

The conceiving of openness, which is the central plot of these two stories, has
become an essential component of the contemporary practice and power of Free
Software. These early battles created a kind of widespread readiness for Free
Software in the 1990s, a recognition of Free Software as a removal of open
systems’ blind spot, as much as an exploitation of its power. The geek ideal of
openness and a moral-technical order (the one that made Napster so significant
an event) was forged in the era of open systems; without this concrete
historical conception of how to maintain openness in technical and moral terms,
the recursive public of geeks would be just another hierarchical closed
organization—a corporation manqué—and not an independent public serving as a
check on the kinds of destructive power that dominated the open-systems
contest.
={ Napster }

2~ Hopelessly Plural

Big iron, silos, legacy systems, turnkey systems, dinosaurs, mainframes: with
the benefit of hindsight, the computer industry of the 1960s to the 1980s
appears to be backward and closed, to have literally painted itself into a
corner, as an early Intel advertisement suggests (figure 3). Contemporary
observers who show disgust and impatience with the form that computers took in
this era are without fail supporters of open systems and opponents of
proprietary systems that "lock in" customers to specific vendors and create
artificial demands for support, integration, and management of resources. Open
systems (were it allowed to flourish) would solve all these problems.
={ Intel (corporation) +2 ;
   proprietary systems :
     lock-in and ;
   mainframes +4
}

Given the promise of a "general-purpose computer," it should seem ironic at
best that open systems needed to be created. But the general-purpose computer
never came into being. We do not live in the world of The Computer, but in a
world of computers: myriad, incompatible, specific machines. The design of
specialized machines (or "architectures") was, and still is, key to a
competitive industry in computers. It required CPUs and components and
associated software that could be clearly qualified and marketed ,{[pg 146]},
,{[pg 147]}, as distinct products: the DEC PDP-11 or the IBM 360 or the CDC
6600. On the Fordist model of automobile production, the computer industry’s
mission was to render desired functions (scientific calculation, bookkeeping,
reservations management) in a large box with a button on it (or a very large
number of buttons on increasingly smaller boxes). Despite the theoretical
possibility, such computers were not designed to do anything, but, rather, to
do specific kinds of calculations exceedingly well. They were objects
customized to particular markets.
={ Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) +1 ;
   International Business Machines (IBM) +1
}

{ 2bits_05_03-100.png }image ~[* Open systems is the solution to painting yourself into a corner. Intel advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 30 May 1984. ]~

% image placed under paragraph

The marketing strategy was therefore extremely stable from about 1955 to about
1980: identify customers with computing needs, build a computer to serve them,
provide them with all of the equipment, software, support, or peripherals they
need to do the job—and charge a large amount. Organizationally speaking, it was
an industry dominated by "IBM and the seven dwarfs": Hewlett-Packard,
Honeywell, Control Data, General Electric, NCR, RCA, Univac, and Burroughs,
with a few upstarts like DEC in the wings.

By the 1980s, however, a certain inversion had happened. Computers had become
smaller and faster; there were more and more of them, and it was becoming
increasingly clear to the "big iron" manufacturers that what was most valuable
to users was the information they generated, not the machines that did the
generating. Such a realization, so the story goes, leads to a demand for
interchangeability, interoperability, information sharing, and networking. It
also presents the nightmarish problems of conversion between a bewildering,
heterogeneous, and rapidly growing array of hardware, software, protocols, and
systems. As one conference paper on the subject of evaluating open systems put
it, "At some point a large enterprise will look around and see a huge amount of
equipment and software that will not work together. Most importantly, the
information stored on these diverse platforms is not being shared, leading to
unnecessary duplication and lost profit."~{ Keves, "Open Systems Formal
Evaluation Process," 87. }~
={ microcomputers +2 }

Open systems emerged in the 1980s as the name of the solution to this problem:
an approach to the design of systems that, if all participants were to adopt
it, would lead to widely interoperable, integrated machines that could send,
store, process, and receive the user’s information. In marketing and
public-relations terms, it would provide "seamless integration."
={ standards :
     as form of competition +1
}

In theory, open systems was simply a question of standards adoption. For
instance, if all the manufacturers of UNIX systems could ,{[pg 148]}, be
convinced to adopt the same basic standard for the operating system, then
seamless integration would naturally follow as all the various applications
could be written once to run on any variant UNIX system, regardless of which
company made it. In reality, such a standard was far from obvious, difficult to
create, and even more difficult to enforce. As such, the meaning of open
systems was "hopelessly plural," and the term came to mean an incredibly
diverse array of things.

"Openness" is precisely the kind of concept that wavers between end and means.
Is openness good in itself, or is openness a means to achieve something
else—and if so what? Who wants to achieve openness, and for what purpose? Is
openness a goal? Or is it a means by which a different goal—say,
"interoperability" or "integration"—is achieved? Whose goals are these, and who
sets them? Are the goals of corporations different from or at odds with the
goals of university researchers or government officials? Are there large
central visions to which the activities of all are ultimately subordinate?
={ openness (component of Free Software) :
     goals of
}

Between 1980 and 1993, no person or company or computer industry consortium
explicitly set openness as the goal that organizations, corporations, or
programmers should aim at, but, by the same token, hardly anyone dissented from
the demand for openness. As such, it appears clearly as a kind of cultural
imperative, reflecting a longstanding social imaginary with roots in liberal
democratic notions, versions of a free market and ideals of the free exchange
of knowledge, but confronting changed technical conditions that bring the moral
ideas of order into relief, and into question.
={ social imaginary }

In the 1980s everyone seemed to want some kind of openness, whether among
manufacturers or customers, from General Motors to the armed forces.~{ General
Motors stirred strong interest in open systems by creating, in 1985, its
Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP), which was built on UNIX. At the time,
General Motors was the second-largest purchaser of computer equipment after the
government. The Department of Defense and the U.S. Air Force also adopted and
required POSIX-compliant UNIX systems early on. }~ The debates, both rhetorical
and technical, about the meaning of open systems have produced a slough of
writings, largely directed at corporate IT managers and CIOs. For instance,
Terry A. Critchley and K. C. Batty, the authors of Open Systems: The Reality
(1993), claim to have collected over a hundred definitions of open systems. The
definitions stress different aspects—from interoperability of heterogeneous
machines, to compatibility of different applications, to portability of
operating systems, to legitimate standards with open-interface
definitions—including those that privilege ideologies of a free market, as does
Bill Gates’s definition: "There’s nothing more open than the PC market. . . .
[U]sers can choose the latest and greatest software." The range ,{[pg 149]}, of
meanings was huge and oriented along multiple axes: what, to whom, how, and so
on. Open systems could mean that source code was open to view or that only the
specifications or interfaces were; it could mean "available to certain third
parties" or "available to everyone, including competitors"; it could mean
self-publishing, well-defined interfaces and application programming interfaces
(APIs), or it could mean sticking to standards set by governments and
professional societies. To cynics, it simply meant that the marketing
department liked the word open and used it a lot.
={ General Motors (GM) }

One part of the definition, however, was both consistent and extremely
important: the opposite of an "open system" was not a "closed system" but a
"proprietary system." In industries other than networking and computing the
word proprietary will most likely have a positive valence, as in "our exclusive
proprietary technology." But in the context of computers and networks such a
usage became anathema in the 1980s and 1990s; what customers reportedly wanted
was a system that worked nicely with other systems, and that system had to be
by definition open since no single company could provide all of the possible
needs of a modern business or government agency. And even if it could, it
shouldn’t be allowed to. For instance, "In the beginning was the word and the
word was ‘proprietary.’ IBM showed the way, purveying machines that existed in
splendid isolation. They could not be operated using programs written for any
other computer; they could not communicate with the machines of competitors. If
your company started out buying computers of various sizes from the
International Business Machines Corporation because it was the biggest and
best, you soon found yourself locked as securely to Big Blue as a manacled
wretch in a medieval dungeon. When an IBM rival unveiled a technologically
advanced product, you could only sigh; it might be years before the new
technology showed up in the IBM line."~{ Paul Fusco, "The Gospel According to
Joy," New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28. }~
={ Joy, Bill +1 ;
   Openness (component of Free Software) :
     proprietary vs. +2 ;
   openness (component of Free Software) :
     definition of +7
}

With the exception of IBM (and to some extent its closest competitors:
Hewlett-Packard, Burroughs, and Unisys), computer corporations in the 1980s
sought to distance themselves from such "medieval" proprietary solutions (such
talk also echoes that of usable pasts of the Protestant Reformation often used
by geeks). New firms like Sun and Apollo deliberately berated the IBM model.
Bill Joy reportedly called one of IBM’s new releases in the 1980s a "grazing
dinosaur ‘with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it.’"~{
"Dinosaur" entry, The Jargon File, http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dinosaur.html.
}~
={ allegory, of Protestant Reformation ;
   Protestant Reformation ;
   usable pasts
}

% ,{[pg 150]},

Open systems was never a simple solution though: all that complexity in
hardware, software, components, and peripherals could only be solved by pushing
hard for standards—even for a single standard. Or, to put it differently,
during the 1980s, everyone agreed that open systems was a great idea, but no
one agreed on which open systems. As one of the anonymous speakers in Open
Systems: The Reality puts it, "It took me a long time to understand what (the
industry) meant by open vs. proprietary, but I finally figured it out. From the
perspective of any one supplier, open meant ‘our products.’ Proprietary meant
‘everyone else’s products.’"~{ Crichtley and Batty, Open Systems, 10. }~
={ openness (component of Free Software) :
     closure vs. +8 ;
   Open Systems :
     intellectual property and +8
}

For most supporters of open systems, the opposition between open and
proprietary had a certain moral force: it indicated that corporations providing
the latter were dangerously close to being evil, immoral, perhaps even criminal
monopolists. Adrian Gropper and Sean Doyle, the principals in Amicas, an
Internet teleradiology company, for instance, routinely referred to the large
proprietary healthcare-information systems they confronted in these terms: open
systems are the way of light, not dark. Although there are no doubt arguments
for closed systems—security, privacy, robustness, control—the demand for
interoperability does not mean that such closure will be sacrificed.~{ An
excellent counterpoint here is Paul Edwards’s The Closed World, which clearly
demonstrates the appeal of a thoroughly and hierarchically controlled system
such as the Semi-Automated Ground Environment (SAGE) of the Department of
Defense against the emergence of more "green world" models of openness. }~
Closure was also a choice. That is, open systems was an issue of sovereignty,
involving the right, in a moral sense, of a customer to control a technical
order hemmed in by firm standards that allowed customers to combine a number of
different pieces of hardware and software purchased in an open market and to
control the configuration themselves—not enforced openness, but the right to
decide oneself on whether and how to be open or closed.
={ Amicas (corporation) ;
   Doyle, Sean ;
   Evil ;
   Gropper, Adrian ;
   moral and technical order +1 ;
   Monopoly
}

The open-systems idea of moral order conflicts, however, with an idea of moral
order represented by intellectual property: the right, encoded in law, to
assert ownership over and control particular bits of source code, software, and
hardware. The call for and the market in open systems were never imagined as
being opposed to intellectual property as such, even if the opposition between
open and proprietary seemed to indicate a kind of subterranean recognition of
the role of intellectual property. The issue was never explicitly broached. Of
the hundred definitions in Open Systems, only one definition comes close to
including legal issues: "Speaker at Interop ’90 (paraphrased and maybe
apocryphal): ‘If you ask to gain access to a technology and the response you
get back is a price list, then ,{[pg 151]}, that technology is "open." If what
you get back is a letter from a lawyer, then it’s not "open."’"~{ Crichtley and
Batty, Open Systems, 13. }~
={ intellectual property +6 }

Openness here is not equated with freedom to copy and modify, but with the
freedom to buy access to any aspect of a system without signing a contract, a
nondisclosure agreement, or any other legal document besides a check. The
ground rules of competition are unchallenged: the existing system of
intellectual property—a system that was expanded and strengthened in this
period—was a sine qua non of competition.
={ standards :
     as form of competition +1
}

Openness understood in this manner means an open market in which it is possible
to buy standardized things which are neither obscure nor secret, but can be
examined and judged—a "commodity" market, where products have functions, where
quality is comparable and forms the basis for vigorous competition. What this
notion implies is freedom from monopoly control by corporations over products,
a freedom that is nearly impossible to maintain when the entire industry is
structured around the monopoly control of intellectual property through trade
secret, patent, or copyright. The blind spot hides the contradiction between an
industry imagined on the model of manufacturing distinct and tangible products,
and the reality of an industry that wavers somewhere between service and
product, dealing in intangible intellectual property whose boundaries and
identity are in fact defined by how they are exchanged, circulated, and shared,
as in the case of the proliferation and differentiation of the UNIX operating
system.
={ monopoly +3 ;
   standards +4
}

There was no disagreement about the necessity of intellectual property in the
computer industry of the 1980s, and there was no perceived contradiction in the
demands for openness. Indeed, openness could only make sense if it were built
on top of a stable system of intellectual property that allowed competitors to
maintain clear definitions of the boundaries of their products. But the
creation of interoperable components seemed to demand a relaxation of the
secrecy and guardedness necessary to "protect" intellectual property. Indeed,
for some observers, the problem of openness created the opportunity for the
worst kinds of cynical logic, as in this example from Regis McKenna’s Who’s
Afraid of Big Blue?
={ McKenna, Regis +1 }

_1 Users want open environments, so the vendors had better comply. In fact, it
is a good idea to support new standards early. That way, you can help control
the development of standards. Moreover, you can ,{[pg 152]}, take credit for
driving the standard. Supporting standards is a way to demonstrate that you’re
on the side of users. On the other hand, companies cannot compete on the basis
of standards alone. Companies that live by standards can die by standards.
Other companies, adhering to the same standards, could win on the basis of
superior manufacturing technology. If companies do nothing but adhere to
standards, then all computers will become commodities, and nobody will be able
to make any money. Thus, companies must keep something proprietary, something
to differentiate their products.~{ McKenna, Who’s Afraid of Big Blue? 178,
emphasis added. McKenna goes on to suggest that computer companies can
differentiate themselves by adding services, better interfaces, or higher
reliability—ironically similar to arguments that the Open Source Initiative
would make ten years later. }~

By such an account, open systems would be tantamount to economic regression, a
state of pure competition on the basis of manufacturing superiority, and not on
the basis of the competitive advantage granted by the monopoly of intellectual
property, the clear hallmark of a high-tech industry.~{ Richard Stallman,
echoing the image of medieval manacled wretches, characterized the blind spot
thus: "Unix does not give the user any more legal freedom than Windows does.
What they mean by ‘open systems’ is that you can mix and match components, so
you can decide to have, say, a Sun chain on your right leg and some other
company’s chain on your left leg, and maybe some third company’s chain on your
right arm, and this is supposed to be better than having to choose to have Sun
chains on all your limbs, or Microsoft chains on all your limbs. You know, I
don’t care whose chains are on each limb. What I want is not to be chained by
anyone" ("Richard Stallman: High School Misfit, Symbol of Free Software,
MacArthur-certified Genius," interview by Michael Gross, Cambridge, Mass.,
1999, 5, http://www.mgross.com/MoreThgsChng/interviews/stallman1.html). }~ It
was an irresolvable tension between the desire for a cooperative, market-based
infrastructure and the structure of an intellectual-property system ill-suited
to the technical realities within which companies and customers operated—a
tension revealing the reorientation of knowledge and power with respect to
creation, dissemination, and modification of knowledge.
={ modifiability +1 ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge
}

From the perspective of intellectual property, ideas, designs, and source code
are everything—if a company were to release the source code, and allow other
vendors to build on it, then what exactly would they be left to sell? Open
systems did not mean anything like free, open-source, or public-domain
computing. But the fact that competition required some form of collaboration
was obvious as well: standard software and network systems were needed;
standard markets were needed; standard norms of innovation within the
constraints of standards were needed. In short, the challenge was not just the
creation of competitive products but the creation of a standard infrastructure,
dealing with the technical questions of availability, modifiability, and
reusability of components, and the moral questions of the proper organization
of competition and collaboration across diverse domains: engineers, academics,
the computer industry, and the industries it computerized. What follows is the
story of how UNIX entered the open-systems fray, a story in which the tension
between the conceiving of openness and the demands of intellectual property is
revealed.
={ availability :
     open systems and ;
   collaboration :
     competition vs. ;
   modifiability ;
   Source code +2
}

% ,{[pg 153]},

2~ Open Systems One: Operating Systems
={ UNIX operating system :
     history of +37 | Open Systems and +37 | standardization and +37
}

In 1980 UNIX was by all accounts the most obvious choice for a standard
operating system for a reason that seemed simple at the outset: it ran on more
than one kind of hardware. It had been installed on DEC machines and IBM
machines and Intel processors and Motorola processors—a fact exciting to many
professional programmers, university computer scientists, and system
administrators, many of whom also considered UNIX to be the best designed of
the available operating systems.

There was a problem, however (there always is): UNIX belonged to AT&T, and AT&T
had licensed it to multiple manufacturers over the years, in addition to
allowing the source code to circulate more or less with abandon throughout the
world and to be ported to a wide variety of different machine architectures.
Such proliferation, albeit haphazard, was a dream come true: a single,
interoperable operating system running on all kinds of hardware. Unfortunately,
proliferation would also undo that dream, because it meant that as the markets
for workstations and operating systems heated up, the existing versions of UNIX
hardened into distinct and incompatible versions with different features and
interfaces. By the mid 1980s, there were multiple competing efforts to
standardize UNIX, an endeavour that eventually went haywire, resulting in the
so-called UNIX wars, in which "gangs" of vendors (some on both sides of the
battle) teamed up to promote competing standards. The story of how this
happened is instructive, for it is a story that has been reiterated several
times in the computer industry.~{ A similar story can be told about the
emergence, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, of manufacturers of
"plug-compatible" devices, peripherals that plugged into IBM machines (see
Takahashi, "The Rise and Fall of the Plug Compatible Manufacturers").
Similarly, in the 1990s the story of browser compatibility and the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C) standards is another recapitulation. }~
={ standards :
     as form of competition +7
}

As a hybrid commercial-academic system, UNIX never entered the market as a
single thing. It was licensed in various ways to different people, both
academic and commercial, and contained additions and tools and other features
that may or may not have originated at (or been returned to) Bell Labs. By the
early 1980s, the Berkeley Software Distribution was in fact competing with the
AT&T version, even though BSD was a sublicensee—and it was not the only one. By
the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of corporations had licensed UNIX from
AT&T for use on new machines. Microsoft licensed it (and called it Xenix,
rather than licensing the name UNIX as well) to be installed on Intel-based
machines. IBM, Unisys, Amdahl, Sun, DEC, and Hewlett-Packard all followed suit
and ,{[pg 154]}, created their own versions and names: HP-UX, A/UX, AIX,
Ultrix, and so on. Given the ground rules of trade secrecy and intellectual
property, each of these licensed versions needed to be made legally distinct—if
they were to compete with each other. Even if "UNIX" remained conceptually pure
in an academic or pedagogical sense, every manufacturer would nonetheless have
to tweak, to extend, to optimize in order to differentiate. After all, "if
companies do nothing but adhere to standards, then all computers will become
commodities, and nobody will be able to make any money."~{ McKenna, Who’s
Afraid of Big Blue? 178. }~
={ AT&T :
     version of UNIX ;
   portability, of operating systems +4 ;
   UNIX wars ;
   workstations
}

It was thus unlikely that any of these corporations would contribute the
changes they made to UNIX back into a common pool, and certainly not back to
AT&T which subsequent to the 1984 divestiture finally released their own
commercial version of UNIX, called UNIX System V. Very quickly, the promising
"open" UNIX of the 1970s became a slough of alternative operating systems, each
incompatible with the next thanks to the addition of market-differentiating
features and hardware-specific tweaks. According to Pamela Gray, "By the
mid-1980s, there were more than 100 versions in active use" centered around the
three market leaders, AT&T’s System V, Microsoft/SCO Xenix, and the BSD.~{
Pamela Gray, Open Systems. }~ By 1984, the differences in systems had become
significant—as in the case of the BSD additions of the TCP/IP protocols, the vi
editor, and the Pascal compiler—and created not only differentiation in terms
of quality but also incompatibility at both the software and networking levels.
={ AT&T :
     divestiture in 1984 ;
   Open Systems :
     operating systems and +32
}

Different systems of course had different user communities, based on who was
the customer of whom. Eric Raymond suggests that in the mid-1980s, independent
hackers, programmers, and computer scientists largely followed the fortunes of
BSD: "The divide was roughly between longhairs and shorthairs; programmers and
technical people tended to line up with Berkeley and BSD, more
business-oriented types with AT&T and System V. The longhairs, repeating a
theme from Unix’s early days ten years before, liked to see themselves as
rebels against a corporate empire; one of the small companies put out a poster
showing an X-wing-like space fighter marked "BSD" speeding away from a huge
AT&T ‘death star’ logo left broken and in flames."~{ Eric Raymond, "Origins and
History of Unix, 1969-1995," The Art of UNIX Programming,
http://www.faqs.org/docs/artu/ch02s01.html#id2880014. }~
={ Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   UNIX operating system :
     allegiance to versions of +1
}

So even though UNIX had become the standard operating system of choice for
time-sharing, multi-user, high-performance computers by the mid-1980s, there
was no such thing as UNIX. Competitors ,{[pg 155]}, in the UNIX market could
hardly expect the owner of the system, AT&T, to standardize it and compete with
them at the same time, and the rest of the systems were in some legal sense
still derivations from the original AT&T system. Indeed, in its licensing
pamphlets, AT&T even insisted that UNIX was not a noun, but an adjective, as in
"the UNIX system."~{ Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 22. Also noted in
Tanenbaum, "The UNIX Marketplace in 1987," 419. }~
={ UNIX operating system :
     as part of speech
}

The dawning realization that the proliferation of systems was not only
spreading UNIX around the world but also spreading it thin and breaking it
apart led to a series of increasingly startling and high-profile attempts to
"standardize" UNIX. Given that the three major branches (BSD, which would
become the industry darling as Sun’s Solaris operating system; Microsoft, and
later SCO Xenix; and AT&T’s System V) all emerged from the same AT&T and
Berkeley work done largely by Thompson, Ritchie, and Joy, one would think that
standardization would be a snap. It was anything but.
={ SCO (corporation) ;
   Solaris (operating system)
}

2~ Figuring Out Goes Haywire
={ figuring out +1 }

Figuring out the moral and technical order of open systems went haywire around
1986-88, when there were no fewer than four competing international standards,
represented by huge consortia of computer manufacturers (many of whom belonged
to multiple consortia): POSIX, the X/Open consortium, the Open Software
Foundation, and UNIX International. The blind spot of open systems had much to
do with this crazy outcome: academics, industry, and government could not find
ways to agree on standardization. One goal of standardization was to afford
customers choice; another was to allow competition unconstrained by
"artificial" means. A standard body of source code was impossible; a standard
"interface definition" was open to too much interpretation; government and
academic standards were too complex and expensive; no particular corporation’s
standard could be trusted (because they could not be trusted to reveal it in
advance of their own innovations); and worst of all, customers kept buying, and
vendors kept shipping, and the world was increasingly filled with diversity,
not standardization.
={ moral and technical order ;
   Open Software Foundation (OSF) ;
   POSIX (standard) ;
   standards :
     interface definition as +6 ;
   X/Open Consortium ;
   UNIX International
}

UNIX proliferated quickly because of porting, leading to multiple instances of
an operating system with substantially similar source code shared by academics
and licensed by AT&T. But it differentiated ,{[pg 156]}, just as quickly
because of forking, as particular features were added to different ports. Some
features were reincorporated into the "main" branch—the one Thompson and
Ritchie worked on—but the bulk of these mutations spread in a haphazard way,
shared through users directly or implemented in newly formed commercial
versions. Some features were just that, features, but others could extend the
system in ways that might make an application possible on one version, but not
on another.
={ differentiation of software +1 ;
   proliferation of software +1
}

The proliferation and differentiation of UNIX, the operating system, had
peculiar effects on the emerging market for UNIX, the product: technical issues
entailed design and organizational issues. The original UNIX looked the way it
did because of the very peculiar structure of the organization that created and
sustained UNIX: Bell Labs and the worldwide community of users and developers.
The newly formed competitors, conceiving of UNIX as a product distinct from the
original UNIX, adopted it precisely because of its portability and because of
the promise of open systems as an alternative to "big iron" mainframes. But as
UNIX was funneled into existing corporations with their own design and
organizational structures, it started to become incompatible with itself, and
the desire for competition in open systems necessitated efforts at UNIX
standardization.
={ standards organizations +26 }

The first step in the standardization of open systems and UNIX was the creation
of what was called an "interface definition," a standard that enumerated the
minimum set of functions that any version of UNIX should support at the
interface level, meaning that any programmer who wrote an application could
expect to interact with any version of UNIX on any machine in the same way and
get the same response from the machine (regardless of the specific
implementation of the operating system or the source code that was used).
Interface definitions, and extensions to them, were ideally to be published and
freely available.

The interface definition was a standard that emphasized portability, not at the
source-code or operating-system level, but at the application level, allowing
applications built on any version of UNIX to be installed and run on any other.
The push for such a standard came first from a UNIX user group founded in 1980
by Bob Marsh and called, after the convention of file hierarchies in the UNIX
interface, "/usr/group" (later renamed Uniforum). The 1984 /usr/group standard
defined a set of system calls, which, however, "was ,{[pg 157]}, immediately
ignored and, for all practical purposes, useless."~{ Libes and Ressler, Life
with UNIX, 67. }~ It seemed the field was changing too fast and UNIX
proliferating and innovating too widely for such a standard to work.
={ user groups +1 :
     /usr/group +4
}

The /usr/group standard nevertheless provided a starting point for more
traditional standards organizations—the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI)—to take
on the task. Both institutions took the /usr/group standard as a basis for what
would be called IEEE P1003 Portable Operating System Interface for Computer
Environments (POSIX). Over the next three years, from 1984 to 1987, POSIX would
work diligently at providing a standard interface definition for UNIX.
={ American National Standards Institute (ANSI) +1 ;
   Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) +3 ;
   POSIX (standard) +1
}

Alongside this development, the AT&T version of UNIX became the basis for a
different standard, the System V Interface Definition (SVID), which attempted
to standardize a set of functions similar but not identical to the /usr/group
and POSIX standards. Thus emerged two competing definitions for a standard
interface to a system that was rapidly proliferating into hundreds of tiny
operating-system fiefdoms.~{ A case might be made that a third definition, the
ANSI standard for the C programming language, also covered similar ground,
which of course it would have had to in order to allow applications written on
one ,{[pg 330]}, operating system to be compiled and run on another (see Gray,
Open Systems, 55-58; Libes and Ressler, Life with UNIX, 70-75). }~ The danger
of AT&T setting the standard was not lost on any of the competing
manufacturers. Even if they created a thoroughly open standard-interface
definition, AT&T’s version of UNIX would be the first to implement it, and they
would continually have privileged knowledge of any changes: if they sought to
change the implementation, they could change the standard; if they received
demands that the standard be changed, they could change their implementation
before releasing the new standard.
={ standards :
     as form of competition +24 | implementation ;
    System V Interface Definition (SVID)
}

In response to this threat, a third entrant into the standards race emerged:
X/Open, which comprised a variety of European computer manufacturers (including
AT&T!) and sought to develop a standard that encompassed both SVID and POSIX.
The X/Open initiative grew out of European concern about the dominance of IBM
and originally included Bull, Ericsson, ICL, Nixdorf, Olivetti, Philips, and
Siemens. In keeping with a certain 1980s taste for the integration of European
economic activity vis-à-vis the United States and Japan, these manufacturers
banded together both to distribute a unified UNIX operating system in Europe
(based initially on the BSD and Sun versions of UNIX) and to attempt to
standardize it at the same time.
={ Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ;
   X/Open Consortium +20 ;
   International Business Machines (IBM) +2
}

X/Open represented a subtle transformation of standardization efforts and of
the organizational definition of open systems. While ,{[pg 158]}, the
/usr/group standard was developed by individuals who used UNIX, and the POSIX
standard by an acknowledged professional society (IEEE), the X/Open group was a
collective of computer corporations that had banded together to fund an
independent entity to help further the cause of a standard UNIX. This
paradoxical situation—of a need to share a standard among all the competitors
and the need to keep the details of that standardized product secret to
maintain an advantage—was one that many manufacturers, especially the Europeans
with their long experience of IBM’s monopoly, understood as mutually
destructive. Hence, the solution was to engage in a kind of organizational
innovation, to create a new form of metacorporate structure that could
strategically position itself as at least temporarily interested in
collaboration with other firms, rather than in competition. Thus did stories
and promises of open systems wend their way from the details of technical
design to those of organizational design to the moral order of competition and
collaboration, power and strategy. "Standards" became products that
corporations sought to "sell" to their own industry through the intermediary of
the consortium.
={ collaboration :
     competition vs. +22 ;
   monopoly
}

In 1985 and 1986 the disarrayed state of UNIX was also frustrating to the major
U.S. manufacturers, especially to Sun Microsystems, which had been founded on
the creation of a market for UNIX-based "workstations," high-powered networked
computers that could compete with mainframes and personal computers at the same
time. Founded by Bill Joy, Vinod Khosla, and Andreas Bechtolsheim, Sun had very
quickly become an extraordinarily successful computer company. The business
pages and magazines were keen to understand whether workstations were viable
competitors to PCs, in particular to those of IBM and Microsoft, and the de
facto standard DOS operating system, for which a variety of extremely
successful business-, personal-, and home-computer applications were written.
={ Joy, Bill ;
   Microsoft ;
   Sun Microsystems +9 ;
   workstations +3
}

Sun seized on the anxiety around open systems, as is evident in the ad it ran
during the summer of 1987 (figure 4). The ad plays subtly on two anxieties: the
first is directed at the consumer and suggests that only with Sun can one
actually achieve interoperability among all of one business’ computers, much
less across a network or industry; the second is more subtle and plays to fears
within the computer industry itself, the anxiety that Sun might merge with one
,{[pg 159]}, of the big corporations, AT&T or Unisys, and corner the market in
open systems by producing the de facto standard.
={ interoperability ;
   mergers +2 ;
   Unisys +2
}

{ 2bits_05_04-100.png }image ~[* 4a and 4b. Open systems anxiety around mergers and compatibility. Sun Microsystems advertisement, Wall Street Journal, 9 July 1987. ]~

In fact, in October 1987 Sun announced that it had made a deal with AT&T. AT&T
would distribute a workstation based on Sun’s SPARC line of workstations and
would acquire 20 percent of Sun.~{ "AT&T Deal with Sun Seen," New York Times,
19 October 1987, D8. }~ As part of this announcement, Sun and AT&T made clear
that they intended to merge two of the dominant versions of UNIX on the market:
AT&T’s System V and the BSD-derived Solaris. This move clearly frightened the
rest of the manufacturers interested in UNIX and open systems, as it suggested
a kind of super-power alignment that would restructure (and potentially
dominate) the market. A 1988 article in the New York Times quotes an industry
analyst who characterizes the merger as "a matter of concern at the highest
levels of every major computer company in the United States, and possibly the
world," and it suggests that competing manufacturers "also fear that AT&T will
gradually make Unix a proprietary product, usable only on AT&T or Sun
machines."~{ Thomas C. Hayesdallas, "AT&T’s Unix Is a Hit at Last, and Other
Companies Are Wary," New York Times, 24 February 1988, D8. }~ The industry
anxiety was great enough that in March Unisys (a computer manufacturer,
formerly Burroughs-Sperry) announced that it would work with AT&T and Sun to
bring UNIX to its mainframes and to make its ,{[pg 160]}, business applications
run on UNIX. Such a move was tantamount to Unisys admitting that there would be
no future in proprietary high-end computing—the business on which it had
hitherto built its reputation—unless it could be part of the consortium that
could own the standard.~{ "Unisys Obtains Pacts for Unix Capabilities," New
York Times, 10 March 1988, D4. }~
={ AT&T +7 ;
   Solaris (operating system)
}

In response to this perceived collusion a group of U.S. and European companies
banded together to form another rival organization—one that partially
overlapped with X/Open but now included IBM—this one called the Open Software
Foundation. A nonprofit corporation, the foundation included IBM, Digital
Equipment, Hewlett-Packard, Bull, Nixdorf, Siemens, and Apollo Computer (Sun’s
most direct competitor in the workstation market). Their goal was explicitly to
create a "competing standard" for UNIX that would be available on the hardware
they manufactured (and based, according to some newspaper reports, on IBM’s
AIX, which was to be called OSF/1). AT&T appeared at first to support the
foundation, suggesting that if the Open Software Foundation could come up with
a standard, then AT&T would make System V compatible with it. Thus, 1988 was
the summer of open love. Every major computer manufacturer in the world was now
part of some consortium or another, and some were part of two—each promoting a
separate standard.
={ X/Open Consortium }

Of all the corporations, Sun did the most to brand itself as the originator of
the open-systems concept. They made very broad claims for the success of
open-systems standardization, as for instance in an ad from August 1988 (figure
5), which stated in part:
={ openness (component of Free Software) :
     proprietary vs.
}

_1 But what’s more, those sales confirm a broad acceptance of the whole idea
behind Sun.

_1 The Open Systems idea. Systems based on standards so universally accepted
that they allow combinations of hardware and software from literally thousands
of independent vendors. . . . So for the first time, you’re no longer locked
into the company who made your computers. Even if it’s us.

The ad goes on to suggest that "in a free market, the best products win out,"
even as Sun played both sides of every standardization battle, cooperating with
both AT&T and with the Open Software Foundation. But by October of that year,
it was clear to Sun that ,{[pg 161]}, ,{[pg 162]}, the idea hadn’t really
become "so universal" just yet. In that month AT&T and Sun banded together with
seventeen other manufacturers and formed a rival consortium: Unix
International, a coalition of the willing that would back the AT&T UNIX System
V version as the one true open standard. In a full-page advertisement from
Halloween of 1988 (figure 6), run simultaneously in the New York Times, the
Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, the rhetoric of achieved success
remained, but now instead of "the Open Systems idea," it was "your demand for
UNIX System V-based solutions that ushered in the era of open architecture."
Instead of a standard for all open systems, it was a war of all against all, a
war to assure customers that they had made, not the right choice of hardware or
software, but the right choice of standard.
={ UNIX International +3 ;
   UNIX wars +3
}

{ 2bits_05_05-100.png }image ~[* It pays to be open: Sun’s version of profitable and successful open systems. Sun Microsystems advertisement, New York Times, 2 August 1988. ]~

% image placed after paragraph

The proliferation of standards and standards consortia is often referred to as
the UNIX wars of the late 1980s, but the creation of such consortia did not
indicate clearly drawn lines. Another metaphor that seems to have been very
popular in the press at the time was that of "gang" warfare (no doubt helped
along by the creation of another industry consortia informally called the Gang
of Nine, which were involved in a dispute over whether MicroChannel or EISA
buses should be installed in PCs). The idea of a number of companies forming
gangs to fight with each other, Bloods-and-Crips style—or perhaps more
Jets-and-Sharks style, minus the singing—was no doubt an appealing metaphor at
the height of Los Angeles’s very real and high-profile gang warfare. But as one
article in the New York Times pointed out, these were strange gangs: "Since
‘openness’ and ‘cooperation’ are the buzzwords behind these alliances, the gang
often asks its enemy to join. Often the enemy does so, either so that it will
not seem to be opposed to openness or to keep tabs on the group. IBM was
invited to join the corporation for Open Systems, even though the clear if
unstated motive of the group was to dilute IBM’s influence in the market. AT&T
negotiated to join the Open Software Foundation, but the talks collapsed
recently. Some companies find it completely consistent to be members of rival
gangs. . . . About 10 companies are members of both the Open Software
Foundation and its archrival Unix International."~{ Andrew Pollack, "Computer
Gangs Stake Out Turf," New York Times, 13 December 1988, D1. See also Evelyn
Richards, "Computer Firms Get a Taste of ‘Gang Warfare,’" Washington Post, 11
December 1988, K1; Brit Hume, "IBM, Once the Bully on the Block, Faces a Tough
New PC Gang," Washington Post, 3 October 1988, E24. }~
={ openness (component of Free Software) :
     standardization and
}

{ 2bits_05_06-100.png }image ~[* The UNIX Wars, Halloween 1988. UNIX International advertisement, Wall Street Journal and New York Times, 31 October 1988. ]~

% image placed above paragraph

The proliferation of these consortia can be understood in various ways. One
could argue that they emerged at a time—during the Reagan administration—when
antitrust policing had diminished to ,{[pg 163]}, ,{[pg 164]}, the point where
computer corporations did not see such collusion as a risky activity vis-à-vis
antitrust policing. One could also argue that these consortia represented a
recognition that the focus on hardware control (the meaning of proprietary) had
been replaced with a focus on the control of the "open standard" by one or
several manufacturers, that is, that competition was no longer based on
superior products, but on "owning the standard." It is significant that the
industry consortia quickly overwhelmed national efforts, such as the IEEE POSIX
standard, in the media, an indication that no one was looking to government or
nonprofits, or to university professional societies, to settle the dispute by
declaring a standard, but rather to industry itself to hammer out a standard,
de facto or otherwise. Yet another way to understand the emergence of these
consortia is as a kind of mutual policing of the market, a kind of paranoid
strategy of showing each other just enough to make sure that no one would
leapfrog ahead and kill the existing, fragile competition.
={ antitrust +2 ;
   standards :
     ownership of ;
   Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
}

What this proliferation of UNIX standards and consortia most clearly
represents, however, is the blind spot of open systems: the difficulty of
having collaboration and competition at the same time in the context of
intellectual-property rules that incompletely capture the specific and unusual
characteristics of software. For participants in this market, the structure of
intellectual property was unassailable—without it, most participants assumed,
innovation would cease and incentives disappear. Despite the fact that secrecy
haunted the industry, its customers sought both openness and compatibility.
These conflicting demands proved irresolvable.
={ secrecy }

2~ Denouement

Ironically, the UNIX wars ended not with the emergence of a winner, but with
the reassertion of proprietary computing: Microsoft Windows and Windows NT.
Rather than open systems emerging victorious, ushering in the era of seamless
integration of diverse components, the reverse occurred: Microsoft managed to
grab a huge share of computer markets, both desktop and high-performance, by
leveraging its brand, the ubiquity of DOS, and application-software developers’
dependence on the "Wintel" monster (Windows plus Intel chips). Microsoft
triumphed, largely for the same reasons the open-systems dream failed: the
legal structure of intellectual ,{[pg 165]}, property favored a strong
corporate monopoly on a single, branded product over a weak array of "open" and
competing components. There was no large gain to investors, or to corporations,
from an industry of nice guys sharing the source code and making the components
work together. Microsoft, on the other hand, had decided to do so internal to
itself; it did not necessarily need to form consortia or standardize its
operating systems, if it could leverage its dominance in the market to spread
the operating system far and wide. It was, as standards observers like to say,
the triumph of de facto standardization over de jure. It was a return to the
manacled wretches of IBM’s monopoly—but with a new dungeon master.
={ Intel (corporation) ;
   Microsoft :
     Windows operating system ;
   Openness (component of Free Software) :
     proprietary vs. ;
   monopoly ;
   openness (component of Free Software) +10
}

The denouement of the UNIX standards story was swift: AT&T sold its UNIX System
Labs (including all of the original source and rights) to Novell in 1993, who
sold it in turn to SCO two years later. Novell sold (or transferred) the
trademark name UNIX™ to the X/Open group, which continued to fight for
standardization, including a single universal UNIX specification. In 1996
X/Open and the Open Software Foundation merged to form the Open Group.~{ "What
Is Unix?" The Unix System,
http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html. }~ The Open Group
eventually joined forces with IEEE to turn POSIX into a single UNIX
specification in 2001. They continue to push the original vision of open
systems, though they carefully avoid using the name or concept, referring
instead to the trademarked mouthful "Boundaryless Information Flow" and
employing an updated and newly inscrutable rhetoric: "Boundaryless Information
Flow, a shorthand representation of ‘access to integrated information to
support business process improvements’ represents a desired state of an
enterprise’s infrastructure and is specific to the business needs of the
organization."~{ "About the Open Group," The Open Group,
http://www.opengroup.org/overview/vision-mission.htm. }~
={ AT&T ;
   Novell ;
   SCO (corporation)
}

The Open Group, as well as many other participants in the history of open
systems, recognize the emergence of "open source" as a return to the now one
true path of boundaryless information flow. Eric Raymond, of course, sees
continuity and renewal (not least of which in his own participation in the Open
Source movement) and in his Art of UNIX Programming says, "The Open Source
movement is building on this stable foundation and is creating a resurgence of
enthusiasm for the UNIX philosophy. In many ways Open Source can be seen as the
true delivery of Open Systems that will ensure it continues to go from strength
to strength."~{ "What Is Unix?" The Unix System,
http://www.unix.org/what_is_unix/history_timeline.html. }~
={ Open Source }

This continuity, of course, deliberately disavows the centrality of the legal
component, just as Raymond and the Open Source ,{[pg 166]}, Initiative had in
1998. The distinction between a robust market in UNIX operating systems and a
standard UNIX-based infrastructure on which other markets and other activities
can take place still remains unclear to even those closest to the money and
machines. It does not yet exist, and may well never come to.
={ infrastructure +1 }

The growth of Free Software in the 1980s and 1990s depended on openness as a
concept and component that was figured out during the UNIX wars. It was during
these wars that the Free Software Foundation (and other groups, in different
ways) began to recognize the centrality of the issue of intellectual property
to the goal of creating an infrastructure for the successful creation of open
systems.~{ Larry McVoy was an early voice, within Sun, arguing for solving the
open-systems problem by turning to Free Software. Larry McVoy, "The Sourceware
Operating System Proposal," 9 November 1993,
http://www.bitmover.com/lm/papers/srcos.html. }~ The GNU (GNU’s Not Unix)
project in particular, but also the X Windows system at MIT, the Remote
Procedure Call and Network File System (NFS) systems created by Sun, and tools
like sendmail and BIND were each in their own way experiments with alternative
licensing arrangements and were circulating widely on a variety of the UNIX
versions in the late 1980s. Thus, the experience of open systems, while
technically a failure as far as UNIX was concerned, was nonetheless a profound
learning experience for an entire generation of engineers, hackers, geeks, and
entrepreneurs. Just as the UNIX operating system had a pedagogic life of its
own, inculcating itself into the minds of engineers as the paradigm of an
operating system, open systems had much the same effect, realizing an inchoate
philosophy of openness, interconnection, compatibility, interoperability—in
short, availability and modifiability—that was in conflict with
intellectual-property structures as they existed. To put it in Freudian terms:
the neurosis of open systems wasn’t cured, but the structure of its
impossibility had become much clearer to everyone. UNIX, the operating system,
did not disappear at all—but UNIX, the market, did.
={ modifiability +5 ;
   availability :
     open systems and +5 ;
   Free software :
     components of ;
   GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) ;
   interoperability ;
   modifiability +4 ;
   pedagogy :
     operating systems and ;
   X Windows
}

2~ Open Systems Two: Networks
={ Open Systems :
     networks and +28
}

The struggle to standardize UNIX as a platform for open systems was not the
only open-systems struggle; alongside the UNIX wars, another "religious war"
was raging. The attempt to standardize networks—in particular, protocols for
the inter-networking of multiple, diverse, and autonomous networks of
computers—was also a key aspect of the open-systems story of the 1980s.~{ The
distinction between a protocol, an implementation and a standard is important:
Protocols are descriptions of the precise terms by which two computers can
communicate (i.e., a dictionary and a handbook for communicating). An
implementation is the creation of software that uses a protocol (i.e., actually
does the communicating; thus two implementations using the same protocol should
be able to share data. A standard defines which protocol should be used by
which computers, for what purposes. It may or may not define the protocol, but
will set limits on changes to that protocol. }~ The war ,{[pg 167]}, between
the TCP/IP and OSI was also a story of failure and surprising success: the
story of a successful standard with international approval (the OSI protocols)
eclipsed by the experimental, military-funded TCP/IP, which exemplified an
alternative and unusual standards process. The moral-technical orders expressed
by OSI and TCP/IP are, like that of UNIX, on the border between government,
university, and industry; they represent conflicting social imaginaries in
which power and legitimacy are organized differently and, as a result,
expressed differently in the technology.
={ moral and technical order ;
   Networks :
     protools for +3 ;
   Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) :
     as reference model +27 ;
   protocols :
     Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) +27 | TCP/IP ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) +27 ;
   religious wars +3 ;
   social imaginary ;
   standards processes +3
}

OSI and TCP/IP started with different goals: OSI was intended to satisfy
everyone, to be the complete and comprehensive model against which all
competing implementations would be validated; TCP/IP, by contrast, emphasized
the easy and robust interconnection of diverse networks. TCP/IP is a protocol
developed by bootstrapping between standard and implementation, a mode
exemplified by the Requests for Comments system that developed alongside them
as part of the Arpanet project. OSI was a "model" or reference standard
developed by internationally respected standards organizations.
={ Arpanet (network) +18 ;
   Request for Comments (RFC)
}

In the mid-1980s OSI was en route to being adopted internationally, but by 1993
it had been almost completely eclipsed by TCP/IP. The success of TCP/IP is
significant for three reasons: (1) availability—TCP/IP was itself available via
the network and development open to anyone, whereas OSI was a bureaucratically
confined and expensive standard and participation was confined to state and
corporate representatives, organized through ISO in Geneva; (2)
modifiability—TCP/IP could be copied from an existing implementation (such as
the BSD version of UNIX) and improved, whereas OSI was a complex standard that
had few existing implementations available to copy; and (3) serendipity—new
uses that took advantage of availability and modifiability sprouted, including
the "killer app" that was the World Wide Web, which was built to function on
existing TCP/IP-based networks, convincing many manufacturers to implement that
protocol instead of, or in addition to, OSI.
={ World Wide Web (www) }

The success of TCP/IP over OSI was also significant because of the difference
in the standardization processes that it exemplified. The OSI standard (like
all official international standards) is conceived and published as an aid to
industrial growth: it was imagined according to the ground rules of
intellectual property and as an attempt to facilitate the expansion of markets
in networking. ,{[pg 168]}, OSI would be a "vendor-neutral" standard: vendors
would create their own, secret implementations that could be validated by OSI
and thereby be expected to interoperate with other OSI-validated systems. By
stark contrast, the TCP/IP protocols were not published (in any conventional
sense), nor were the implementations validated by a legitimate
international-standards organization; instead, the protocols are themselves
represented by implementations that allow connection to the network itself
(where the TCP/IP protocols and implementations are themselves made available).
The fact that one can only join the network if one possesses or makes an
implementation of the protocol is generally seen as the ultimate in validation:
it works.~{ The advantages of such an unplanned and unpredictable network have
come to be identified in hindsight as a design principle. See Gillespie,
"Engineering a Principle" for an excellent analysis of the history of "end to
end" or "stupid" networks. }~ In this sense, the struggle between TCP/IP and
OSI is indicative of a very familiar twentieth-century struggle over the role
and extent of government planning and regulation (versus entrepreneurial
activity and individual freedom), perhaps best represented by the twin figures
of Friedrich Hayek and Maynard Keynes. In this story, it is Hayek’s aversion to
planning and the subsequent privileging of spontaneous order that eventually
triumphs, not Keynes’s paternalistic view of the government as a neutral body
that absorbs or encourages the swings of the market.
={ Hayek, Friedrich ;
   Keynes, John Maynard ;
   standards :
     validation of
}

2~ Bootstrapping Networks

The "religious war" between TCP/IP and OSI occurred in the context of intense
competition among computer manufacturers and during a period of vibrant
experimentation with computer networks worldwide. As with most developments in
computing, IBM was one of the first manufacturers to introduce a networking
system for its machines in the early 1970s: the System Network Architecture
(SNA). DEC followed suit with Digital Network Architecture (DECnet or DNA), as
did Univac with Distributed Communications Architecture (DCA), Burroughs with
Burroughs Network Architecture (BNA), and others. These architectures were,
like the proprietary operating systems of the same era, considered closed
networks, networks that interconnected a centrally planned and specified number
of machines of the same type or made by the same manufacturer. The goal of such
networks was to make connections internal to a firm, even if that involved
geographically widespread systems (e.g., from branch to headquarters). Networks
were also to be products.
={ Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) :
     DECNet ;
   Networks :
     as products | varieties of +4
}

The 1970s and 1980s saw extraordinarily vibrant experimentation with academic,
military, and commercial networks. Robert Metcalfe had developed Ethernet at
Xerox PARC in the mid-1970s, and IBM later created a similar technology called
"token ring." In the 1980s the military discovered that the Arpanet was being
used predominantly by computer scientists and not just for military
applications, and decided to break it into MILNET and CSNET.~{ William Broad,
"Global Network Split as Safeguard," New York Times, 5 October 1983, A13. }~
Bulletin Board Services, which connected PCs to each other via modems to
download files, appeared in the late 1970s. Out of this grew Tom Jennings’s
very successful experiment called FidoNet.~{ See the incomparable BBS: The
Documentary, DVD, directed by Jason Scott (Boston: Bovine Ignition Systems,
2005), http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/. }~ In the 1980s an existing social
network of university faculty on the East Coast of the United States started a
relatively successful network called BITNET (Because It’s There Network) in the
mid-1980s.~{ Grier and Campbell, "A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv
1985-1991." }~ The Unix to Unix Copy Protocol (uucp), which initially enabled
the Usenet, was developed in the late 1970s and widely used until the mid-1980s
to connect UNIX computers together. In 1984 the NSF began a program to fund
research in networking and created the first large backbones for NSFNet,
successor to the CSNET and Arpanet.~{ On Usenet, see Hauben and Hauben,
Netizens. See also Pfaffenberger, "‘A Standing Wave in the Web of Our
Communications.’" }~
={ Sparc (computer workstation) ;
   Unix to Unix copy protocol (uucp) ;
   Usenet ;
   Xerox PARC
}

In the 1970s telecommunications companies and spin-off start-ups experimented
widely with what were called "videotex" systems, of which the most widely
implemented and well-known is Minitel in France.~{ Schmidt and Werle,
Coordinating Technology, chap. 7. }~ Such systems were designed for consumer
users and often provided many of the now widespread services available on the
Internet in a kind of embryonic form (from comparison shopping for cars, to
directory services, to pornography).~{ See, for example, Martin, Viewdata and
the Information Society. }~ By the late 1970s, videotex systems were in the
process of being standardized by the Commité Consultative de Information,
Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) at the International
Telecommunications Union (ITU) in Geneva. These standards efforts would
eventually be combined with work of the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) on OSI, which had originated from work done at
Honeywell.~{ There is little information on the development of open systems;
there is, however, a brief note from William Stallings, author of perhaps the
most widely used textbook on networking, at "The Origins of OSI,"
http://williamstallings.com/Extras/OSI.html. }~
={ Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) ;
   International Telecommunications Union (ITU) +6 ;
   Internet :
     early development +5 ;
   International Organization for Standardization (ISO) +4 ;
   regulation :
     telecommunications +3 ;
   telecommunications industry +5
}

One important feature united almost all of these experiments: the networks of
the computer manufacturers were generally piggybacked, or bootstrapped, onto
existing telecommunications infrastructures built by state-run or regulated
monopoly telecommunications firms. This situation inevitably spelled grief, for
telecommunications providers are highly regulated entities, while the computer
industry has been almost totally unregulated from its ,{[pg 170]}, inception.
Since an increasingly core part of the computer industry’s business involved
transporting signals through telecommunications systems without being regulated
to do so, the telecommunications industry naturally felt themselves at a
disadvantage.~{ Brock, The Second Information Revolution is a good introductory
source for this conflict, at least in its policy outlines. The Federal
Communications Commission issued two decisions (known as "Computer 1" and
"Computer 2") that attempted to deal with this conflict by trying to define
what counted as voice communication and what as data. }~ Telecommunications
companies were not slow to respond to the need for data communications, but
their ability to experiment with products and practices outside the scope of
telephony and telegraphy was often hindered by concerns about antitrust and
monopoly.~{ Brock, The Second Information Revolution, chap. 10. }~ The
unregulated computer industry, by contrast, saw the tentativeness of the
telecommunications industry (or national PTTs) as either bureaucratic inertia
or desperate attempts to maintain control and power over existing
networks—though no computer manufacturer relished the idea of building their
own physical network when so many already existed.
={ antitrust }

TCP/IP and OSI have become emblematic of the split between the worlds of
telecommunications and computing; the metaphors of religious wars or of blood
feuds and cold wars were common.~{ Drake, "The Internet Religious War." }~ A
particularly arch account from this period is Carl Malamud’s Exploring the
Internet: A Technical Travelogue, which documents Malamud’s (physical) visits
to Internet sites around the globe, discussions (and beer) with networking
researchers on technical details of the networks they have created, and his own
typically geeky, occasionally offensive takes on cultural difference.~{
Malamud, Exploring the Internet; see also Michael M. J. Fischer, "Worlding
Cyberspace." }~ A subtheme of the story is the religious war between Geneva (in
particular the ITU) and the Internet: Malamud tells the story of asking the ITU
to release its 19,000-page "blue book" of standards on the Internet, to
facilitate its adoption and spread.
={ Malmud, Carl +1 ;
   standards processes +4
}

The resistance of the ITU and Malamud’s heroic if quixotic attempts are a
parable of the moral-technical imaginaries of openness—and indeed, his story
draws specifically on the usable past of Giordano Bruno.~{ The usable past of
Giordano Bruno is invoked by Malamud to signal the heretical nature of his own
commitment to openly publishing standards that ISO was opposed to releasing.
Bruno’s fate at the hands of the Roman Inquisition hinged in some part on his
acceptance of the Copernican cosmology, so he has been, like Galileo, a natural
figure for revolutionary claims during the 1990s. }~ The "bruno" project
demonstrates the gulf that exists between two models of legitimacy—those of ISO
and the ITU—in which standards represent the legal and legitimate consensus of
a regulated industry, approved by member nations, paid for and enforced by
governments, and implemented and adhered to by corporations.
={ Bruno, Giordano ;
   Usable pasts ;
   International Organization for Standardization (ISO) +3
}

Opposite ISO is the ad hoc, experimental style of Arpanet and Internet
researchers, in which standards are freely available and implementations
represent the mode of achieving consensus, rather than the outcome of the
consensus. In reality, such a rhetorical ,{[pg 171]}, opposition is far from
absolute: many ISO standards are used on the Internet, and ISO remains a
powerful, legitimate standards organization. But the clash of established
(telecommunications) and emergent (computer-networking) industries is an
important context for understanding the struggle between OSI and TCP/IP.

The need for standard networking protocols is unquestioned: interoperability is
the bread and butter of a network. Nonetheless, the goals of the OSI and the
TCP/IP protocols differed in important ways, with profound implications for the
shape of that interoperability. OSI’s goals were completeness, control, and
comprehensiveness. OSI grew out of the telecommunications industry, which had a
long history of confronting the vicissitudes of linking up networks and
facilitating communication around the world, a problem that required a strong
process of consensus and negotiation among large, powerful, government-run
entities, as well as among smaller manufacturers and providers. OSI’s feet were
firmly planted in the international standardization organizations like OSI and
the ITU (an organization as old as telecommunications itself, dating to the
1860s).
={ interoperability +12 }

Even if they were oft-mocked as slow, bureaucratic, or cumbersome, the
processes of ISO and ITU—based in consensus, international agreement, and
thorough technical specification—are processes of unquestioned legitimacy. The
representatives of nations and corporations who attend ISO and ITU standards
discussions, and who design, write, and vote on these standards, are usually
not bureaucrats, but engineers and managers directly concerned with the needs
of their constituency. The consensus-oriented process means that ISO and ITU
standards attempt to satisfy all members’ goals, and as such they tend to be
very large, complex, and highly specific documents. They are generally sold to
corporations and others who need to use them, rather than made freely
available, a fact that until recently reflected their legitimacy, rather than
lack thereof.

TCP/IP, on the other hand, emerged from very different conditions.~{ Abbate,
Inventing the Internet; Salus, Casting the Net; Galloway, Protocol; and Brock,
The Second Information Revolution. For practitioner histories, see Kahn et al.,
"The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System"; Clark, "The
Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols." }~ These protocols were
part of a Department of Defense-funded experimental research project: Arpanet.
The initial Arpanet protocols (the Network Control Protocol, or NCP) were
insufficient, and TCP/IP was an experiment in interconnecting two different
"packet-switched networks": the ground-line-based Arpanet network and a
radio-wave network called Packet Radio.~{ Kahn et al., "The Evolution of the
Internet as a Global Information System," 134-140; Abbate, Inventing the
Internet, 114-36. }~ The ,{[pg 172]}, problem facing the designers was not how
to accommodate everyone, but merely how to solve a specific problem:
interconnecting two technically diverse networks, each with autonomous
administrative boundaries, but forcing neither of them to give up the system or
the autonomy.
={ Defense, Department of +11 ;
   Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) +1 ;
   packet-switching +1
}

Until the mid-1980s, the TCP/IP protocols were resolutely research-oriented,
and not the object of mainstream commercial interest. Their development
reflected a core set of goals shared by researchers and ultimately promoted by
the central funding agency, the Department of Defense. The TCP/IP protocols are
often referred to as enabling packet-switched networks, but this is only
partially correct; the real innovation of this set of protocols was a design
for an "inter-network," a system that would interconnect several diverse and
autonomous networks (packet-switched or circuit-switched), without requiring
them to be transformed, redesigned, or standardized—in short, by requiring only
standardization of the intercommunication between networks, not standardization
of the network itself. In the first paper describing the protocol Robert Kahn
and Vint Cerf motivated the need for TCP/IP thus: "Even though many different
and complex problems must be solved in the design of an individual
packet-switching network, these problems are manifestly compounded when
dissimilar networks are interconnected. Issues arise which may have no direct
counterpart in an individual network and which strongly influence the way in
which Internetwork communication can take place."~{ Kahn and Cerf, "A Protocol
for Packet Network Intercommunication," 637. }~
={ Cerf, Vinton +2 ;
   Kahn, Robert ;
   TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) :
     goals of +2
}

The explicit goal of TCP/IP was thus to share computer resources, not
necessarily to connect two individuals or firms together, or to create a
competitive market in networks or networking software. Sharing between
different kinds of networks implied allowing the different networks to develop
autonomously (as their creators and maintainers saw best), but without
sacrificing the ability to continue sharing. Years later, David Clark, chief
Internet engineer for several years in the 1980s, gave a much more explicit
explanation of the goals that led to the TCP/IP protocols. In particular, he
suggested that the main overarching goal was not just to share resources but
"to develop an effective technique for multiplexed utilization of existing
interconnected networks," and he more explicitly stated the issue of control
that faced the designers: "Networks represent administrative boundaries of
control, and it was an ambition of this project to come to grips with the
problem of integrating a number ,{[pg 173]}, of separately administrated
entities into a common utility."~{ Clark, "The Design Philosophy of the DARPA
Internet Protocols," 54-55. }~ By placing the goal of expandability first, the
TCP/IP protocols were designed with a specific kind of simplicity in mind: the
test of the protocols’ success was simply the ability to connect.
={ Clark, David }

By setting different goals, TCP/IP and OSI thus differed in terms of technical
details; but they also differed in terms of their context and legitimacy, one
being a product of international-standards bodies, the other of military-funded
research experiments. The technical and organizational differences imply
different processes for standardization, and it is the peculiar nature of the
so-called Requests for Comments (RFC) process that gave TCP/IP one of its most
distinctive features. The RFC system is widely recognized as a unique and
serendipitous outcome of the research process of Arpanet.~{ RFCs are archived
in many places, but the official site is RFC Editor,
http://www.rfc-editor.org/. }~ In a thirty-year retrospective (published,
naturally, as an RFC: RFC 2555), Vint Cerf says, "Hiding in the history of the
RFCs is the history of human institutions for achieving cooperative work." He
goes on to describe their evolution over the years: "When the RFCs were first
produced, they had an almost 19th century character to them—letters exchanged
in public debating the merits of various design choices for protocols in the
ARPANET. As email and bulletin boards emerged from the fertile fabric of the
network, the far-flung participants in this historic dialog began to make
increasing use of the online medium to carry out the discussion—reducing the
need for documenting the debate in the RFCs and, in some respects, leaving
historians somewhat impoverished in the process. RFCs slowly became conclusions
rather than debates."~{ RFC Editor, RFC 2555, 6. }~
={ standards processes ;
   Request for Comments (RFC) +2
}

Increasingly, they also became part of a system of discussion and
implementation in which participants created working software as part of an
experiment in developing the standard, after which there was more discussion,
then perhaps more implementation, and finally, a standard. The RFC process was
a way to condense the process of standardization and validation into
implementation; which is to say, the proof of open systems was in the
successful connection of diverse networks, and the creation of a standard
became a kind of ex post facto rubber-stamping of this demonstration. Any
further improvement of the standard hinged on an improvement on the standard
implementation because the standards that resulted were freely and widely
available: "A user could request an RFC by email from his host computer and
have it automatically delivered to his mailbox. . . . RFCs were also shared
freely with official standards ,{[pg 174]}, bodies, manufacturers and vendors,
other working groups, and universities. None of the RFCs were ever restricted
or classified. This was no mean feat when you consider that they were being
funded by DoD during the height of the Cold War."~{ Ibid., 11. }~
={ Software :
     implementation of ;
   standards :
     implementation +9 | validation of ;
   Secrecy +1
}

The OSI protocols were not nearly so freely available. The ironic reversal—the
transparency of a military-research program versus the opacity of a
Geneva-based international-standards organization—goes a long way toward
explaining the reasons why geeks might find the story of TCP/IP’s success to be
so appealing. It is not that geeks are secretly militaristic, but that they
delight in such surprising reversals, especially when those reversals exemplify
the kind of ad hoc, clever solution to problems of coordination that the RFC
process does. The RFC process is not the only alternative to a
consensus-oriented model of standardization pioneered in the international
organizations of Geneva, but it is a specific response to a reorientation of
power and knowledge that was perhaps more "intuitively obvious" to the creators
of Arpanet and the Internet, with its unusual design goals and context, than it
would have been to the purveyors of telecommunications systems with over a
hundred years of experience in connecting people in very specific and
established ways.
={ geeks ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge ;
   standards organizations
}

2~ Success as Failure

By 1985, OSI was an official standard, one with widespread acceptance by
engineers, by the government and military (the "GOSIP" standard), and by a
number of manufacturers, the most significant of which was General Motors, with
its Manufacturing Automation Protocol (MAP). In textbooks and handbooks of the
late 1980s and early 1990s, OSI was routinely referred to as the inevitable
standard—which is to say, it had widespread legitimacy as the standard that
everyone should be implementing—but few implementations existed. Many of the
textbooks on networking from the late 1980s, especially those slanted toward a
theoretical introduction, give elaborate detail of the OSI reference model—a
generation of students in networking was no doubt trained to understand the
world in terms of OSI—but the ambivalence continued. Indeed, the most enduring
legacy of the creation of the OSI protocols is not the protocols themselves
(some of which, like ASN.1, are still ,{[pg 175]}, widely used today), but the
pedagogical model: the "7 layer stack" that is as ubiquitous in networking
classes and textbooks as UNIX is in operating-systems classes.~{ This can be
clearly seen, for instance, by comparing the various editions of the main
computer-networking textbooks: cf. Tanenbaum, Computer Networks, 1st ed.
(1981), 2d ed. (1988), 3d ed. (1996), and 4th ed. (2003); Stallings, Data and
Computer Communications, 1st ed. (1985), 2d ed. (1991), ,{[pg 332]}, 3d ed.
(1994), 4th ed. (1997), and 5th ed. (2004); and Comer, Internetworking with
TCP/IP (four editions between 1991 and 1999). }~
={ General Motors (GM) }

But in the late 1980s, the ambivalence turned to confusion. With OSI widely
recognized as the standard, TCP/IP began to show up in more and more actually
existing systems. For example, in Computer Network Architectures and Protocols,
Carl Sunshine says, "Now in the late 1980s, much of the battling seems over.
CCITT and ISO have aligned their efforts, and the research community seems
largely to have resigned itself to OSI." But immediately afterward he adds: "It
is ironic that while a consensus has developed that OSI is indeed inevitable,
the TCP/IP protocol suite has achieved widespread deployment, and now serves as
a de facto interoperability standard. . . . It appears that the vendors were
unable to bring OSI products to market quickly enough to satisfy the demand for
interoperable systems, and TCP/IP were there to fill the need."~{ Sunshine,
Computer Network Architectures and Protocols, 5. }~
={ Commité Consultative de Information, Technologie et Télécommunications (CCITT) ;
   pedagogy :
     network protocols and
}

The more implementations that appeared, the less secure the legitimate standard
seemed to be. By many accounts the OSI specifications were difficult to
implement, and the yearly networking-industry "Interop" conferences became a
regular locale for the religious war between TCP/IP and OSI. The success of
TCP/IP over OSI reflects the reorientation of knowledge and power to which Free
Software is also a response. The reasons for the success are no doubt complex,
but the significance of the success of TCP/IP illustrates three issues:
availability, modifiability, and serendipity.

!_ Availability
The TCP/IP standards themselves were free to anyone and available over TCP/IP
networks, exemplifying one of the aspects of a recursive public: that the only
test of participation in a TCP/IP-based internetwork is the fact that one
possesses or has created a device that implements TCP/IP. Access to the network
is contingent on the interoperability of the networks. The standards were not
"published" in a conventional sense, but made available through the network
itself, without any explicit intellectual property restrictions, and without
any fees or restrictions on who could access them. By contrast, ISO standards
are generally not circulated freely, but sold for relatively high prices, as a
source of revenue, and under the general theory that only legitimate
corporations or government agencies would need access to them.
={ availability :
     open systems and +1 ;
   recursive public +3
}

% ,{[pg 176]},

Related to the availability of the standards is the fact that the standards
process that governed TCP/IP was itself open to anyone, whether corporate,
military or academic. The structure of governance of the Internet Engineering
Task Force (the IETF) and the Internet Society (ISOC) allowed for anyone with
the means available to attend the "working group" meetings that would decide on
the standards that would be approved. Certainly this does not mean that the
engineers and defense contractors responsible actively sought out corporate
stakeholders or imagined the system to be "public" in any dramatic fashion;
however, compared to the system in place at most standards bodies (in which
members are usually required to be the representatives of corporations or
governments), the IETF allowed individuals to participate qua individuals.~{
The structure of the IETF, the Internet Architecture Board, and the ISOC is
detailed in Comer, Internetworking with TCP/IP, 8-13; also in Schmidt and
Werle, Coordinating Technology, 53-58. }~
={ Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) ;
   Internet Society (ISOC)
}

!_ Modifiability
Implementations of TCP/IP were widely available, bootstrapped from machine to
machine along with the UNIX operating system and other tools (e.g., the
implementation of TCP/IP in BSD 4.2, the BSD version of UNIX), generally
including the source code. An existing implementation is a much more expressive
and usable object than a specification for an implementation, and though ISO
generally prepares reference implementations for such standards, in the case of
OSI there were many fewer implementations to work with or build on. Because
multiple implementations of TCP/IP already existed, it was easy to validate:
did your (modified) implementation work with the other existing
implementations? By contrast, OSI would provide independent validation, but the
in situ validation through connection to other OSI networks was much harder to
achieve, there being too few of them, or access being restricted. It is far
easier to build on an existing implementation and to improve on it piecemeal,
or even to rewrite it completely, using its faults as a template (so to speak),
than it is to create an implementation based solely on a standard. The
existence of the TCP/IP protocols in BSD 4.2 not only meant that people who
installed that operating system could connect to the Internet easily, at a time
when it was by no means standard to be able to do so, but it also meant that
manufacturers or tinkerers could examine the implementation in BSD 4.2 as the
basis for a modified, or entirely new, implementation.
={ modifiability ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) ;
   standards :
     validation of
}

!_ Serendipity
Perhaps most significant, the appearance of widespread and popular applications
that were dependent on TCP/IP ,{[pg 177]}, gave those protocols an inertia that
OSI, with relatively few such applications, did not have. The most important of
these by far was the World Wide Web (the http protocol, the HTML mark-up
language, and implementations of both servers, such as libwww, and clients,
such as Mosaic and Netscape). The basic components of the Web were made to work
on top of the TCP/IP networks, like other services that had already been
designed (ftp, telnet, gopher, archie, etc.); thus, Tim Berners-Lee, who
co-invented the World Wide Web, could also rely on the availability and
openness of previous work for his own protocols. In addition, Berners-Lee and
CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) dedicated their work to
the public domain more or less immediately, essentially allowing anyone to do
anything they wished with the system they had cobbled together.~{ Message-ID: {
673c43e160cia758@sluvca.slu.edu.
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=673c43e160cia758@sluvca.slu.edu See also
Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. }~ From the perspective of the tension between
TCP/IP and OSI, the World Wide Web was thus what engineers call a "killer app,"
because its existence actually drove individuals and corporations to make
decisions (in favor of TCP/IP) that it might not have made otherwise.
={ Berners-Lee, Tim ;
   Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ;
   Mosaic (web browser) ;
   Netscape Navigator (application) ;
   World Wide Web (www)
}

2~ Conclusion

Openness and open systems are key to understanding the practices of Free
Software: the open-systems battles of the 1980s set the context for Free
Software, leaving in their wake a partially articulated infrastructure of
operating systems, networks, and markets that resulted from figuring out open
systems. The failure to create a standard UNIX operating system opened the door
for Microsoft Windows NT, but it also set the stage for the emergence of the
Linux-operating-system kernel to emerge and spread. The success of the TCP/IP
protocols forced multiple competing networking schemes into a single
standard—and a singular entity, the Internet—which carried with it a set of
built-in goals that mirror the moral-technical order of Free Software.
={ Linux (Free Software project) ;
   moral and technical order
}

This "infrastructure" is at once technical (protocols and standards and
implementations) and moral (expressing ideas about the proper order and
organization of commercial efforts to provide high-tech software, networks, and
computing power). As with the invention of UNIX, the opposition
commercial-noncommercial (or its doppelgangers public-private,
profit-nonprofit, capitalist-socialist, etc.) ,{[pg 178]}, doesn’t capture the
context. Constraints on the ability to collaborate, compete, or withdraw are in
the making here through the technical and moral imaginations of the actors
involved: from the corporate behemoths like IBM to (onetime) startups like Sun
to the independent academics and amateurs and geeks with stakes in the new
high-tech world of networks and software.
={ geeks }

The creation of a UNIX market failed. The creation of a legitimate
international networking standard failed. But they were local failures only.
They opened the doors to new forms of commercial practice (exemplified by
Netscape and the dotcom boom) and new kinds of politicotechnical fractiousness
(ICANN, IPv6, and "net neutrality"). But the blind spot of open
systems—intellectual property—at the heart of these failures also provided the
impetus for some geeks, entrepreneurs, and lawyers to start figuring out the
legal and economic aspects of Free Software, and it initiated a vibrant
experimentation with copyright licensing and with forms of innovative
coordination and collaboration built on top of the rapidly spreading protocols
of the Internet.
={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) }

1~ 6. Writing Copyright Licenses
={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) +110 ;
   General Public License (GPL) +110 ;
   Stallman, Richard +110 ;
   intellectual property +110
}

% ,{[pg 179]},

_1 To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to
deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. - Preamble to the
GNU General Public License

The use of novel, unconventional copyright licenses is, without a doubt, the
most widely recognized and exquisitely refined component of Free Software. The
GNU General Public License (GPL), written initially by Richard Stallman, is
often referred to as a beautiful, clever, powerful "hack" of
intellectual-property law—when it isn’t being denounced as a viral, infectious
object threatening the very fabric of economy and society. The very fact that
something so boring, so arcane, and so legalistic as a copyright license can
become an object of both devotional reverence and bilious scorn means there is
much more than fine print at stake. ,{[pg 180]},

By the beginning of the twenty-first century, there were hundreds of different
Free Software licenses, each with subtle legal and technical differences, and
an enormous legal literature to explain their details, motivation, and
impact.~{ The legal literature on Free Software expands constantly and quickly,
and it addresses a variety of different legal issues. Two excellent starting
points are Vetter, "The Collaborative Integrity of Open-Source Software" and
"‘Infectious’ Open Source Software." }~ Free Software licenses differ from
conventional copyright licenses on software because they usually restrict only
the terms of distribution, while so-called End User License Agreements (EULAs)
that accompany most proprietary software restrict what users can do with the
software. Ethnographically speaking, licenses show up everywhere in the field,
and contemporary hackers are some of the most legally sophisticated non-lawyers
in the world. Indeed, apprenticeship in the world of hacking is now impossible,
as Gabriella Coleman has shown, without a long, deep study of
intellectual-property law.~{ Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom." }~
={ Coleman, Gabriella ;
   End User License Agreements (EULAs)
}

But how did it come to be this way? As with the example of sharing UNIX source
code, Free Software licenses are often explained as a reaction to expanding
intellectual-property laws and resistance to rapacious corporations. The text
of the GPL itself begins deep in such assumptions: "The licenses for most
software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it."~{ "The
GNU General Public Licence, Version 2.0,"
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html. }~ But even if
corporations are rapacious, sharing and modifying software are by no means
natural human activities. The ideas of sharing and of common property and its
relation to freedom must always be produced through specific practices of
sharing, before being defended. The GPL is a precise example of how geeks fit
together the practices of sharing and modifying software with the moral and
technical orders—the social imaginaries—of freedom and autonomy. It is at once
an exquisitely precise legal document and the expression of an idea of how
software should be made available, shareable, and modifiable.
={ practices ;
   social imaginary ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software)
}

In this chapter I tell the story of the creation of the GPL, the first Free
Software license, during a controversy over EMACS, a very widely used and
respected piece of software; the controversy concerned the reuse of bits of
copyrighted source code in a version of EMACS ported to UNIX. There are two
reasons to retell this story carefully. The first is simply to articulate the
details of the origin of the Free Software license itself, as a central
component of Free Software, details that should be understood in the context of
changing copyright law and the UNIX and open-systems struggles of the 1980s.
Second, although the story of the GPL is also an oft-told story of the "hacker
ethic," the GPL is not an "expression" of this ,{[pg 181]}, ethic, as if the
ethic were genotype to a legal phenotype. Opposite the familiar story of
ethics, I explain how the GPL was "figured out" in the controversy over EMACS,
how it was formed in response to a complicated state of affairs, both legal and
technical, and in a medium new to all the participants: the online mailing
lists and discussion lists of Usenet and Arpanet.~{ All existing accounts of
the hacker ethic come from two sources: from Stallman himself and from the
colorful and compelling chapter about Stallman in Steven Levy’s Hackers. Both
acknowledge a prehistory to the ethic. Levy draws it back in time to the MIT
Tech Model Railroad Club of the 1950s, while Stallman is more likely to
describe it as reaching back to the scientific revolution or earlier. The
stories of early hackerdom at MIT are avowedly Edenic, and in them hackers live
in a world of uncontested freedom and collegial competition—something like a
writer’s commune without the alcohol or the brawling. There are stories about a
printer whose software needed fixing but was only available under a
nondisclosure agreement; about a requirement to use passwords (Stallman
refused, chose <return> as his password, and hacked the system to encourage
others to do the same); about a programming war between different LISP
machines; and about the replacement of the Incompatible Time-Sharing System
with DEC’s TOPS-20 ("Twenex") operating system. These stories are oft-told
usable pasts, but they are not representative. Commercial constraints have
always been part of academic life in computer science and engineering: hardware
and software were of necessity purchased from commercial manufacturers and
often controlled by them, even if they offered "academic" or "educational"
licenses. }~
={ EMACS (text editor) +105 ;
   Hacker ethic +1 ;
   Open Systems ;
   Usenet ;
   Arpanet (network) ;
   hackers :
     hacks and +7 ;
   ethnographic data :
     availability of | mailing lists and +1
}

The story of the creation of the GNU General Public License ultimately affirms
the hacker ethic, not as a story of the ethical hacker genius, but as a
historically specific event with a duration and a context, as something that
emerges in response to the reorientation of knowledge and power, and through
the active modulation of existing practices among both human and nonhuman
actors. While hackers themselves might understand the hacker ethic as an
unchanging set of moral norms, their practices belie this belief and
demonstrate how ethics and norms can emerge suddenly and sharply, undergo
repeated transformations, and bifurcate into ideologically distinct camps (Free
Software vs. Open Source), even as the practices remain stable relative to
them. The hacker ethic does not descend from the heights of philosophy like the
categorical imperative—hackers have no Kant, nor do they want one. Rather, as
Manuel Delanda has suggested, the philosophy of Free Software is the fact of
Free Software itself, its practices and its things. If there is a hacker ethic,
it is Free Software itself, it is the recursive public itself, which is much
more than a list of norms.~{ Delanda, "Open Source." }~ By understanding it in
this way, it becomes possible to track the proliferation and differentiation of
the hacker ethic into new and surprising realms, instead of assuming its static
universal persistence as a mere procedure that hackers execute.
={ Delanda, Manuel ;
   practices :
     five components of Free Software +2 ;
   Kant, Immanuel ;
   recursive public ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge
}

2~ Free Software Licenses, Once More with Feeling

In lecturing on liberalism in 1935, John Dewey said the following of Jeremy
Bentham: "He was, we might say, the first great muck-raker in the field of law
. . . but he was more than that, whenever he saw a defect, he proposed a
remedy. He was an inventor in law and administration, as much so as any
contemporary in mechanical production."~{ Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action.
}~ Dewey’s point was that the liberal reforms attributed to Bentham came not so
much from his theories as from his direct involvement in administrative and
legal reform—his experimentation. ,{[pg 182]}, Whether or not Bentham’s
influence is best understood this way, it nonetheless captures an important
component of liberal reform in Europe and America that is also a key component
in the story of Free Software: that the route to achieving change is through
direct experiment with the system of law and administration.
={ Bentham, Jeremy +1 ;
   Dewey, John ;
   experimentation :
     administrative reform as +1 ;
   figuring out
}

A similar story might be told of Richard Stallman, hacker hero and founder of
the Free Software Foundation, creator of (among many other things) the GNU C
Compiler and GNU EMACS, two of the most widely used and tested Free Software
tools in the world. Stallman is routinely abused for holding what many perceive
to be "dogmatic" or "intractable" ideological positions about freedom and the
right of individuals to do what they please with software. While it is no doubt
quite true that his speeches and writings clearly betray a certain fervor and
fanaticism, it would be a mistake to assume that his speeches, ideas, or
belligerent demands concerning word choice constitute the real substance of his
reform. In fact, it is the software he has created and the licenses he has
written and rewritten which are the key to his Bentham-like inventiveness.
Unlike Bentham, however, Stallman is not a creator of law and administrative
structure, but a hacker.
={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) }

Stallman’s GNU General Public License "hacks" the federal copyright law, as is
often pointed out. It does this by taking advantage of the very strong rights
granted by federal law to actually loosen the restrictions normally associated
with ownership. Because the statutes grant owners strong powers to create
restrictions, Stallman’s GPL contains the restriction that anybody can use the
licensed material, for any purpose, so long as they subsequently offer the same
restriction. Hacks (after which hackers are named) are clever solutions to
problems or shortcomings in technology. Hacks are work-arounds, clever,
shortest-path solutions that take advantage of characteristics of the system
that may or may not have been obvious to the people who designed it. Hacks
range from purely utilitarian to mischievously pointless, but they always
depend on an existing system or tool through which they achieve their point. To
call Free Software a hack is to point out that it would be nothing without the
existence of intellectual-property law: it relies on the structure of U.S.
copyright law (USC§17) in order to subvert it. Free Software licenses are, in a
sense, immanent to copyright laws—there is nothing illegal or even legally
arcane about what they accomplish—but there is nonetheless a kind of lingering
sense ,{[pg 183]}, that this particular use of copyright was not how the law
was intended to function.
={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     as hack of copyright law +1 ;
   Copyright +1
}

Like all software since the 1980 copyright amendments, Free Software is
copyrightable—and what’s more, automatically copyrighted as it is written
(there is no longer any requirement to register). Copyright law grants the
author (or the employer of the author) a number of strong rights over the
dispensation of what has been written: rights to copy, distribute, and change
the work.~{ Copyright Act of 1976, Pub. L. No. 94-553, 90 Stat. 2541, enacted
19 October 1976; and Copyright Amendments, Pub. L. No. 96-517, 94 Stat. 3015,
3028 (amending §101 and §117, title 17, United States Code, regarding computer
programs), enacted 12 December 1980. All amendments since 1976 are listed at
http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92preface.html. }~ Free Software’s hack is to
immediately make use of these rights in order to abrogate the rights the
programmer has been given, thus granting all subsequent licensees rights to
copy, distribute, modify, and use the copyrighted software. Some licenses, like
the GPL, add the further restriction that every licensee must offer the same
terms to any subsequent licensee, others make no such restriction on subsequent
uses. Thus, while statutory law suggests that individuals need strong rights
and grants them, Free Software licenses effectively annul them in favor of
other activities, such as sharing, porting, and forking software. It is for
this reason that they have earned the name "copyleft."~{ The history of the
copyright and software is discussed in Litman, Digital Copyright; Cohen et al.,
Copyright in a Global Information Economy; and Merges, Menell, and Lemley,
Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age. }~
={ Copyright :
     changes in 1976 | rights granted by
}

This is a convenient ex post facto description, however. Neither Stallman nor
anyone else started out with the intention of hacking copyright law. The hack
of the Free Software licenses was a response to a complicated controversy over
a very important invention, a tool that in turn enabled an invention called
EMACS. The story of the controversy is well-known among hackers and geeks, but
not often told, and not in any rich detail, outside of these small circles.~{
See Wayner, Free for All; Moody, Rebel Code; and Williams, Free as in Freedom.
Although this story could be told simply by interviewing Stallman and James
Gosling, both of whom are still alive and active in the software world, I have
chosen to tell it through a detailed analysis of the Usenet and Arpanet
archives of the controversy. The trade-off is between a kind of incomplete,
fly-on-the-wall access to a moment in history and the likely revisionist
retellings of those who lived through it. All of the messages referenced here
are cited by their "Message-ID," which should allow anyone interested to access
the original messages through Google Groups (http://groups.google.com). }~

2~ EMACS, the Extensible, Customizable, Self-documenting, Real-time Display Editor
={ text editors +13 ;
   EMACS (text editor) :
     modularity and extensibility of +7
}

EMACS is a text editor; it is also something like a religion. As one of the two
most famous text editors, it is frequently lauded by its devoted users and
attacked by detractors who prefer its competitor (Bill Joy’s vi, also created
in the late 1970s). EMACS is more than just a tool for writing text; for many
programmers, it was (and still is) the principal interface to the operating
system. For instance, it allows a programmer not only to write a program but
also to debug it, to compile it, to run it, and to e-mail it to another user,
,{[pg 184]}, all from within the same interface. What’s more, it allows users
to quickly and easily write extensions to EMACS itself, extensions that
automate frequent tasks and in turn become core features of the software. It
can do almost anything, but it can also frustrate almost anyone. The name
itself is taken from its much admired extensibility: EMACS stands for "editing
macros" because it allows programmers to quickly record a series of commands
and bundle them into a macro that can be called with a simple key combination.
In fact, it was one of the first editors (if not the first) to take advantage
of keys like ctrl and meta, as in the now ubiquitous ctrl-S familiar to users
of non-free word processors like Microsoft Word™.
={ Joy, Bill ;
   vi (text editor)
}

Appreciate the innovation represented by EMACS: before the UNIX-dominated
minicomputer era, there were very few programs for directly manipulating text
on a display. To conceive of source code as independent of a program running on
a machine meant first conceiving of it as typed, printed, or hand-scrawled code
which programmers would scrutinize in its more tangible, paper-based form.
Editors that allowed programmers to display the code in front of them on a
screen, to manipulate it directly, and to save changes to those files were an
innovation of the mid- to late 1960s and were not widespread until the
mid-1970s (and this only for bleeding-edge academics and computer
corporations). Along with a few early editors, such as QED (originally created
by Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch, and rewritten for UNIX by Ken Thompson),
one of the most famous of these was TECO (text editor and corrector), written
by Dan Murphy for DEC’s PDP-1 computer in 1962-63. Over the years, TECO was
transformed (ported and extended) to a wide variety of machines, including
machines at Berkeley and MIT, and to other DEC hardware and operating systems.
By the early 1970s, there was a version of TECO running on the Incompatible
Time-sharing System (ITS), the system in use at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence
(AI) Lab, and it formed the basis for EMACS. (Thus, EMACS was itself conceived
of as a series of macros for a separate editor: Editing MACroS for TECO.)
={ Artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab), at MIT +10 ;
   QED (text editor) ;
   TECO (text editor and programming language) +1
}

Like all projects on ITS at the AI Lab, many people contributed to the
extension and maintenance of EMACS (including Guy Steele, Dave Moon, Richard
Greenblatt, and Charles Frankston), but there is a clear recognition that
Stallman made it what it was. The earliest AI Lab memo on EMACS, by Eugene
Ciccarelli, says: "Finally, of all the people who have contributed to the
development of EMACS, ,{[pg 185]}, and the TECO behind it, special mention and
appreciation go to Richard M. Stallman. He not only gave TECO the power and
generality it has, but brought together the good ideas of many different
Teco-function packages, added a tremendous amount of new ideas and environment,
and created EMACS. Personally one of the joys of my avocational life has been
writing Teco/EMACS functions; what makes this fun and not painful is the rich
set of tools to work with, all but a few of which have an ‘RMS’ chiseled
somewhere on them."~{ Eugene Ciccarelli, "An Introduction to the EMACS Editor,"
MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 447, 1978, 2. }~

At this point, in 1978, EMACS lived largely on ITS, but its reputation soon
spread, and it was ported to DEC’s TOPS-20 (Twenex) operating system and
rewritten for Multics and the MIT’s LISP machine, on which it was called EINE
(Eine Is Not EMACS), and which was followed by ZWEI (Zwei Was Eine Initially).
={ Multics ;
   proliferation of software +1
}

The proliferation of EMACS was both pleasing and frustrating to Stallman, since
it meant that the work fragmented into different projects, each of them
EMACS-like, rather than building on one core project, and in a 1981 report he
said, "The proliferation of such superficial facsimiles of EMACS has an
unfortunate confusing effect: their users, not knowing that they are using an
imitation of EMACS and never having seen EMACS itself, are led to believe they
are enjoying all the advantages of EMACS. Since any real-time display editor is
a tremendous improvement over what they probably had before, they believe this
readily. To prevent such confusion, we urge everyone to refer to a
nonextensible imitation of EMACS as an ‘ersatz EMACS.’ "~{ Richard Stallman,
"EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," MIT
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March 1981, 19.
Also published as Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable
Self-documenting Display Editor," Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN SIGOA
Symposium on Text Manipulation, 8-10 June (ACM, 1981), 147-56. }~
={ EMACS (text editor) :
     ersatz versions
}

Thus, while EMACS in its specific form on ITS was a creation of Stallman, the
idea of EMACS or of any "real-time display editor" was proliferating in
different forms and on different machines. The porting of EMACS, like the
porting of UNIX, was facilitated by both its conceptual design integrity and
its widespread availability.
={ design +1 }

The phrase "nonextensible imitation" captures the combination of design
philosophy and moral philosophy that EMACS represented. Extensibility was not
just a useful feature for the individual computer user; it was a way to make
the improvements of each new user easily available equally to all by providing
a standard way for users to add extensions and to learn how to use new
extensions that were added (the "self-documenting" feature of the system). The
program had a conceptual integrity that was compromised when it was copied
imperfectly. EMACS has a modular, extensible design ,{[pg 186]}, that by its
very nature invites users to contribute to it, to extend it, and to make it
perform all manner of tasks—to literally copy and modify it, instead of
imitating it. For Stallman, this was not only a fantastic design for a text
editor, but an expression of the way he had always done things in the
small-scale setting of the AI Lab. The story of Stallman’s moral commitments
stresses his resistance to secrecy in software production, and EMACS is, both
in its design and in Stallman’s distribution of it an example of this
resistance.
={ modifiability :
     EMACS and +12 ;
   moral and technical order +7 ;
   Secrecy
}

Not everyone shared Stallman’s sense of communal order, however. In order to
facilitate the extension of EMACS through sharing, Stallman started something
he called the "EMACS commune." At the end of the 1981 report—"EMACS: The
Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display Editor," dated 26 March—he
explained the terms of distribution for EMACS: "It is distributed on a basis of
communal sharing, which means that all improvements must be given back to me to
be incorporated and distributed. Those who are interested should contact me.
Further information about how EMACS works is available in the same way."~{
Richard Stallman, "EMACS: The Extensible, Customizable Self-documenting Display
Editor," MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 519a, 26 March
1981, 24. }~
={ EMACS commune +19 }

In another report, intended as a user’s manual for EMACS, Stallman gave more
detailed and slightly more colorful instructions:

_1 EMACS does not cost anything; instead, you are joining the EMACS
software-sharing commune. The conditions of membership are that you must send
back any improvements you make to EMACS, including any libraries you write, and
that you must not redistribute the system except exactly as you got it,
complete. (You can also distribute your customizations, separately.) Please do
not attempt to get a copy of EMACS, for yourself or anyone else, by dumping it
off of your local system. It is almost certain to be incomplete or
inconsistent. It is pathetic to hear from sites that received incomplete copies
lacking the sources [source code], asking me years later whether sources are
available. (All sources are distributed, and should be on line at every site so
that users can read them and copy code from them). If you wish to give away a
copy of EMACS, copy a distribution tape from MIT, or mail me a tape and get a
new one.~{ Richard M. Stallman, "EMACS Manual for ITS Users," MIT Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory, AI Lab Memo no. 554, 22 October 1981, 163. }~

Because EMACS was so widely admired and respected, Stallman had a certain
amount of power over this commune. If it had been an obscure, nonextensible
tool, useful for a single purpose, no one would have heeded such demands, but
because EMACS was by nature the kind of tool that was both useful for all kinds
of tasks and ,{[pg 187]}, customizable for specific ones, Stallman was not the
only person who benefited from this communal arrangement. Two disparate sites
may well have needed the same macro extension, and therefore many could easily
see the social benefit in returning extensions for inclusion, as well as in
becoming a kind of co-developer of such a powerful system. As a result, the
demands of the EMACS commune, while unusual and autocratic, were of obvious
value to the flock. In terms of the concept of recursive public, EMACS was
itself the tool through which it was possible for users to extend EMACS, the
medium of their affinity; users had a natural incentive to share their
contributions so that all might receive the maximum benefit.
={ affinity (of geeks) ;
   recursive public
}

The terms of the EMACS distribution agreement were not quite legally binding;
nothing compelled participation except Stallman’s reputation, his hectoring, or
a user’s desire to reciprocate. On the one hand, Stallman had not yet chosen
to, or been forced to, understand the details of the legal system, and so the
EMACS commune was the next best thing. On the other hand, the state of
intellectual-property law was in great flux at the time, and it was not clear
to anyone, whether corporate or academic, exactly what kind of legal
arrangements would be legitimate (the 1976 changes to copyright law were some
of the most drastic in seventy years, and a 1980 amendment made software
copyrightable, but no court cases had yet tested these changes). Stallman’s
"agreement" was a set of informal rules that expressed the general sense of
mutual aid that was a feature of both the design of the system and Stallman’s
own experience at the AI Lab. It was an expression of the way Stallman expected
others to behave, and his attempts to punish or shame people amounted to
informal enforcement of these expectations. The small scale of the community
worked in Stallman’s favor.
={ Copyright :
     changes in 1976 | changes in 1980
}

At its small scale, Stallman’s commune was confronting many of the same issues
that haunted the open-systems debates emerging at the same time, issues of
interoperability, source-code sharing, standardization, portability, and
forking. In particular, Stallman was acutely aware of the blind spot of open
systems: the conflict of moral-technical orders represented by intellectual
property. While UNIX vendors left intellectual-property rules unchallenged and
simply assumed that they were the essential ground rules of debate, Stallman
made them the substance of his experiment and, like Bentham, became something
of a legal muckraker as a result.
={ Open Systems }

% ,{[pg 188]},

Stallman’s communal model could not completely prevent the porting and forking
of software. Despite Stallman’s request that imitators refer to their versions
of EMACS as ersatz EMACS, few did. In the absence of legal threats over a
trademarked term there was not much to stop people from calling their ports and
forks EMACS, a problem of success not unlike that of Kleenex or Xerox. Few
people took the core ideas of EMACS, implemented them in an imitation, and then
called it something else (EINE and ZWEI were exceptions). In the case of UNIX
the proliferation of forked versions of the software did not render them any
less UNIX, even when AT&T insisted on ownership of the trademarked name. But as
time went on, EMACS was ported, forked, rewritten, copied, or imitated on
different operating systems and different computer architectures in
universities and corporations around the world; within five or six years, many
versions of EMACS were in wide use. It was this situation of successful
adoption that would provide the context for the controversy that occurred
between 1983 and 1985.
={ EMACS (text editor) :
     ersatz versions +6 | controversy about +43
}

2~ The Controversy

In brief the controversy was this: in 1983 James Gosling decided to sell his
version of EMACS—a version written in C for UNIX called GOSMACS—to a commercial
software vendor called Unipress. GOSMACS, the second most famous implementation
of EMACS (after Stallman’s itself ), was written when Gosling was a graduate
student at Carnegie Mellon University. For years, Gosling had distributed
GOSMACS by himself and had run a mailing list on Usenet, on which he answered
queries and discussed extensions. Gosling had explicitly asked people not to
redistribute the program, but to come back to him (or send interested parties
to him directly) for new versions, making GOSMACS more of a benevolent
dictatorship than a commune. Gosling maintained his authority, but graciously
accepted revisions and bug-fixes and extensions from users, incorporating them
into new releases. Stallman’s system, by contrast, allowed users to distribute
their extensions themselves, as well as have them included in the "official"
EMACS. By 1983, Gosling had decided he was unable to effectively maintain and
support GOSMACS—a task he considered the proper role of a corporation.
={ Gosling, James +64 ;
   GOSMACS (version of EMACS) +41 ;
   Unipress +41
}

% ,{[pg 189]},

For Stallman, Gosling’s decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was "software
sabotage." Even though Gosling had been substantially responsible for writing
GOSMACS, Stallman felt somewhat proprietorial toward this ersatz version—or, at
the very least, was irked that no noncommercial UNIX version of EMACS existed.
So Stallman wrote one himself (as part of a project he announced around the
same time, called GNU [GNU’s Not UNIX], to create a complete non-AT&T version
of UNIX). He called his version GNU EMACS and released it under the same EMACS
commune terms. The crux of the debate hinged on the fact that Stallman used,
albeit ostensibly with permission, a small piece of Gosling’s code in his new
version of EMACS, a fact that led numerous people, including the new commercial
suppliers of EMACS, to cry foul. Recriminations and legal threats ensued and
the controversy was eventually resolved when Stallman rewrote the offending
code, thus creating an entirely "Gosling-free" version that went on to become
the standard UNIX version of EMACS.
={ GNU (Gnu's Not Unix) +40 ;
   EMACS (text editor) :
     ersatz versions
}

The story raises several questions with respect to the changing legal context.
In particular, it raises questions about the difference between "law on the
books" and "law in action," that is, the difference between the actions of
hackers and commercial entities, advised by lawyers and legally minded friends,
and the text and interpretation of statutes as they are written by legislators
and interpreted by courts and lawyers. The legal issues span trade secret,
patent, and trademark, but copyright is especially significant. Three issues
were undecided at the time: the copyrightability of software, the definition of
what counts as software and what doesn’t, and the meaning of copyright
infringement. While the controversy did not resolve any of these issues (the
first two would be resolved by Congress and the courts, the third remains
somewhat murky), it did clarify the legal issues for Stallman sufficiently that
he could leave behind the informal EMACS commune and create the first version
of a Free Software license, the GNU General Public License, which first started
appearing in 1985.
={ Copyright :
     software and copyrightability | legal definition of software and +70 | infringement and software +70 ;
   software :
     copyrightability of +70 ;
   trademark law ;
   trade secret law
}

Gosling’s decision to sell GOSMACS, announced in April of 1983, played into a
growing EMACS debate being carried out on the GOSMACS mailing list, a Usenet
group called net.emacs. Since net.emacs was forwarded to the Arpanet via a
gateway maintained by John Gilmore at Sun Microsystems, a fairly large
community ,{[pg 190]}, of EMACS users were privy to Gosling’s announcement.
Prior to his declaration, there had been quite a bit of discussion regarding
different versions of EMACS, including an already "commercial" version called
CCA EMACS, written by Steve Zimmerman, of Computer Corporation of America
(CCA).~{ Back in January of 1983, Steve Zimmerman had announced that the
company he worked for, CCA, had created a commercial version of EMACS called
CCA EMACS (Message-ID: { 385@yetti.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=385@yetti.uucp ). Zimmerman had not
written this version entirely, but had taken a version written by Warren
Montgomery at Bell Labs (written for UNIX on PDP-11s) and created the version
that was being used by programmers at CCA. Zimmerman had apparently distributed
it by ftp at first, but when CCA determined that it might be worth something,
they decided to exploit it commercially, rather than letting Zimmerman
distribute it "freely." By Zimmerman’s own ,{[pg 334]}, account, this whole
procedure required ensuring that there was nothing left of the original code by
Warren Montgomery that Bell Labs owned (Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp ). }~ Some readers
wanted comparisons between CCA EMACS and GOSMACS; others objected that it was
improper to discuss a commercial version on the list: was such activity
legitimate, or should it be carried out as part of the commercial company’s
support activities? Gosling’s announcement was therefore a surprise, since it
was already perceived to be the "noncommercial" version.
={ net.emacs (mailing list) +38 ;
   Computer Corporation of America (CCA) +60 ;
   Zimmerman, Steve +60
}

group{

Date: Tue Apr 12 04:51:12 1983

Subject: EMACS goes commercial

  The version of EMACS that I wrote is now available commercially through a company called Unipress. . . . They will be doing development, maintenance and will be producing a real manual. EMACS will be available on many machines (it already runs on VAXen under Unix and VMS, SUNs, codatas, and Microsoft Xenix). Along with this, I regret to say that I will no longer be distributing it.

  This is a hard step to take, but I feel that it is necessary. I can no longer look after it properly, there are too many demands on my time. EMACS has grown to be completely unmanageable. Its popularity has made it impossible to distribute free: just the task of writing tapes and stuffing them into envelopes is more than I can handle.

  The alternative of abandoning it to the public domain is unacceptable. Too many other programs have been destroyed that way.

  Please support these folks. The effort that they can afford to put into looking after EMACS is directly related to the support they get. Their prices are reasonable.

James.~{ Message-ID for Gosling: { bnews.sri-arpa.865. }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=bnews.sri-arpa.865 }~

}group
={ Microsoft :
     Xenix (version of UNIX) ;
   public domain :
     meaning in EMACS controversy +59
}

The message is worth paying careful attention to: Gosling’s work of
distributing the tapes had become "unmanageable," and the work of maintenance,
upkeep, and porting (making it available on multiple architectures) is
something he clearly believes should be done by a commercial enterprise.
Gosling, it is clear, did not understand his effort in creating and maintaining
EMACS to have emerged from a communal sharing of bits of code—even if he had
done a Sisyphean amount of work to incorporate all the changes and suggestions
his users had made—but he did long have a commitment ,{[pg 191]}, to
distributing it for free, a commitment that resulted in many people
contributing bits and pieces to GOSMACS.

"Free," however, did not mean "public domain," as is clear from his statement
that "abandoning it" to the public domain would destroy the program. The
distinction is an important one that was, and continues to be, lost on many
sophisticated members of net.emacs. Here, free means without charge, but
Gosling had no intention of letting that word suggest that he was not the
author, owner, maintainer, distributor, and sole beneficiary of whatever value
GOSMACS had. Public domain, by contrast, implied giving up all these rights.~{
The thread starting at Message-ID: { 969@sdcsvax.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=969@sdcsvax.uucp contains one example of
a discussion over the difference between public-domain and commercial software.
}~ His decision to sell GOSMACS to Unipress was a decision to transfer these
rights to a company that would then charge for all the labor he had previously
provided for no charge (for "free"). Such a distinction was not clear to
everyone; many people considered the fact that GOSMACS was free to imply that
it was in the public domain.~{ In particular, a thread discussing this in
detail starts at Message-ID: { 172@encore.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=172@encore.uucp and includes Message-ID:
{ 137@osu-eddie.UUCP }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=137@osu-eddie.UUCP,
Message-ID: { 1127@godot.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1127@godot.uucp, Message-ID: {
148@osu-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=148@osu-eddie.uucp. }~
Not least of these was Richard Stallman, who referred to Gosling’s act as
"software sabotage" and urged people to avoid using the "semi-ersatz" Unipress
version.~{ Message-ID: bnews.sri-arpa.988. }~
={ Public domain :
     contrasted with free +12
}

To Stallman, the advancing commercialization of EMACS, both by CCA and by
Unipress, was a frustrating state of affairs. The commercialization of CCA had
been of little concern so long as GOSMACS remained free, but with Gosling’s
announcement, there was no longer a UNIX version of EMACS available. To
Stallman, however, "free" meant something more than either "public domain" or
"for no cost." The EMACS commune was designed to keep EMACS alive and growing
as well as to provide it for free—it was an image of community stewardship, a
community that had included Gosling until April 1983.

The disappearance of a UNIX version of EMACS, as well as the sudden commercial
interest in making UNIX into a marketable operating system, fed into Stallman’s
nascent plan to create a completely new, noncommercial, non-AT&T UNIX operating
system that he would give away free to anyone who could use it. He announced
his intention on 27 September 1983:~{ Message-ID: { 771@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=771@mit-eddie.uucp, announced on
net.unix-wizards and net.usoft. }~
={ GNU Manifesto +7 }

group{

Free Unix!

  Starting this Thanksgiving I am going to write a complete Unix-compatible software system called GNU (for Gnu’s Not Unix), and give it away free to everyone who can use it. Contributions of time, money, programs and equipment are greatly needed.

}group

% ,{[pg 192]},

His justifications were simple.

group{

Why I Must Write GNU

  I consider that the golden rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement.

  So that I can continue to use computers without violating my principles, I have decided to put together a sufficient body of free software so that I will be able to get along without any software that is not free.~{ Message-ID: { 771@mit-eddie.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=771@mit-eddie.uucp. }~

}group

At that point, it is clear, there was no "free software license." There was the
word free, but not the term public domain. There was the "golden rule," and
there was a resistance to nondisclosure and license arrangements in general,
but certainly no articulated conception of copyleft of Free Software as a
legally distinct entity. And yet Stallman hardly intended to "abandon it" to
the public domain, as Gosling suggested. Instead, Stallman likely intended to
require the same EMACS commune rules to apply to Free Software, rules that he
would be able to control largely by overseeing (in a nonlegal sense) who was
sent or sold what and by demanding (in the form of messages attached to the
software) that any modifications or improvements come in the form of donations.
It was during the period 1983-85 that the EMACS commune morphed into the GPL,
as Stallman began adding copyrights and appending messages that made explicit
what people could do with the software.~{ Various other people seem to have
conceived of a similar scheme around the same time (if the Usenet archives are
any guide), including Guido Van Rossum (who would later become famous for the
creation of the Python scripting language). The following is from Message-ID:
5568@mcvax.uucp: \\ /* This software is copyright (c) Mathematical Centre,
Amsterdam, \\ * 1983. \\ * Permission is granted to use and copy this software,
but not for * profit, \\ * and provided that these same conditions are imposed
on any person \\ * receiving or using the software. \\ */ }~
={ EMACS commune }

The GNU project initially received little attention, however; scattered
messages to net.unix-wizards over the course of 1983-84 periodically ask about
the status and how to contact them, often in the context of discussions of AT&T
UNIX licensing practices that were unfolding as UNIX was divested and began to
market its own version of UNIX.~{ For example, Message-ID: { 6818@brl-tgr.arpa
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6818@brl-tgr.arpa. }~ Stallman’s original
plan for GNU was to start with the core operating system, the kernel, but his
extensive work on EMACS and the sudden need for a free EMACS for UNIX led him
to start with a UNIX version of EMACS. In 1984 and into 1985, he and others
began work on a UNIX version of GNU EMACS. The two commercial versions of UNIX
EMACS (CCA EMACS and Unipress EMACS) continued to circulate and improve in
parallel. DEC users meanwhile used the original free version created by
Stallman. And, as often happens, life went on: Zimmerman left CCA in August
,{[pg 193]}, 1984, and Gosling moved to Sun, neither of them remaining closely
involved in the software they had created, but leaving the new owners to do so.
={ AT&T ;
   Digital Equipment Corporation (corporation) +1 ;
   Sun Microsystems +1
}

By March 1985, Stallman had a complete version (version 15) of GNU EMACS
running on the BSD 4.2 version of UNIX (the version Bill Joy had helped create
and had taken with him to form the core of Sun’s version of UNIX), running on
DEC’s VAX computers. Stallman announced this software in a characteristically
flamboyant manner, publishing in the computer programmers’ monthly magazine Dr.
Dobbs an article entitled "The GNU Manifesto."~{ Stallman, "The GNU Manifesto."
Available at GNU’s Not Unix!, http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html. }~
={ Joy, Bill }

Stallman’s announcement that a free version of UNIX EMACS was available caused
some concern among commercial distributors. The main such concern was that GNU
EMACS 15.34 contained code marked "Copyright (c) James Gosling," code used to
make EMACS display on screen.~{ The main file of the controversy was called
display.c. A version that was modified by Chris Torek appears in net.sources,
Message-ID: { 424@umcp-cs.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=424@umcp-cs.uucp. A separate example of a
piece of code written by Gosling bears a note that claims he had declared it
public domain, but did not "include the infamous Stallman anti-copyright
clause" (Message-ID: { 78@tove.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=78@tove.uucp ). }~ The "discovery" (not
so difficult, since Stallman always distributed the source code along with the
binary) that this code had been reused by Stallman led to extensive discussion
among EMACS users of issues such as the mechanics of copyright, the nature of
infringement, the definition of software, the meaning of public domain, the
difference between patent, copyright, and trade secret, and the mechanics of
permission and its granting—in short, a discussion that would be repeatedly
recapitulated in nearly every software and intellectual property controversy in
the future.
={ Copyright infringement :
     EMACS controversy and ;
   EMACS (text editor) :
     legal status of +48 ;
   rumor on Usenet +7 ;
   Usenet :
     rumor on +7
}

The story of the controversy reveals the structure of rumor on the Usenet to be
a bit like the child’s game of Chinese Whispers, except that the translations
are all archived. GNU EMACS 15.34 was released in March 1985. Between March and
early June there was no mention of its legal status, but around June 3 messages
on the subject began to proliferate. The earliest mention of the issue appeared
not on net.emacs, but on fa.info-vax—a newsgroup devoted to discussions of VAX
computer systems ("fa" stands for "from Arpanet")—and it included a dialogue,
between Ron Natalie and Marty Sasaki, labeled "GNU EMACS: How Public Domain?":
"FOO, don’t expect that GNU EMACS is really in the public domain. UNIPRESS
seems rather annoyed that there are large portions of it that are marked
copyright James Gosling."~{ Message-ID: { 7773@ucbvax.arpa.
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=7773@ucbvax.arpa }~ This message was
reprinted on 4 June 1985 on net.emacs, with the addendum: "RMS’s work is based
on a version of Gosling code that existed before Unipress got it. Gosling had
put that code into the public domain. Any ,{[pg 194]}, work taking off from the
early Gosling code is therefore also public domain."~{ Message-ID: {
11400007@inmet.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=11400007@inmet.uucp.
}~

The addendum was then followed by an extensive reply from Zimmerman, whose CCA
EMACS had been based on Warren Montgomery’s Bell Labs EMACS but rewritten to
avoid reusing the code, which may account for why his understanding of the
issue seems to have been both deep and troubling for him.
={ Montgomery, Warren }

_1 This is completely contrary to Gosling’s public statements. Before he made
his arrangements with Unipress, Gosling’s policy was that he would send a free
copy of his EMACS to anyone who asked, but he did not (publicly, at least) give
anyone else permission to make copies. Once Unipress started selling Gosling’s
EMACS, Gosling stopped distributing free copies and still did not grant anyone
else permission to make them; instead, he suggested that people buy EMACS from
Unipress. All versions of Gosling’s EMACS distributed by him carry his
copyright notice, and therefore none of them are in the public domain. Removing
copyright notices without the author’s permission is, of course, illegal. Now,
a quick check of my GNU EMACS sources shows that sure enough, a number of files
have Gosling’s copyright notice in them. What this all means is that unless RMS
got written permission from Gosling to distribute his code, all copies of GNU
EMACS constitute violations of the copyright law. All those people making such
copies, including those people who allow them to be copied off their machines,
could each be liable for large sums of money. I think that RMS had better tell
us if he has Gosling’s written permission to make these copies. If so, why has
he not stated this earlier (preferably in the distribution itself ) and thereby
cleared up a potentially major point of confusion? If not, why has he gone
ahead and made many, many people liable for criminal prosecution by
recommending that they distribute this code without even warning them of their
liability? (People who distribute this code would be liable even if they claim
that they didn’t see Gosling’s notices; the fact that the notices are there is
sufficient. "Ignorance of the law is no excuse.")
={ AT&T :
     version of EMACS ;
   Copyright infringement :
     permissions and +45
}

_1 Now, I have nothing against free software; it’s a free country and people
can do what they want. It’s just that people who do distribute free software
had better be sure that they have the legal right to do so, or be prepared to
face the consequences. (Jun 9, 1985).~{ Message-ID: { 717@masscomp.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=717@masscomp.uucp. }~

Stallman replied the next day. ,{[pg 195]},

_1 Nobody has any reason to be afraid to use or distribute GNU EMACS. It is
well known that I do not believe any software is anyone’s property. However,
for the GNU project, I decided it was necessary to obey the law. I have refused
to look at code I did not have permission to distribute. About 5% of GNU EMACS
is close to (though quite a bit changed from) an old version of Gosling EMACS.
I am distributing it for Fen Labalme, who received permission from Gosling to
distribute it. It is therefore legal for me to do so. To be scrupulously legal,
I put statements at the front of the files concerned, describing this
situation.
={ Labalme, Fen +8 }

_1 I don’t see anything I should warn people about—except that Zimmerman is
going to try to browbeat them.~{ Message-ID: { 4421@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4421@mit-eddie.uucp. }~

Stallman’s original defense for using Gosling’s code was that he had permission
to do so. According to him, Fen Labalme had received written permission—whether
to make use of or to redistribute is not clear—the display code that was
included in GNU EMACS 15.34. According to Stallman, versions of Labalme’s
version of Gosling’s version of EMACS were in use in various places (including
at Labalme’s employer, Megatest), and Stallman and Labalme considered this a
legally defensible position.~{ Message-ID: { 4486@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4486@mit-eddie.uucp. Stallman also
recounts this version of events in "RMS Lecture at KTH (Sweden)," 30 October
1986, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html. }~
={ AT&T :
     version of EMACS
}

Over the next two weeks, a slew of messages attempted to pick apart and
understand the issues of copyright, ownership, distribution, and authorship.
Gosling wrote to clarify that GOSMACS had never been in the public domain, but
that "unfortunately, two moves have left my records in a shambles," and he is
therefore silent on the question of whether he granted permission.~{
Message-ID: { 2334@sun.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=2334@sun.uucp. }~ Gosling’s claim could
well be strategic: giving permission, had he done so, might have angered
Unipress, which expected exclusive control over the version he had sold; by the
same token, he may well have approved of Stallman’s re-creation, but not have
wanted to affirm this in any legally actionable way. Meanwhile, Zimmerman
relayed an anonymous message suggesting that some lawyers somewhere found the
"third hand redistribution" argument was legally "all wet."~{ Message-ID: {
732@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=732@masscomp.uucp. }~
={ authorship ;
   intellectual property :
     strategy and +17
}

Stallman’s biggest concern was not so much the legality of his own actions as
the possibility that people would choose not to use the software because of
legal threats (even if such threats were issued only as rumors by former
employees of companies that distributed software they had written). Stallman
wanted users not only ,{[pg 196]}, to feel safe using his software but to adopt
his view that software exists to be shared and improved and that anything that
hinders this is a loss for everyone, which necessitates an EMACS commune.
={ Copyright infringement :
     legal threats and ;
   EMACS commune +1
}

Stallman’s legal grounds for using Gosling’s code may or may not have been
sound. Zimmerman did his best throughout to explain in detail what kind of
permission Stallman and Labalme would have needed, drawing on his own
experience with the CCA lawyers and AT&T Bell Labs, all the while berating
Stallman for not creating the display code himself. Meanwhile, Unipress posted
an official message that said, "UniPress wants to inform the community that
portions of the GNU EMACS program are most definitely not public domain, and
that use and/or distribution of the GNU EMACS program is not necessarily
proper."~{ Message-ID: { 103@unipress.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=103@unipress.uucp. }~ The admittedly
vague tone of the message left most people wondering what that meant—and
whether Unipress intended to sue anyone. Strategically speaking, the company
may have wished to maintain good will among hackers and readers of net.emacs,
an audience likely composed of many potential customers. Furthermore, if
Gosling had given permission to Stallman, then Unipress would themselves have
been on uncertain legal ground, unable to firmly and definitively threaten
users of GNU EMACS with legal action. In either case, the question of whether
or not permission was needed was not in question—only the question of whether
it had been granted.~{ With the benefit of hindsight, the position that
software could be in the public domain also seems legally uncertain, given that
the 1976 changes to USC§17 abolished the requirement to register and, by the
same token, to render uncertain the status of code contributed to Gosling and
incorporated into GOSMACS. }~
={ AT&T :
     version of EMACS ;
   Copyright infringement :
     EMACS controversy and +18
}

However, a more complicated legal issue also arose as a result, one concerning
the status of code contributed to Gosling by others. Fen Labalme wrote a
message to net.emacs, which, although it did not clarify the legal status of
Gosling’s code (Labalme was also unable to find his "permission" from Gosling),
did raise a related issue: the fact that he and others had made significant
contributions to GOSMACS, which Gosling had incorporated into his version, then
sold to Unipress without their permission: "As one of the ‘others’ who helped
to bring EMACS [GOSMACS] up to speed, I was distressed when Jim sold the editor
to UniPress. This seemed to be a direct violation of the trust that I and
others had placed in Jim as we sent him our improvements, modifications, and
bug fixes. I am especially bothered by the general mercenary attitude
surrounding EMACS which has taken over from the once proud ‘hacker’ ethic—EMACS
is a tool that can make all of our lives better. Let’s help it to grow!"~{
Message-ID: { 18@megatest }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=18@megatest.
Note here the use of "once proud hacker ethic," which seems to confirm the
perpetual feeling that the ethic has been compromised. }~
={ Hacker ethic +2 }

% ,{[pg 197]},

Labalme’s implication, though he may not even have realized this himself, is
that Gosling may have infringed on the rights of others in selling the code to
Unipress, as a separate message from Joaquim Martillo makes clear: "The
differences between current version of Unipress EMACS and Gnu EMACS display.c
(a 19 page module) is about 80%. For all the modules which Fen LeBalme [sic]
gave RMS permission to use, the differences are similar. Unipress is not even
using the disputed software anymore! Now, these modules contain code people
like Chris Torek and others contributed when Gosling’s emacs was in the public
domain. I must wonder whether these people would have contributed had they
known their freely-given code was going to become part of someone’s product."~{
Message-ID: { 287@mit-athena.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=287@mit-athena.uucp. }~

Indeed, the general irony of this complicated situation was certainly not as
evident as it might have been given the emotional tone of the debates: Stallman
was using code from Gosling based on permission Gosling had given to Labalme,
but Labalme had written code for Gosling which Gosling had commercialized
without telling Labalme—conceivably, but not likely, the same code.
Furthermore, all of them were creating software that had been originally
conceived in large part by Stallman (but based on ideas and work on TECO, an
editor written twenty years before EMACS), who was now busy rewriting the very
software Gosling had rewritten for UNIX. The "once proud hacker ethic" that
Labalme mentions would thus amount not so much to an explicit belief in sharing
so much as a fast-and-loose practice of making contributions and fixes without
documenting them, giving oral permission to use and reuse, and "losing" records
that may or may not have existed—hardly a noble enterprise.
={ TECO (text editor and programming language) }

But by 27 June 1985, all of the legal discussion was rendered moot when
Stallman announced that he would completely rewrite the display code in EMACS.

_1 I have decided to replace the Gosling code in GNU EMACS, even though I still
believe Fen and I have permission to distribute that code, in order to keep
people’s confidence in the GNU project.

_1 I came to this decision when I found, this night, that I saw how to rewrite
the parts that had seemed hard. I expect to have the job done by the weekend.~{
Message-ID: { 4559@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4559@mit-eddie.uucp. }~

On 5 July, Stallman sent out a message that said: ,{[pg 198]},

_1 Celebrate our independence from Unipress!

_1 EMACS version 16, 100% Gosling-free, is now being tested at several places.
It appears to work solidly on Vaxes, but some other machines have not been
tested yet.~{ Message-ID: { 4605@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4605@mit-eddie.uucp. }~

The fact that it only took one week to create the code is a testament to
Stallman’s widely recognized skills in creating great software—it doesn’t
appear to have indicated any (legal) threat or urgency. Indeed, even though
Unipress seems also to have been concerned about their own reputation, and
despite the implication made by Stallman that they had forced this issue to
happen, they took a month to respond. At that point, the Unipress employee Mike
Gallaher wrote to insist, somewhat after the fact, that Unipress had no
intention of suing anyone—as long as they were using the Gosling-free EMACS
version 16 and higher.

_1 UniPress has no quarrel with the Gnu project. It bothers me that people seem
to think we are trying to hinder it. In fact, we hardly did or said much at
all, except to point out that the Gnumacs code had James Gosling’s copyright in
it. We have not done anything to keep anyone from using Gnumacs, nor do we
intend to now that it is "Gosling-free" (version 16.56).

_1 You can consider this to be an official statement from UniPress: There is
nothing in Gnumacs version 16.56 that could possibly cause UniPress to get
upset. If you were afraid to use Gnumacs because you thought we would hassle
you, don’t be, on the basis of version 16.56.~{ Message-ID: { 104@unipress.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=104@unipress.uucp. }~

Both Stallman and Unipress received various attacks and defenses from observers
of the controversy. Many people pointed out that Stallman should get credit for
"inventing" EMACS and that the issue of him infringing on his own invention was
therefore ironic. Others proclaimed the innocence and moral character of
Unipress, which, it was claimed, was providing more of a service (support for
EMACS) than the program itself.
={ Copyright infringement :
     infringement on own invention
}

Some readers interpreted the fact that Stallman had rewritten the display code,
whether under pressure from Unipress or not, as confirmation of the ideas
expressed in "The GNU Manifesto," namely, that commercial software stifles
innovation. According to this logic, precisely because Stallman was forced to
rewrite the code, rather than build on something that he himself assumed he had
permission ,{[pg 199]}, to do, there was no innovation, only fear-induced
caution.~{ Joaquim Martillo, Message-ID: { 287@mit-athena.uucpp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=287@mit-athena.uucpp :
     "Trying to forbid RMS from using discarded code so that he must spend time
to reinvent the wheel supports his contention that ‘software hoarders’ are
slowing down progress in computer science." }~ On the other hand, latent within
this discussion is a deep sense of propriety about what people had created;
many people, not only Stallman and Gosling and Zimmerman, had contributed to
making EMACS what it was, and most had done so under the assumption, legally
correct or not, that it would not be taken away from them or, worse, that
others might profit by it.
={ GNU Manifesto }

Gosling’s sale of EMACS is thus of a different order from his participation in
the common stewardship of EMACS. The distinction between creating software and
maintaining it is a commercial fiction driven in large part by the structure of
intellectual property. It mirrors the experience of open systems. Maintaining
software can mean improving it, and improving it can mean incorporating the
original work and ideas of others. To do so by the rules of a changing
intellectual-property structure forces different choices than to do so
according to an informal hacker ethic or an experimental "commune." One
programmer’s minor improvement is another programmer’s original contribution.
={ software development :
     creating vs. maintaining
}

2~ The Context of Copyright

The EMACS controversy occurred in a period just after some of the largest
changes to U.S. intellectual-property law in seventy years. Two aspects of this
context are worth emphasizing: (1) practices and knowledge about the law change
slowly and do not immediately reflect the change in either the law or the
strategies of actors; (2) U.S. law creates a structural form of uncertainty in
which the interplay between legislation and case law is never entirely certain.
In the former aspect, programmers who grew up in the 1970s saw a commercial
practice entirely dominated by trade secret and patent protection, and very
rarely by copyright; thus, the shift to widespread use of copyright law
(facilitated by the 1976 and 1980 changes to the law) to protect software was a
shift in thinking that only slowly dawned on many participants, even the most
legally astute, since it was a general shift in strategy as well as a statutory
change. In the latter aspect, the 1976 and 1980 changes to the copyright law
contained a number of uncertainties that would take over a decade to be worked
out in case law, issues such as the copyrightability of software, the
definition of software, and the meaning ,{[pg 200]}, of infringement in
software copyright, to say nothing of the impact of the codification of fair
use and the removal of the requirement to register (issues that arguably went
unnoticed until the turn of the millennium). Both aspects set the stage for the
EMACS controversy and Stallman’s creation of the GPL.
={ patents on software +1 ;
   practices :
     opposed to legal changes +2 ;
   Trade secret law +6 ;
   uncertainty, in the law +20 ;
   copyright infringement ;
   Copyright :
     changes in 1976 +20 | changes in 1980 +20 | requirement to register :
     software and copyrightability +3 ;
   fair use +1 ;
   software :
     registration of copyright
}

Legally speaking, the EMACS controversy was about copyright, permission, and
the meanings of a public domain and the reuse of software (and, though never
explicitly mentioned, fair use). Software patenting and trade-secret law are
not directly concerned, but they nonetheless form a background to the
controversy. Many of the participants expressed a legal and conventional
orthodoxy that software was not patentable, that is, that algorithms, ideas, or
fundamental equations fell outside the scope of patent, even though the 1981
case Diamond v. Diehr is generally seen as the first strong support by the
courts for forcing the United States Patent and Trademark Office to grant
patents on software.~{ Diamond V. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981), the Supreme Court
decision, forced the patent office to grant patents on software. Interestingly,
software patents had been granted much earlier, but went either uncontested or
unenforced. An excellent example is patent 3,568,156, held by Ken Thompson, on
regular expression pattern matching, granted in 1971. }~ Software, this
orthodoxy went, was better protected by trade-secret law (a state-by-state law,
not a federal statute), which provided protection for any intellectual property
that an owner reasonably tried to maintain as a secret. The trade-secret status
of UNIX, for example, meant that all the educational licensees who were given
the source code of UNIX had agreed to keep it secret, even though it was
manifestly circulating the world over; one could therefore run afoul of
trade-secret rules if one looked at the source code (e.g., signed a
nondisclosure license or was shown the code by an employee) and then
implemented something similar.
={ source code +1 }

By contrast, copyright law was rarely deployed in matters of software
production. The first copyright registration of software occurred in 1964, but
the desirability of relying on copyright over trade secret was uncertain well
into the 1970s.~{ Calvin Mooers, in his 1975 article "Computer Software and
Copyright," suggests that the IBM unbundling decision opened the doors to
thinking about copyright protection. }~ Some corporations, like IBM, routinely
marked all source code with a copyright symbol. Others asserted it only on the
binaries they distributed or in the license agreements. The case of software on
the UNIX operating system and its derivatives is particularly haphazard, and
the existence of copyright notices by the authors varies widely. An informal
survey by Barry Gold singled out only James Gosling, Walter Tichy (author of
rcs), and the RAND Corporation as having adequately labeled source code with
copyright notices.~{ Message-ID: { 933@sdcrdcf.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=933@sdcrdcf.uucp. }~ Gosling was also the
first to register EMACS as copyrighted software in 1983, ,{[pg 201]}, while
Stallman registered GNU EMACS just after version 15.34 was released in May
1985.~{ Gosling’s EMACS 264 (Stallman copied EMACS 84) is registered with the
Library of Congress, as is GNU EMACS 15.34. Gosling’s EMACS Library of Congress
registration number is TX-3-407-458, registered in 1992. Stallman’s
registration number is TX-1-575-302, registered in May 1985. The listed dates
are uncertain, however, since there are periodic re-registrations and updates.
}~

The uncertainty of the change from reliance on trade secret to reliance on
copyright is clear in some of the statements made by Stallman around the reuse
of Gosling’s code. Since neither Stallman nor Gosling sought to keep the
program secret in any form—either by licensing it or by requiring users to keep
it secret—there could be no claims of trade-secret status on either program.
Nonetheless, there was frequent concern about whether one had seen any code
(especially code from a UNIX operating system, which is covered by trade
secret) and whether code that someone else had seen, rewritten, or distributed
publicly was therefore "in the public domain."~{ This is particularly confusing
in the case of "dbx." Message-ID: { 4437@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4437@mit-eddie.uucp, Message-ID: {
6238@shasta.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=6238@shasta.arpa, and
Message-ID: { 730@masscomp.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp. }~ But, at the same
time, Stallman was concerned that rewriting Gosling’s display code would be too
difficult: "Any display code would have a considerable resemblance to that
display code, just by virtue of doing the same job. Without any clear idea of
exactly how much difference there would have to be to reassure you users, I
cannot tell whether the rewrite would accomplish that. The law is not any
guidance here. . . . Writing display code that is significantly different is
not easy."~{ Message-ID: { 4489@mit-eddie.uucp
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=4489@mit-eddie.uucp. }~
={ trade secret law :
     relationship to public domain +3
}

Stallman’s strategy for rewriting software, including his plan for the GNU
operating system, also involved "not looking at" anyone else’s code, so as to
ensure that no trade-secret violations would occur. Although it was clear that
Gosling’s code was not a trade secret, it was also not obvious that it was "in
the public domain," an assumption that might be made about other kinds of
software protected by trade secret. Under trade-secret rules, Gosling’s public
distribution of GOSMACS appears to give the green light for its reuse, but
under copyright law, a law of strict liability, any unauthorized use is a
violation, regardless of how public the software may have been.~{ A standard
practice well into the 1980s, and even later, was the creation of so-called
clean-room versions of software, in which new programmers and designers who had
not seen the offending code were hired to ,{[pg 336]}, re-implement it in order
to avoid the appearance of trade-secret violation. Copyright law is a strict
liability law, meaning that ignorance does not absolve the infringer, so the
practice of "clean-room engineering" seems not to have been as successful in
the case of copyright, as the meaning of infringement remains murky. }~

The fact of trade-secret protection was nonetheless an important aspect of the
EMACS controversy: the version of EMACS that Warren Montgomery had created at
Bell Labs (and on which Zimmerman’s CCA version would be based) was the subject
of trade-secret protection by AT&T, by virtue of being distributed with UNIX
and under a nondisclosure agreement. AT&T was at the time still a year away
from divestiture and thus unable to engage in commercial exploitation of the
software. When CCA sought to commercialize ,{[pg 202]}, the version of UNIX
Zimmerman had based on Montgomery’s, it was necessary to remove any AT&T code
in order to avoid violating their trade-secret status. CCA in turn distributed
their EMACS as either binary or as source (the former costing about $1,000, the
latter as much as $7,000) and relied on copyright rather than trade-secret
protection to prevent unauthorized uses of their software.~{ Message-ID: {
730@masscomp.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=730@masscomp.uucp. AT&T
was less concerned about copyright infringement than they were about the status
of their trade secrets. Zimmerman quotes a statement (from Message-ID: {
108@emacs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=108@emacs.uucp ) that he
claims indicates this: "Beginning with CCA EMACS version 162.36z, CCA EMACS no
longer contained any of the code from Mr. Montgomery’s EMACS, or any methods or
concepts which would be known only by programmers familiar with BTL [Bell Labs]
EMACS of any version." The statement did not mention copyright, but implied
that CCA EMACS did not contain any AT&T trade secrets, thus preserving their
software’s trade-secret status. The fact that EMACS was a conceptual design—a
particular kind of interface, a LISP interpreter, and extensibility—that was
very widely imitated had no apparent bearing on the legal status of these
secrets. }~
={ AT&T :
     divestiture in ;
   Computer Corporation of America (CCA) ;
   Montgomery, Warren ;
   Zimmerman, Steve
}

The uncertainty over copyright was thus in part a reflection of a changing
strategy in the computer-software industry, a kind of uneven development in
which copyright slowly and haphazardly came to replace trade secret as the main
form of intellectual-property protection. This switch had consequences for how
noncommercial programmers, researchers, and amateurs might interpret their own
work, as well as for the companies whose lawyers were struggling with the same
issues. Of course, copyright and trade-secret protection are not mutually
exclusive, but they structure the need for secrecy in different ways, and they
make different claims on issues like similarity, reuse, and modification.
={ intellectual property :
     strategy and +1 ;
   modifiability ;
   secrecy
}

The 1976 changes to copyright law were therefore extremely significant in
setting out a new set of boundaries and possibilities for intellectual-property
arguments, arguments that created a different kind of uncertainty from that of
a changing commercial strategy: a structural uncertainty created by the need
for a case law to develop around the statutory changes implemented by Congress.

The Copyright Act of 1976 introduced a number of changes that had been some ten
years in the making, largely organized around new technologies like photocopier
machines, home audiotaping, and the new videocassette recorders. It codified
fair-use rights, it removed the requirement to register, and it expanded the
scope of copyrightable materials considerably. It did not, however, explicitly
address software, an oversight that frustrated many in the computer industry,
in particular the young software industry. Pursuant to this oversight, the
National Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyright (CONTU) was charged
with making suggestions for changes to the law with respect to software. It was
therefore only in 1980 that Congress implemented these changes, adding software
to title 17 of the U.S. copyright statute as something that could be considered
copyrightable by law.~{ CONTU Final Report,
http://digital-law-online.info/CONTU/contu1.html (accessed 8 December 2006). }~
={ CONTU report }

The 1980 amendment to the copyright law answered one of three lingering
questions about the copyrightability of software: the simple question of
whether it was copyrightable material at all. Congress ,{[pg 203]}, answered
yes. It did not, however, designate what constituted "software." During the
1980s, a series of court cases helped specify what counted as software,
including source code, object code (binaries), screen display and output, look
and feel, and microcode and firmware.~{ The cases that determine the meaning of
the 1976 and 1980 amendments begin around 1986: Whelan Associates, Inc. v.
Jaslow Dental Laboratory, Inc., et al., U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals, 4
August 1986, 797 F.2d 1222, 230 USPQ 481, affirming that "structure (or
sequence or organization)" of software is copyrightable, not only the literal
software code; Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., U.S.
Second Circuit Court of Appeals, 22 June 1992, 982 F.2d 693, 23 USPQ 2d 1241,
arguing that the structure test in Whelan was not sufficient to determine
infringement and thus proposing a three-part "abstraction-filiation-comparison"
test; Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp, U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals, 1994, 35 F.3d 1435, finding that the "desktop metaphor" used in
Macintosh and Windows was not identical and thus did not constitute
infringement; Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc.
(94-2003), 1996, 513 U.S. 233, finding that the "look and feel" of a menu
interface was not copyrightable. }~ The final question, which the courts are
still faced with adjudicating, concerns how much similarity constitutes an
infringement in each of these cases. The implications of the codification of
fair use and the requirement to register continue to unfold even into the
present.
={ fair use ;
   intellectual property +20 ;
   source code :
     legal definition and +5 ;
   Software :
     legal definition of source code and +5 | registration of copyright +1
}

The EMACS controversy confronts all three of these questions. Stallman’s
initial creation of EMACS was accomplished under conditions in which it was
unclear whether copyright would apply (i.e., before 1980). Stallman, of course,
did not attempt to copyright the earliest versions of EMACS, but the 1976
amendments removed the requirement to register, thus rendering everything
written after 1978 automatically copyrighted. Registration represented only an
additional effort to assert ownership in cases of suspected infringement.

Throughout this period, the question of whether software was copyrightable—or
copyrighted—was being answered differently in different cases: AT&T was relying
on trade-secret status; Gosling, Unipress, and CCA negotiated over copyrighted
material; and Stallman was experimenting with his "commune." Although the
uncertainty was answered statutorily by the 1980 amendment, not everyone
instantly grasped this new fact or changed practices based on it. There is
ample evidence throughout the Usenet archive that the 1976 changes were poorly
understood, especially by comparison with the legal sophistication of hackers
in the 1990s and 2000s. Although the law changed in 1980, practices changed
more slowly, and justifications crystallized in the context of experiments like
that of GNU EMACS.
={ trade secret law ;
   Usenet
}

Further, a tension emerged between the meaning of source code and the meaning
of software. On the one hand was the question of whether the source code or the
binary code was copyrightable, and on the other was the question of defining
the boundaries of software in a context wherein all software relies on other
software in order to run at all. For instance, EMACS was originally built on
top of TECO, which was referred to both as an editor and as a programming
language; even seemingly obvious distinctions (e.g., application vs.
programming language) were not necessarily always clear. ,{[pg 204]}, If EMACS
was an application written in TECO qua programming language, then it would seem
that EMACS should have its own copyright, distinct from any other program
written in TECO. But if EMACS was an extension or modification of TECO qua
editor, then it would seem that EMACS was a derivative work and would require
the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
={ TECO (text editor and programming language) }

Further, each version of EMACS, in order to be EMACS, needed a LISP interpreter
in order to make the extensible interface similar across all versions. But not
all versions used the same LISP interpreter. Gosling’s used an interpreter
called MOCKLISP (mlisp in the trademarked Unipress version), for instance. The
question of whether the LISP interpreter was a core component of the software
or an "environment" needed in order to extend the application was thus also
uncertain and unspecified in the law. While both might be treated as software
suitable for copyright protection, both might also be understood as necessary
components out of which copyrightable software would be built.~{ The
relationship between the definition of source and target befuddles software law
to this day, one of the most colorful examples being the DeCSS case. See
Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 1: Gallery of CSS
Descramblers, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/DeCSS/gallery/. }~
={ LISP (programming language) :
     interpreter in EMACS ;
   Unipress
}

What’s more, both the 1976 and 1980 amendments are silent on the copyright
status of source code vs. binary code. While all the versions of EMACS were
distributed in binary, Stallman and Gosling both included the source to allow
users to modify it and extend it, but they differed on the proper form of
redistribution. The threshold between modifying software for oneself and
copyright infringement was not yet clear, and it hung on the meaning of
redistribution. Changing the software for use on a single computer might be
necessary to get it to run, but by the early days of the Arpanet, innocently
placing that code in a public directory on one computer could look like mass
distribution.~{ An interesting addendum here is that the manual for EMACS was
also released at around the same time as EMACS 16 and was available ,{[pg
337]}, as a TeX file. Stallman also attempted to deal with the paper document
in the same fashion (see Message-ID: 4734@mit-eddie.uucp, 19 July 1985), and
this would much later become a different and trickier issue that would result
in the GNU Free Documentation License. }~
={ copyright infringement :
     redistribution of software as ;
   redistribution of software +4
}

Finally, the question of what constitutes infringement was at the heart of this
controversy and was not resolved by law or by legal adjudication, but simply by
rewriting the code to avoid the question. Stallman’s use of Gosling’s code, his
claim of third-hand permission, the presence or absence of written permission,
the sale of GOSMACS to Unipress when it most likely contained code not written
by Gosling but copyrighted in his name—all of these issues complicated the
question of infringement to the point where Stallman’s only feasible option for
continuing to create software was to avoid using anyone else’s code at all.
Indeed, Stallman’s decision to use Gosling’s code (which he claims to have
changed in significant portions) might have come to nothing if he had
unethically ,{[pg 205]}, and illegally chosen not to include the copyright
notice at all (under the theory that the code was original to Stallman, or an
imitation, rather than a portion of Gosling’s work). Indeed, Chris Torek
received Gosling’s permission to remove Gosling’s name and copyright from the
version of display.c he had heavily modified, but he chose not to omit them:
"The only reason I didn’t do so is that I feel that he should certainly be
credited as the inspiration (at the very least) for the code."~{ Message-ID: {
659@umcp-cs.uucp }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=659@umcp-cs.uucp. }~
Likewise, Stallman was most likely concerned to obey the law and to give credit
where credit was due, and therefore left the copyright notice attached—a clear
case of blurred meanings of authorship and ownership.
={ GOSMACS (version of EMACS) ;
   authorship :
     ownership vs. ;
   Torek, Chris
}

In short, the interplay between new statutes and their settlement in court or
in practice was a structural uncertainty that set novel constraints on the
meaning of copyright, and especially on the norms and forms of permission and
reuse. GNU EMACS 15.34 was the safest option—a completely new version that
performed the same tasks, but in a different manner, using different algorithms
and code.

Even as it resolved the controversy, however, GNU EMACS posed new problems for
Stallman: how would the EMACS commune survive if it wasn’t clear whether one
could legally use another person’s code, even if freely contributed? Was
Gosling’s action in selling work by others to Unipress legitimate? Would
Stallman be able to enforce its opposite, namely, prevent people from
commercializing EMACS code they contributed to him? How would Stallman avoid
the future possibility of his own volunteers and contributors later asserting
that he had infringed on their copyright?
={ copyright infringement :
     legal threats and +2
}

By 1986, Stallman was sending out a letter that recorded the formal transfer of
copyright to the Free Software Foundation (which he had founded in late 1985),
with equal rights to nonexclusive use of the software.~{ Message-ID: {
8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8605202356.aa12789@ucbvax.berkeley.edu.
}~ While such a demand for the expropriation of copyright might seem contrary
to the aims of the GNU project, in the context of the unfolding copyright law
and the GOSMACS controversy it made perfect sense. Having been accused himself
of not having proper permission to use someone else’s copyrighted material in
his free version of GNU EMACS, Stallman took steps to forestall such an event
in the future.
={ copyright :
     transfer of ;
   Free Software Foundation +8
}

The interplay between technical and legal issues and "ethical" concerns was
reflected in the practical issues of fear, intimidation, and common-sense
(mis)understandings of intellectual-property ,{[pg 206]}, law. Zimmerman’s
veiled threats of legal liability were directed not only at Stallman but at
anyone who was using the program Stallman had written; breaking the law was,
for Zimmerman, an ethical lapse, not a problem of uncertainty and change.
Whether or not such an interpretation of the law was correct, it did reveal the
mechanisms whereby a low level of detailed knowledge about the law—and a law in
flux, at that (not to mention the litigious reputation of the U.S. legal system
worldwide)—often seemed to justify a sense that buying software was simply a
less risky option than acquiring it for free. Businesses, not customers, it was
assumed, would be liable for such infringements. By the same token, the sudden
concern of software programmers (rather than lawyers) with the detailed
mechanics of copyright law meant that a very large number of people found
themselves asserting common-sense notions, only to be involved in a flame war
over what the copyright law "actually says."
={ Zimmerman, Steve }

Such discussion has continued and grown exponentially over the last twenty
years, to the point that Free Software hackers are now nearly as deeply
educated about intellectual property law as they are about software code.~{ See
Coleman, "The Social Construction of Freedom," chap. 6, on the Debian New
Maintainer Process, for an example of how induction into a Free Software
project stresses the legal as much as the technical, if not more. }~ Far from
representing the triumph of the hacker ethic, the GNU General Public License
represents the concrete, tangible outcome of a relatively wide-ranging cultural
conversation hemmed in by changing laws, court decisions, practices both
commercial and academic, and experiments with the limits and forms of new media
and new technology.
={ experimentation ;
   hacker ethic +9 ;
   hackers
}

2~ Conclusion

The rest of the story is quickly told: Stallman resigned from the AI Lab at MIT
and started the Free Software Foundation in 1985; he created a raft of new
tools, but ultimately no full UNIX operating system, and issued General Public
License 1.0 in 1989. In 1990 he was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant." During
the 1990s, he was involved in various high-profile battles among a new
generation of hackers; those controversies included the debate around Linus
Torvalds’s creation of Linux (which Stallman insisted be referred to as
GNU/Linux), the forking of EMACS into Xemacs, and Stallman’s own participation
in—and exclusion from—conferences and events devoted to Free Software. ,{[pg
207]},
={ artificial Intelligence Lab (AI Lab), at MIT +6 ;
   Linux (Free Software project) ;
   Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) +6 ;
   Torvalds, Linus
}

Between 1986 and 1990, the Free Software Foundation and its software became
extremely well known among geeks. Much of this had to do with the wealth of
software that they produced and distributed via Usenet and Arpanet. And as the
software circulated and was refined, so were the new legal constraints and the
process of teaching users to understand what they could and could not do with
the software—and why it was not in the public domain.
={ Arpanet (network) ;
   geeks ;
   Usenet
}

Each time a new piece of software was released, it was accompanied by one or
more text files which explained what its legal status was. At first, there was
a file called DISTRIB, which contained an explanation of the rights the new
owner had to modify and redistribute the software.~{ For example, Message-ID: {
5745@ucbvax.arpa }http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=5745@ucbvax.arpa. }~
DISTRIB referenced a file called COPYING, which contained the "GNU EMACS
copying permission notice," also known as the GNU EMACS GPL. The first of these
licenses listed the copyright holder as Richard Stallman (in 1985), but by 1986
all licenses referred to the Free Software Foundation as the copyright holder.
={ General Public License (GPL) :
     development of +2
}

As the Free Software Foundation released other pieces of software, the license
was renamed—GNU CC GPL, a GNU Bison GPL, a GNU GDB GPL, and so on, all of which
were essentially the same terms—in a file called COPYING, which was meant to be
distributed along with the software. In 1988, after the software and the
licenses had become considerably more widely available, Stallman made a few
changes to the license that relaxed some of the terms and specified others.~{
See Message-ID: { 8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=8803031948.aa01085@venus.berkeley.edu. }~
This new version would become the GNU GPL 1.0. By the time Free Software
emerged into the public consciousness in the late 1990s, the GPL had reached
version 2.0, and the Free Software Foundation had its own legal staff.

The creation of the GPL and the Free Software Foundation are often understood
as expressions of the hacker ethic, or of Stallman’s ideological commitment to
freedom. But the story of EMACS and the complex technical and legal details
that structure it illustrate how the GPL is more than just a hack: it was a
novel, privately ordered legal "commune." It was a space thoroughly independent
of, but insinuated into the existing bedrock of rules and practices of the
world of corporate and university software, and carved out of the slippery,
changing substance of intellectual-property statutes. At a time when the giants
of the software industry were fighting to create a different kind of
openness—one that preserved and would even strengthen existing relations of
intellectual property—this ,{[pg 208]}, hack was a radical alternative that
emphasized the sovereignty not of a national or corporate status quo, but of
self-fashioning individuals who sought to opt out of that national-corporate
unity. The creation of the GNU GPL was not a return to a golden age of
small-scale communities freed from the dominating structures of bureaucratic
modernity, but the creation of something new out of those structures. It relied
on and emphasized, not their destruction, but their stability—at least until
they are no longer necessary.
={ Open Systems }

The significance of the GPL is due to its embedding within and emergence from
the legal and technical infrastructure. Such a practice of situated reworking
is what gives Free Software—and perhaps all forms of engineering and creative
practice—its warp and weft. Stallman’s decision to resign from the AI Lab and
start the Free Software Foundation is a good example; it allowed Stallman no
only to devote energy to Free Software but also to formally differentiate the
organizations, to forestall at least the potential threat that MIT (which still
provided him with office space, equipment, and network connection) might decide
to claim ownership over his work. One might think that the hacker ethic and the
image of self-determining free individuals would demand the total absence of
organizations, but it requires instead their proliferation and modulation.
Stallman himself was never so purely free: he relied on the largesse of MIT’s
AI Lab, without which he would have had no office, no computer, no connection
to the network, and indeed, for a while, no home.
={ infrastructure ;
   proliferation of software
}

The Free Software Foundation represents a recognition on his part that
individual and communal independence would come at the price of a legally and
bureaucratically recognizable entity, set apart from MIT and responsible only
to itself. The Free Software Foundation took a classic form: a nonprofit
organization with a hierarchy. But by the early 1990s, a new set of experiments
would begin that questioned the look of such an entity. The stories of Linux
and Apache reveal how these ventures both depended on the work of the Free
Software Foundation and departed from the hierarchical tradition it
represented, in order to innovate new similarly embedded sociotechnical forms
of coordination.
={ Free Software Foundation :
     Linux and Apache vs. +1
}

The EMACS text editor is still widely used, in version 22.1 as of 2007, and
ported to just about every conceivable operating system. The controversy with
Unipress has faded into the distance, as newer and more intense controversies
have faced Stallman and Free Software, ,{[pg 209]}, but the GPL has become the
most widely used and most finely scrutinized of the legal licenses. More
important, the EMACS controversy was by no means the only one to have erupted
in the lives of software programmers; indeed, it has become virtually a rite of
passage for young geeks to be involved in such debates, because it is the only
way in which the technical details and the legal details that confront geeks
can be explored in the requisite detail. Not all such arguments end in the
complete rewriting of source code, and today many of them concern the attempt
to convince or evangelize for the release of source code under a Free Software
license. The EMACS controversy was in some ways a primal scene—a traumatic one,
for sure—that determined the outcome of many subsequent fights by giving form
to the Free Software license and its uses.

1~ 7. Coordinating Collaborations
={ coordination (component of Free Software) +3 }

% ,{[pg 210]},

The final component of Free Software is coordination. For many participants and
observers, this is the central innovation and essential significance of Open
Source: the possibility of enticing potentially huge numbers of volunteers to
work freely on a software project, leveraging the law of large numbers, "peer
production," "gift economies," and "self-organizing social economies."~{
Research on coordination in Free Software forms the central core of recent
academic work. Two of the most widely read pieces, Yochai Benkler’s "Coase’s
Penguin" and Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source, are directed at classic
research questions about collective action. Rishab Ghosh’s "Cooking Pot
Markets" and Eric Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar set many of the terms
of debate. Josh Lerner’s and Jean Tirole’s "Some Simple Economics of Open
Source" was an early contribution. Other important works on the subject are
Feller et al., Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software; Tuomi, Networks
of Innovation; Von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation. }~ Coordination in Free
Software is of a distinct kind that emerged in the 1990s, directly out of the
issues of sharing source code, conceiving open systems, and writing copyright
licenses—all necessary precursors to the practices of coordination. The stories
surrounding these issues find continuation in those of the Linux
operating-system kernel, of the Apache Web server, and of Source Code
Management tools (SCMs); together these stories reveal how coordination worked
and what it looked like in the 1990s.
={ Free Software :
     open source vs. ;
   Open Source :
     Free Software vs. ;
   peer production ;
   practices :
     five components of Free Software +2 ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs)
}

Coordination is important because it collapses and resolves the distinction
between technical and social forms into a meaningful ,{[pg 211]}, whole for
participants. On the one hand, there is the coordination and management of
people; on the other, there is the coordination of source code, patches, fixes,
bug reports, versions, and distributions—but together there is a meaningful
technosocial practice of managing, decision-making, and accounting that leads
to the collaborative production of complex software and networks. Such
coordination would be unexceptional, essentially mimicking long-familiar
corporate practices of engineering, except for one key fact: it has no goals.
Coordination in Free Software privileges adaptability over planning. This
involves more than simply allowing any kind of modification; the structure of
Free Software coordination actually gives precedence to a generalized openness
to change, rather than to the following of shared plans, goals, or ideals
dictated or controlled by a hierarchy of individuals.~{ On the distinction
between adaptability and adaptation, see Federico Iannacci, "The Linux Managing
Model," http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/iannacci2.pdf. Matt Ratto
characterizes the activity of Linux-kernel developers as a "culture of
re-working" and a "design for re-design," and captures the exquisite details of
such a practice both in coding and in the discussion between developers, an
activity he dubs the "pressure of openness" that "results as a contradiction
between the need to maintain productive collaborative activity and the
simultaneous need to remain open to new development directions" ("The Pressure
of Openness," 112-38). }~
={ adaptability :
     planning vs. +1 | as a form of critique +1 | adaptation vs. ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) :
     individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +2 ;
   critique, Free Software as +1 ;
   goals, lack of in Free Software +1 ;
   hackers :
     curiosity and virtuosity of +1 ;
   hierarchy, in coordination +5 ;
   planning +1
}

Adaptability does not mean randomness or anarchy, however; it is a very
specific way of resolving the tension between the individual curiosity and
virtuosity of hackers, and the collective coordination necessary to create and
use complex software and networks. No man is an island, but no archipelago is a
nation, so to speak. Adaptability preserves the "joy" and "fun" of programming
without sacrificing the careful engineering of a stable product. Linux and
Apache should be understood as the results of this kind of coordination:
experiments with adaptability that have worked, to the surprise of many who
have insisted that complexity requires planning and hierarchy. Goals and
planning are the province of governance—the practice of goal-setting,
orientation, and definition of control—but adaptability is the province of
critique, and this is why Free Software is a recursive public: it stands
outside power and offers powerful criticism in the form of working
alternatives. It is not the domain of the new—after all Linux is just a rewrite
of UNIX—but the domain of critical and responsive public direction of a
collective undertaking.
={ Linux (Free Software project) +8 ;
   novelty, of Free Software ;
   recursive public +1
}

Linux and Apache are more than pieces of software; they are organizations of an
unfamiliar kind. My claim that they are "recursive publics" is useful insofar
as it gives a name to a practice that is neither corporate nor academic,
neither profit nor nonprofit, neither governmental nor nongovernmental. The
concept of recursive public includes, within the spectrum of political
activity, the creation, modification, and maintenance of software, networks,
and legal documents. While a "public" in most theories is a body of ,{[pg
212]}, people and a discourse that give expressive form to some concern,
"recursive public" is meant to suggest that geeks not only give expressive form
to some set of concerns (e.g., that software should be free or that
intellectual property rights are too expansive) but also give concrete
infrastructural form to the means of expression itself. Linux and Apache are
tools for creating networks by which expression of new kinds can be guaranteed
and by which further infrastructural experimentation can be pursued. For geeks,
hacking and programming are variants of free speech and freedom of assembly.
={ public sphere :
     theories of ;
   Apache (Free Software project) +4 ;
   experimentation ;
   infrastructure
}

2~ From UNIX to Minix to Linux
={ Minix (operating system) +1 ;
   Tanenbaum, Andrew +27
}

Linux and Apache are the two paradigmatic cases of Free Software in the 1990s,
both for hackers and for scholars of Free Software. Linux is a UNIX-like
operating-system kernel, bootstrapped out of the Minix operating system created
by Andrew Tanenbaum.~{ Linux is often called an operating system, which
Stallman objects to on the theory that a kernel is only one part of an
operating system. Stallman suggests that it be called GNU/Linux to reflect the
use of GNU operating-system tools in combination with the Linux kernel. This
not-so-subtle ploy to take credit for Linux reveals the complexity of the
distinctions. The kernel is at the heart of hundreds of different
"distributions"—such as Debian, Red Hat, SuSe, and Ubuntu Linux—all of which
also use GNU tools, but ,{[pg 338]}, which are often collections of software
larger than just an operating system. Everyone involved seems to have an
intuitive sense of what an operating system is (thanks to the pedagogical
success of UNIX), but few can draw any firm lines around the object itself. }~
Apache is the continuation of the original National Center for Supercomputing
Applications (NCSA) project to create a Web server (Rob McCool’s original
program, called httpd), bootstrapped out of a distributed collection of people
who were using and improving that software.
={ McCool, Rob ;
   httpd ;
   modulation :
     of Free Software ;
   National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) ;
   Apache (Free Software project) +3
}

Linux and Apache are both experiments in coordination. Both projects evolved
decision-making systems through experiment: a voting system in Apache’s case
and a structured hierarchy of decision-makers, with Linus Torvalds as
benevolent dictator, in Linux’s case. Both projects also explored novel
technical tools for coordination, especially Source Code Management (SCM) tools
such as Concurrent Versioning System (cvs). Both are also cited as exemplars of
how "fun," "joy," or interest determine individual participation and of how it
is possible to maintain and encourage that participation and mutual aid instead
of narrowing the focus or eliminating possible routes for participation.
={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ;
   experimentation +1 ;
   fun, and development of Linux ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs) ;
   Torvalds, Linus +3
}

Beyond these specific experiments, the stories of Linux and Apache are detailed
here because both projects were actively central to the construction and
expansion of the Internet of the 1990s by allowing a massive number of both
corporate and noncorporate sites to cheaply install and run servers on the
Internet. Were Linux and Apache nothing more than hobbyist projects with a few
thousand ,{[pg 213]}, interested tinkerers, rather than the core technical
components of an emerging planetary network, they would probably not represent
the same kind of revolutionary transformation ultimately branded a "movement"
in 1998-99.
={ movement (component of Free Software) }

Linus Torvalds’s creation of the Linux kernel is often cited as the first
instance of the real "Open Source" development model, and it has quickly become
the most studied of the Free Software projects.~{ Eric Raymond directed
attention primarily to Linux in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Many other
projects preceded Torvalds’s kernel, however, including the tools that form the
core of both UNIX and the Internet: Paul Vixie’s implementation of the Domain
Name System (DNS) known as BIND; Eric Allman’s sendmail for routing e-mail; the
scripting languages perl (created by Larry Wall), python (Guido von Rossum),
and tcl/tk (John Ousterhout); the X Windows research project at MIT; and the
derivatives of the original BSD UNIX, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. On the development
model of FreeBSD, see Jorgensen, "Putting It All in the Trunk" and "Incremental
and Decentralized Integration in FreeBSD." The story of the genesis of Linux is
very nicely told in Moody, Rebel Code, and Williams, Free as in Freedom; there
are also a number of papers—available through Free/Opensource Research
Community, http://freesoftware.mit.edu/—that analyze the development dynamics
of the Linux kernel. See especially Ratto, "Embedded Technical Expression" and
"The Pressure of Openness." I have conducted much of my analysis of Linux by
reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List archives, http://lkml.org. There are also
annotated summaries of the Linux Kernel Mailing List discussions at
http://kerneltraffic.org. }~ Following its appearance in late 1991, Linux grew
quickly from a small, barely working kernel to a fully functional replacement
for the various commercial UNIX systems that had resulted from the UNIX wars of
the 1980s. It has become versatile enough to be used on desktop PCs with very
little memory and small CPUs, as well as in "clusters" that allow for massively
parallel computing power.
={ perl (programming language) ;
   python (programming language) ;
   tcl/tk (programming language)
}

When Torvalds started, he was blessed with an eager audience of hackers keen on
seeing a UNIX system run on desktop computers and a personal style of
encouragement that produced enormous positive feedback. Torvalds is often given
credit for creating, through his "management style," a "new generation" of Free
Software—a younger generation than that of Stallman and Raymond. Linus and
Linux are not in fact the causes of this change, but the results of being at
the right place at the right time and joining together a number of existing
components. Indeed, the title of Torvalds’s semi-autobiographical reflection on
Linux—Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary—captures some of
the character of its genesis.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) +9 ;
   hackers +1 ;
   Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   Stallman, Richard ;
   Torvalds, Linus :
     autobiography of ;
   UNIX operating system
}

The "fun" referred to in the title reflects the privileging of adaptability
over planning. Projects, tools, people, and code that were fun were those that
were not dictated by existing rules and ideas. Fun, for geeks, was associated
with the sudden availability, especially for university students and amateur
hackers, of a rapidly expanding underground world of networks and
software—Usenet and the Internet especially, but also university-specific
networks, online environments and games, and tools for navigating information
of all kinds. Much of this activity occurred without the benefit of any
explicit theorization, with the possible exception of the discourse of
"community" (given print expression by Howard Rheingold in 1993 and present in
nascent form in the pages of Wired and Mondo 2000) that took place through much
of the 1990s.~{ Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community. On the prehistory of
this period and the cultural location of some key aspects, see Turner, From
Counterculture to Cyberculture. }~ The late 1980s and early 1990s gave rise to
vast experimentation with the collaborative possibilities of the Internet as a
medium. Particularly attractive was ,{[pg 214]}, that this medium was built
using freely available tools, and the tools themselves were open to
modification and creative reuse. It was a style that reflected the
quasi-academic and quasi-commercial environment, of which the UNIX operating
system was an exemplar— not pure research divorced from commercial context, nor
entirely the domain of commercial rapacity and intellectual property.
={ adaptability :
     planning vs. ;
   Internet :
     early development +1 | relation to Free Software +1 ;
   Rheingold, Howard ;
   rumor on Usenet +8 ;
   Usenet :
     rumor on +8
}

Fun included the creation of mailing lists by the spread of software such as
list-serv and majordomo; the collaborative maintenance and policing of Usenet;
and the creation of Multi-User Dungeons (MUDs) and MUD Object Orienteds (MOOs),
both of which gave game players and Internet geeks a way to co-create software
environments and discover many of the problems of management and policing that
thereby emerged.~{ Julian Dibbell’s "A Rape in Cyberspace" and Sherry Turkle’s
Life on the Screen are two classic examples of the detailed forms of life and
collaborative ethical creation that preoccupied denizens of these worlds. }~ It
also included the increasing array of "information services" that were built on
top of the Internet, like archie, gopher, Veronica, WAIS, ftp, IRC—all of which
were necessary to access the growing information wealth of the underground
community lurking on the Internet. The meaning and practice of coordination in
all of these projects was up for grabs: some were organized strictly as
university research projects (gopher), while others were more fluid and open to
participation and even control by contributing members (MOOs and MUDs).
Licensing issues were explicit in some, unclear in some, and completely ignored
in others. Some projects had autocratic leaders, while others experimented with
everything from representative democracy to anarchism.
={ anarchism ;
   communities ;
   Multi-User Dungeons (MUDS)
}

During this period (roughly 1987 to 1993), the Free Software Foundation
attained a mythic cult status—primarily among UNIX and EMACS users. Part of
this status was due to the superiority of the tools Stallman and his
collaborators had already created: the GNU C Compiler (gcc), GNU EMACS, the GNU
Debugger (gdb), GNU Bison, and loads of smaller utilities that replaced the
original AT&T UNIX versions. The GNU GPL had also acquired a life of its own by
this time, having reached maturity as a license and become the de facto choice
for those committed to Free Software and the Free Software Foundation. By 1991,
however, the rumors of the imminent appearance of Stallman’s replacement UNIX
operating system had started to sound empty—it had been six years since his
public announcement of his intention. Most hackers were skeptical of Stallman’s
operating-system project, even if they acknowledged the success of all the
other tools necessary to create a full-fledged operating system, and Stallman
himself was stymied by the development ,{[pg 215]}, of one particular
component: the kernel itself, called GNU Hurd.
={ EMACS (text editor) ;
   Free Software Foundation :
     cult status of +9 ;
   General Public License (GPL) ;
   GNU C Compiler (gcc) ;
   GNU Hurd (kernel)
}

% cult status of

Linus Torvalds’s project was not initially imagined as a contribution to the
Free Software Foundation: it was a Helsinki university student’s late-night
project in learning the ins and outs of the relatively new Intel 386/486
microprocessor. Torvalds, along with tens of thousands of other
computer-science students, was being schooled in UNIX through the pedagogy of
Andrew Tanenbaum’s Minix, Douglas Comer’s Xinu-PC, and a handful of other such
teaching versions designed to run on IBM PCs. Along with the classroom pedagogy
in the 1980s came the inevitable connection to, lurking on, and posting to the
Usenet and Arpanet mailing lists devoted to technical (and nontechnical) topics
of all sorts.~{ The yearly influx of students to the Usenet and Arpanet in
September earned that month the title "the longest month," due to the need to
train new users in use and etiquette on the newsgroups. Later in the 1990s,
when AOL allowed subscribers access to the Usenet hierarchy, it became known as
"eternal September." See "September that Never Ended," Jargon File,
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/September-that-never-ended.html. }~ Torvalds
was subscribed, naturally, to comp.os.minix, the newsgroup for users of Minix.
={ Arpanet (network) ;
   Linux (Free Software project) :
     origins in Minix +19 ;
   Minix (operating systems) +19 ;
   pedagogy :
     operating systems and +1 ;
   Tanenbaum, Andrew :
     Minix and
}

The fact of Linus Torvalds’s pedagogical embedding in the world of UNIX, Minix,
the Free Software Foundation, and the Usenet should not be underestimated, as
it often is in hagiographical accounts of the Linux operating system. Without
this relatively robust moral-technical order or infrastructure within which it
was possible to be at the right place at the right time, Torvalds’s late-night
dorm-room project would have amounted to little more than that—but the pieces
were all in place for his modest goals to be transformed into something much
more significant.
={ infrastructure ;
   moral and technical order
}

Consider his announcement on 25 August 1991:

_1 Hello everybody out there using minix—I’m doing a (free) operating system
(just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.
This has been brewing since april, and is starting to get ready. I’d like any
feedback on things people like/dislike in minix, as my OS resembles it somewhat
(same physical layout of the file-system (due to practical reasons) among other
things). I’ve currently ported bash(1.08) and gcc(1.40), and things seem to
work. This implies that I’ll get something practical within a few months, and
I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any suggestions are
welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them :-)

_1 Linus . . .

_1 PS. Yes—it’s free of any minix code, and it has a multi-threaded fs. It is
NOT portable (uses 386 task switching etc), and it probably never will support
anything other than AT-harddisks, as that’s all I have :-(.~{ Message-ID: {
1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=1991aug25.205708.9541@klaava.helsinki.fi.
}~

% ,{[pg 216]},

Torvalds’s announcement is telling as to where his project fit into the
existing context: "just a hobby," not "big and professional like gnu" (a
comment that suggests the stature that Stallman and the Free Software
Foundation had achieved, especially since they were in reality anything but
"big and professional"). The announcement was posted to the Minix list and thus
was essentially directed at Minix users; but Torvalds also makes a point of
insisting that the system would be free of cost, and his postscript furthermore
indicates that it would be free of Minix code, just as Minix had been free of
AT&T code.
={ AT&T ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) :
     of Linux vs. Minix +12
}

Torvalds also mentions that he has ported "bash" and "gcc," software created
and distributed by the Free Software Foundation and tools essential for
interacting with the computer and compiling new versions of the kernel.
Torvalds’s decision to use these utilities, rather than write his own, reflects
both the boundaries of his project (an operating-system kernel) and his
satisfaction with the availability and reusability of software licensed under
the GPL.
={ GNU C Compiler (gcc) ;
   modifiability +2
}

So the system is based on Minix, just as Minix had been based on
UNIX—piggy-backed or bootstrapped, rather than rewritten in an entirely
different fashion, that is, rather than becoming a different kind of operating
system. And yet there are clearly concerns about the need to create something
that is not Minix, rather than simply extending or "debugging" Minix. This
concern is key to understanding what happened to Linux in 1991.
={ debugging +5 }

Tanenbaum’s Minix, since its inception in 1984, was always intended to allow
students to see and change the source code of Minix in order to learn how an
operating system worked, but it was not Free Software. It was copyrighted and
owned by Prentice Hall, which distributed the textbooks. Tanenbaum made the
case—similar to Gosling’s case for Unipress—that Prentice Hall was distributing
the system far wider than if it were available only on the Internet: "A point
which I don’t think everyone appreciates is that making something available by
FTP is not necessarily the way to provide the widest distribution. The Internet
is still a highly elite group. Most computer users are NOT on it. . . . MINIX
is also widely used in Eastern Europe, Japan, Israel, South America, etc. Most
of these people would never have gotten it if there hadn’t been a company
selling it."~{ Message-ID: { 12595@star.cs.vu.nl
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12595@star.cs.vu.nl. }~
={ Tanenbaum, Andrew :
     Minix and +9 ;
   File Transfer Protocol (ftp) ;
   Prentice Hall +1 ;
   textbooks :
     on operating systems and networks +1
}

% larger index range provided for tanenbaum

By all accounts, Prentice Hall was not restrictive in its sublicensing of the
operating system, if people wanted to create an "enhanced" ,{[pg 217]}, version
of Minix. Similarly, Tanenbaum’s frequent presence on comp.os.minix testified
to his commitment to sharing his knowledge about the system with anyone who
wanted it—not just paying customers. Nonetheless, Torvalds’s pointed use of the
word free and his decision not to reuse any of the code is a clear indication
of his desire to build a system completely unencumbered by restrictions, based
perhaps on a kind of intuitive folkloric sense of the dangers associated with
cases like that of EMACS.~{ Indeed, initially, Torvalds’s terms of distribution
for Linux were more restrictive than the GPL, including limitations on
distributing it for a fee or for handling costs. Torvalds eventually loosened
the restrictions and switched to the GPL in February 1992. Torvalds’s release
notes for Linux 0.12 say, "The Linux copyright will change: I’ve had a couple
of requests ,{[pg 339]}, to make it compatible with the GNU copyleft, removing
the ‘you may not distribute it for money’ condition. I agree. I propose that
the copyright be changed so that it conforms to GNU—pending approval of the
persons who have helped write code. I assume this is going to be no problem for
anybody: If you have grievances (‘I wrote that code assuming the copyright
would stay the same’) mail me. Otherwise The GNU copyleft takes effect as of
the first of February. If you do not know the gist of the GNU copyright—read
it"
(http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12).
}~
={ comp.os.minix }

The most significant aspect of Torvalds’s initial message, however, is his
request: "I’d like to know what features most people would want. Any
suggestions are welcome, but I won’t promise I’ll implement them." Torvalds’s
announcement and the subsequent interest it generated clearly reveal the issues
of coordination and organization that would come to be a feature of Linux. The
reason Torvalds had so many eager contributors to Linux, from the very start,
was because he enthusiastically took them off of Tanenbaum’s hands.

2~ Design and Adaptability
={ adaptability :
     planning vs. +18
}

Tanenbaum’s role in the story of Linux is usually that of the straw man—a
crotchety old computer-science professor who opposes the revolutionary young
Torvalds. Tanenbaum did have a certain revolutionary reputation himself, since
Minix was used in classrooms around the world and could be installed on IBM PCs
(something no other commercial UNIX vendors had achieved), but he was also a
natural target for people like Torvalds: the tenured professor espousing the
textbook version of an operating system. So, despite the fact that a very large
number of people were using or knew of Minix as a UNIX operating system
(estimates of comp.os.minix subscribers were at 40,000), Tanenbaum was
emphatically not interested in collaboration or collaborative debugging,
especially if debugging also meant creating extensions and adding features that
would make the system bigger and harder to use as a stripped-down tool for
teaching. For Tanenbaum, this point was central: "I’ve been repeatedly offered
virtual memory, paging, symbolic links, window systems, and all manner of
features. I have usually declined because I am still trying to keep the system
simple enough for students to understand. You can put all this stuff in your
version, but I won’t ,{[pg 218]}, put it in mine. I think it is this point
which irks the people who say ‘MINIX is not free,’ not the $60."~{ Message-ID:
{ 12667@star.cs.vu.nl
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12667@star.cs.vu.nl. }~
={ pedagogy :
     Minix and +3 ;
   comp.os.minix
}

So while Tanenbaum was in sympathy with the Free Software Foundation’s goals
(insofar as he clearly wanted people to be able to use, update, enhance, and
learn from software), he was not in sympathy with the idea of having 40,000
strangers make his software "better." Or, to put it differently, the goals of
Minix remained those of a researcher and a textbook author: to be useful in
classrooms and cheap enough to be widely available and usable on the largest
number of cheap computers.
={ Minix (operating system) :
     goals of +4 ;
   Free Software Foundation +1
}

By contrast, Torvalds’s "fun" project had no goals. Being a cocky
nineteen-year-old student with little better to do (no textbooks to write, no
students, grants, research projects, or committee meetings), Torvalds was keen
to accept all the ready-made help he could find to make his project better. And
with 40,000 Minix users, he had a more or less instant set of contributors.
Stallman’s audience for EMACS in the early 1980s, by contrast, was limited to
about a hundred distinct computers, which may have translated into thousands,
but certainly not tens of thousands of users. Tanenbaum’s work in creating a
generation of students who not only understood the internals of an operating
system but, more specifically, understood the internals of the UNIX operating
system created a huge pool of competent and eager UNIX hackers. It was the work
of porting UNIX not only to various machines but to a generation of minds as
well that set the stage for this event—and this is an essential, though often
overlooked component of the success of Linux.
={ EMACS (text editor) :
     number of users ;
   Stallman,Richard ;
   fun, and development of Linux +1
}

Many accounts of the Linux story focus on the fight between Torvalds and
Tanenbaum, a fight carried out on comp.os.minix with the subject line "Linux is
obsolete."~{ Message-ID: { 12595@star.cs.vu.nl
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=12595@star.cs.vu.nl. Key parts of the
controversy were reprinted in Dibona et al. Open Sources. }~ Tanenbaum argued
that Torvalds was reinventing the wheel, writing an operating system that, as
far as the state of the art was concerned, was now obsolete. Torvalds, by
contrast, asserted that it was better to make something quick and dirty that
worked, invite contributions, and worry about making it state of the art later.
Far from illustrating some kind of outmoded conservatism on Tanenbaum’s part,
the debate highlights the distinction between forms of coordination and the
meanings of collaboration. For Tanenbaum, the goals of Minix were either
pedagogical or academic: to teach operating-system essentials or to explore new
possibilities in operating-system design. By this model, Linux could do
neither; it couldn’t be used in the classroom because ,{[pg 219]}, it would
quickly become too complex and feature-laden to teach, and it wasn’t pushing
the boundaries of research because it was an out-of-date operating system.
Torvalds, by contrast, had no goals. What drove his progress was a commitment
to fun and to a largely inarticulate notion of what interested him and others,
defined at the outset almost entirely against Minix and other free operating
systems, like FreeBSD. In this sense, it could only emerge out of the
context—which set the constraints on its design—of UNIX, open systems, Minix,
GNU, and BSD.
={ comp.os.minix :
     "Linux is obsolete" debate on ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) :
     FreeBSD ;
   FreeBSD
}

Both Tanenbaum and Torvalds operated under a model of coordination in which one
person was ultimately responsible for the entire project: Tanenbaum oversaw
Minix and ensured that it remained true to its goals of serving a pedagogical
audience; Torvalds would oversee Linux, but he would incorporate as many
different features as users wanted or could contribute. Very quickly—with a
pool of 40,000 potential contributors—Torvalds would be in the same position
Tanenbaum was in, that is, forced to make decisions about the goals of Linux
and about which enhancements would go into it and which would not. What makes
the story of Linux so interesting to observers is that it appears that Torvalds
made no decision: he accepted almost everything.

Tanenbaum’s goals and plans for Minix were clear and autocratically formed.
Control, hierarchy, and restriction are after all appropriate in the classroom.
But Torvalds wanted to do more. He wanted to go on learning and to try out
alternatives, and with Minix as the only widely available way to do so, his
decision to part ways starts to make sense; clearly he was not alone in his
desire to explore and extend what he had learned. Nonetheless, Torvalds faced
the problem of coordinating a new project and making similar decisions about
its direction. On this point, Linux has been the subject of much reflection by
both insiders and outsiders. Despite images of Linux as either an anarchic
bazaar or an autocratic dictatorship, the reality is more subtle: it includes a
hierarchy of contributors, maintainers, and "trusted lieutenants" and a
sophisticated, informal, and intuitive sense of "good taste" gained through
reading and incorporating the work of co-developers.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) :
     individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +10 ;
   hierarchy, in coordination +10
}

While it was possible for Torvalds to remain in charge as an individual for the
first few years of Linux (1991-95, roughly), he eventually began to delegate
some of that control to people who would make decisions about different
subcomponents of the kernel. ,{[pg 220]}, It was thus possible to incorporate
more of the "patches" (pieces of code) contributed by volunteers, by
distributing some of the work of evaluating them to people other than Torvalds.
This informal hierarchy slowly developed into a formal one, as Steven Weber
points out: "The final de facto ‘grant’ of authority came when Torvalds began
publicly to reroute relevant submissions to the lieutenants. In 1996 the
decision structure became more formal with an explicit differentiation between
‘credited developers’ and ‘maintainers.’ . . . If this sounds very much like a
hierarchical decision structure, that is because it is one—albeit one in which
participation is strictly voluntary."~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open
Source, 164. }~
={ patches (software) +3 ;
   Weber, Steven ;
   Linux (Free Software project) :
     process of decision making +4
}

Almost all of the decisions made by Torvalds and lieutenants were of a single
kind: whether or not to incorporate a piece of code submitted by a volunteer.
Each such decision was technically complex: insert the code, recompile the
kernel, test to see if it works or if it produces any bugs, decide whether it
is worth keeping, issue a new version with a log of the changes that were made.
Although the various official leaders were given the authority to make such
changes, coordination was still technically informal. Since they were all
working on the same complex technical object, one person (Torvalds) ultimately
needed to verify a final version, containing all the subparts, in order to make
sure that it worked without breaking.

Such decisions had very little to do with any kind of design goals or plans,
only with whether the submitted patch "worked," a term that reflects at once
technical, aesthetic, legal, and design criteria that are not explicitly
recorded anywhere in the project—hence, the privileging of adaptability over
planning. At no point were the patches assigned or solicited, although Torvalds
is justly famous for encouraging people to work on particular problems, but
only if they wanted to. As a result, the system morphed in subtle, unexpected
ways, diverging from its original, supposedly backwards "monolithic" design and
into a novel configuration that reflected the interests of the volunteers and
the implicit criteria of the leaders.
={ design ;
   Linux (Free Software project) :
     planning vs. adaptability in +9
}

By 1995-96, Torvalds and lieutenants faced considerable challenges with regard
to hierarchy and decision-making, as the project had grown in size and
complexity. The first widely remembered response to the ongoing crisis of
benevolent dictatorship in Linux was the creation of "loadable kernel modules,"
conceived as a way to release some of the constant pressure to decide which
patches would be incorporated into the kernel. The decision to modularize ,{[pg
221]}, Linux was simultaneously technical and social: the software-code base
would be rewritten to allow for external loadable modules to be inserted "on
the fly," rather than all being compiled into one large binary chunk; at the
same time, it meant that the responsibility to ensure that the modules worked
devolved from Torvalds to the creator of the module. The decision repudiated
Torvalds’s early opposition to Tanenbaum in the "monolithic vs. microkernel"
debate by inviting contributors to separate core from peripheral functions of
an operating system (though the Linux kernel remains monolithic compared to
classic microkernels). It also allowed for a significant proliferation of new
ideas and related projects. It both contracted and distributed the hierarchy;
now Linus was in charge of a tighter project, but more people could work with
him according to structured technical and social rules of responsibility.
={ modifiability :
     modularity in software +1
}

Creating loadable modules changed the look of Linux, but not because of any
planning or design decisions set out in advance. The choice is an example of
the privileged adaptability of the Linux, resolving the tension between the
curiosity and virtuosity of individual contributors to the project and the need
for hierarchical control in order to manage complexity. The commitment to
adaptability dissolves the distinction between the technical means of
coordination and the social means of management. It is about producing a
meaningful whole by which both people and code can be coordinated—an
achievement vigorously defended by kernel hackers.
={ design :
     evolution, and +7
}

The adaptable organization and structure of Linux is often described in
evolutionary terms, as something without teleological purpose, but responding
to an environment. Indeed, Torvalds himself has a weakness for this kind of
explanation.

_1 Let’s just be honest, and admit that it [Linux] wasn’t designed.

_1 Sure, there’s design too—the design of UNIX made a scaffolding for the
system, and more importantly it made it easier for people to communicate
because people had a mental model for what the system was like, which means
that it’s much easier to discuss changes.

_1 But that’s like saying that you know that you’re going to build a car with
four wheels and headlights—it’s true, but the real bitch is in the details.

_1 And I know better than most that what I envisioned 10 years ago has nothing
in common with what Linux is today. There was certainly no premeditated design
there.~{ Quoted in Zack Brown, "Kernel Traffic #146 for 17Dec2001," Kernel
Traffic, http://www.kerneltraffic.org/kernel-traffic/kt20011217_146.html; also
quoted in Federico Iannacci, "The Linux Managing Model,"
http://opensource.mit.edu/papers/iannacci2.pdf. }~

% ,{[pg 222]},

Adaptability does not answer the questions of intelligent design. Why, for
example, does a car have four wheels and two headlights? Often these
discussions are polarized: either technical objects are designed, or they are
the result of random mutations. What this opposition overlooks is the fact that
design and the coordination of collaboration go hand in hand; one reveals the
limits and possibilities of the other. Linux represents a particular example of
such a problematic—one that has become the paradigmatic case of Free
Software—but there have been many others, including UNIX, for which the
engineers created a system that reflected the distributed collaboration of
users around the world even as the lawyers tried to make it conform to legal
rules about licensing and practical concerns about bookkeeping and support.

Because it privileges adaptability over planning, Linux is a recursive public:
operating systems and social systems. It privileges openness to new directions,
at every level. It privileges the right to propose changes by actually creating
them and trying to convince others to use and incorporate them. It privileges
the right to fork the software into new and different kinds of systems. Given
what it privileges, Linux ends up evolving differently than do systems whose
life and design are constrained by corporate organization, or by strict
engineering design principles, or by legal or marketing definitions of
products—in short, by clear goals. What makes this distinction between the
goal-oriented design principle and the principle of adaptability important is
its relationship to politics. Goals and planning are the subject of negotiation
and consensus, or of autocratic decision-making; adaptability is the province
of critique. It should be remembered that Linux is by no means an attempt to
create something radically new; it is a rewrite of a UNIX operating system, as
Torvalds points out, but one that through adaptation can end up becoming
something new.
={ critique, Free Software as ;
   ontology :
     of linux ;
   recursive public
}

2~ Patch and Vote
={ Apache (Free Software project) +28 ;
   patches (software) :
     voting in software development and +28 ;
   software development :
     patch and vote method +28
}

The Apache Web server and the Apache Group (now called the Apache Software
Foundation) provide a second illuminating example of the how and why of
coordination in Free Software of the 1990s. As with the case of Linux, the
development of the Apache project illustrates how adaptability is privileged
over planning ,{[pg 223]}, and, in particular, how this privileging is intended
to resolve the tensions between individual curiosity and virtuosity and
collective control and decision-making. It is also the story of the progressive
evolution of coordination, the simultaneously technical and social mechanisms
of coordinating people and code, patches and votes.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) :
     individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +3
}

The Apache project emerged out of a group of users of the original httpd
(HyperText Transmission Protocol Daemon) Web server created by Rob McCool at
NCSA, based on the work of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web project at CERN.
Berners-Lee had written a specification for the World Wide Web that included
the mark-up language HTML, the transmission protocol http, and a set of
libraries that implemented the code known as libwww, which he had dedicated to
the public domain.~{ Message-ID: { 673c43e160C1a758@sluvca.slu.edu
}http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=673c43e160C1a758@sluvca.slu.edu. See
also, Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web. }~
={ Berners-Lee, Tim ;
   httpd +22 ;
   Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language (HTML) ;
   Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) ;
   McCool, Rob +3 ;
   World Wide Web (www) +2
}

The NCSA, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, picked up both www
projects, subsequently creating both the first widely used browser, Mosaic,
directed by Marc Andreessen, and httpd. Httpd was public domain up until
version 1.3. Development slowed when McCool was lured to Netscape, along with
the team that created Mosaic. By early 1994, when the World Wide Web had
started to spread, many individuals and groups ran Web servers that used httpd;
some of them had created extensions and fixed bugs. They ranged from university
researchers to corporations like Wired Ventures, which launched the online
version of its magazine (HotWired.com) in 1994. Most users communicated
primarily through Usenet, on the comp.infosystems.www.* newsgroups, sharing
experiences, instructions, and updates in the same manner as other software
projects stretching back to the beginning of the Usenet and Arpanet newsgroups.
={ Andreessen, Marc ;
   Arpanet (network) ;
   Mosaic (web browser) ;
   National Center for Super Computing Applications (NCSA) +2 ;
   Rumor on Usenet ;
   Usenet :
     rumor on ;
   User groups ;
   Wired (magazine) :
     HotWired (online version of Wired) +1
}

When NCSA failed to respond to most of the fixes and extensions being proposed,
a group of several of the most active users of httpd began to communicate via a
mailing list called new-httpd in 1995. The list was maintained by Brian
Behlendorf, the webmaster for HotWired, on a server he maintained called
hyperreal; its participants were those who had debugged httpd, created
extensions, or added functionality. The list was the primary means of
association and communication for a diverse group of people from various
locations around the world. During the next year, participants hashed out
issues related to coordination, to the identity of and the processes involved
in patching the "new" httpd, version 1.3.~{ The original Apache Group included
Brian Behlendorf, Roy T. Fielding, Rob Harthill, David Robinson, Cliff
Skolnick, Randy Terbush, Robert S. Thau, Andrew Wilson, Eric Hagberg, Frank
Peters, and Nicolas Pioch. The mailing list new-httpd eventually became the
Apache developers list. The archives are available at
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/httpd-dev/ and cited hereafter as
"Apache developer mailing list," followed by sender, subject, date, and time.
}~ ,{[pg 224]},
={ Behlendorf, Brian :
     as head of Apache +24 ;
   new httpd (mailing list) +24
}

Patching a piece of software is a peculiar activity, akin to debugging, but
more like a form of ex post facto design. Patching covers the spectrum of
changes that can be made: from fixing security holes and bugs that prevent the
software from compiling to feature and performance enhancements. A great number
of the patches that initially drew this group together grew out of needs that
each individual member had in making a Web server function. These patches were
not due to any design or planning decisions by NCSA, McCool, or the assembled
group, but most were useful enough that everyone gained from using them,
because they fixed problems that everyone would or could encounter. As a
result, the need for a coordinated new-httpd release was key to the group’s
work. This new version of NCSA httpd had no name initially, but apache was a
persistent candidate; the somewhat apocryphal origin of the name is that it was
"a patchy webserver."~{ For another version of the story, see Moody, Rebel
Code, 127-28. The official story honors the Apache Indian tribes for "superior
skills in warfare strategy and inexhaustible endurance." Evidence of the
concern of the original members over the use of the name is clearly visible in
the archives of the Apache project. See esp. Apache developer mailing list,
Robert S. Thau, Subject: The political correctness question . . . , 22 April
1995, 21:06 EDT. }~
={ bugs ;
   debugging :
     patching vs. ;
   patches (software) :
     debugging vs. ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) +50 ;
   software development :
     Apache project +17
}

At the outset, in February and March 1995, the pace of work of the various
members of new-httpd differed a great deal, but was in general extremely rapid.
Even before there was an official release of a new httpd, process issues
started to confront the group, as Roy Fielding later explained: "Apache began
with a conscious attempt to solve the process issues first, before development
even started, because it was clear from the very beginning that a
geographically distributed set of volunteers, without any traditional
organizational ties, would require a unique development process in order to
make decisions."~{ Mockus, Fielding, and Herbsleb, "Two Case Studies of Open
Source Software Development," 3. }~

The need for process arose more or less organically, as the group developed
mechanisms for managing the various patches: assigning them IDs, testing them,
and incorporating them "by hand" into the main source-code base. As this
happened, members of the list would occasionally find themselves lost, confused
by the process or the efficiency of other members, as in this message from
Andrew Wilson concerning Cliff Skolnick’s management of the list of bugs:
={ Wilson, Andrew +2 ;
   Skolnick, Cliff
}

_1 Cliff, can you concentrate on getting an uptodate copy of the
bug/improvement list please. I’ve already lost track of just what the heck is
meant to be going on. Also what’s the status of this pre-pre-pre release Apache
stuff. It’s either a pre or it isn’t surely? AND is the pre-pre-etc thing the
same as the thing Cliff is meant to be working on?

_1 Just what the fsck is going on anyway? Ay, ay ay! Andrew Wilson.~{ Apache
developer mailing list, Andrew Wilson, Subject: Re: httpd patch B5 updated, 14
March 1995, 21:49 GMT. }~ ,{[pg 225]},

To which Rob Harthill replied, "It is getting messy. I still think we should
all implement one patch at a time together. At the rate (and hours) some are
working we can probably manage a couple of patches a day. . . . If this is
acceptable to the rest of the group, I think we should order the patches, and
start a systematic processes of discussion, implementations and testing."~{
Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: httpd patch B5
updated, 14 March 1995, 15:10 MST. }~
={ Harthill, Rob +12 }

Some members found the pace of work exciting, while others appealed for slowing
or stopping in order to take stock. Cliff Skolnick created a system for
managing the patches and proposed that list-members vote in order to determine
which patches be included.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Cliff Skolnick,
Subject: Process (please read), 15 March 1995, 3:11 PST; and Subject: Patch
file format, 15 March 1995, 3:40 PST. }~ Rob Harthill voted first.
={ Skolnick, Cliff }

group{

    Here are my votes for the current patch list shown at http://www.hyperreal.com/httpd/patchgen/list.cgi

    I’ll use a vote of

    -1 have a problem with it

    0 haven’t tested it yet (failed to understand it or whatever)

    +1 tried it, liked it, have no problem with it.

    [Here Harthill provides a list of votes on each patch.]

    If this voting scheme makes sense, lets use it to filter out the stuff we’re happy with. A "-1" vote should veto any patch. There seems to be about 6 or 7 of us actively commenting on patches, so I’d suggest that once a patch gets a vote of +4 (with no vetos), we can add it to an alpha.~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: patch list vote, 15 March 1995, 13:21:24 MST. }~

}group

Harthill’s votes immediately instigated discussion about various patches,
further voting, and discussion about the process (i.e., how many votes or
vetoes were needed), all mixed together in a flurry of e-mail messages. The
voting process was far from perfect, but it did allow some consensus on what
"apache" would be, that is, which patches would be incorporated into an
"official" (though not very public) release: Apache 0.2 on 18 March.~{ Apache
developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: apache-0.2 on hyperreal, 18
March 1995, 18:46 MST. }~ Without a voting system, the group of contributors
could have gone on applying patches individually, each in his own context,
fixing the problems that ailed each user, but ignoring those that were
irrelevant or unnecessary in that context. With a voting process, however, a
convergence on a tested and approved new-httpd could emerge. As the process was
refined, members sought a volunteer to take votes, to open and close the voting
once a week, and to build a new version of Apache when the voting was done.
(Andrew Wilson was the first volunteer, to which Cliff Skolnick replied, "I
guess the first vote is ,{[pg 226]}, voting Andrew as the vote taker :-).")~{
Apache developer mailing list, Cliff Skolnick, Subject: Re: patch list vote, 21
March 1995, 2:47 PST. }~ The patch-and-vote process that emerged in the early
stages of Apache was not entirely novel; many contributors noted that the
FreeBSD project used a similar process, and some suggested the need for a
"patch coordinator" and others worried that "using patches gets very ugly, very
quickly."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Paul Richards, Subject: Re: vote
counting, 21 March 1995, 22:24 GMT. }~
={ Wilson, Andrew ;
   Skolnick, Cliff ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) :
     FreeBSD ;
   FreeBSD
}

The significance of the patch-and-vote system was that it clearly represented
the tension between the virtuosity of individual developers and a group process
aimed at creating and maintaining a common piece of software. It was a way of
balancing the ability of each separate individual’s expertise against a common
desire to ship and promote a stable, bug-free, public-domain Web server. As Roy
Fielding and others would describe it in hindsight, this tension was part of
Apache’s advantage.

_1 Although the Apache Group makes decisions as a whole, all of the actual work
of the project is done by individuals. The group does not write code, design
solutions, document products, or provide support to our customers; individual
people do that. The group provides an environment for collaboration and an
excellent trial-by-fire for ideas and code, but the creative energy needed to
solve a particular problem, redesign a piece of the system, or fix a given bug
is almost always contributed by individual volunteers working on their own, for
their own purposes, and not at the behest of the group. Competitors mistakenly
assume Apache will be unable to take on new or unusual tasks because of the
perception that we act as a group rather than follow a single leader. What they
fail to see is that, by remaining open to new contributors, the group has an
unlimited supply of innovative ideas, and it is the individuals who chose to
pursue their own ideas who are the real driving force for innovation.~{ Roy T.
Fielding, "Shared Leadership in the Apache Project." }~
={ Apache (Free Software project) :
     individual vs. group innovation +1
}

Although openness is widely touted as the key to the innovations of Apache, the
claim is somewhat disingenuous: patches are just that, patches. Any large-scale
changes to the code could not be accomplished by applying patches, especially
if each patch must be subjected to a relatively harsh vote to be included. The
only way to make sweeping changes—especially changes that require iteration and
testing to get right—is to engage in separate "branches" of a project or to
differentiate between internal and external releases—in short, to fork the
project temporarily in hopes that it would soon rejoin its stable parent.
Apache encountered this problem very early on with the "Shambhala" rewrite of
httpd by Robert Thau. ,{[pg 227]},
={ Shambhala +6 ;
   Thau, Robert +6 ;
   differentiation of software :
     in Apache +6 | see also forking and sharing source code +6 ;
   forking :
     in Apache +6
}

Shambhala was never quite official: Thau called it his "noodling" server, or a
"garage" project. It started as his attempt to rewrite httpd as a server which
could handle and process multiple requests at the same time. As an experiment,
it was entirely his own project, which he occasionally referred to on the
new-httpd list: "Still hacking Shambhala, and laying low until it works well
enough to talk about."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau,
Subject: Re: 0.7.2b, 7 June 1995, 17:27 EDT. }~ By mid-June of 1995, he had a
working version that he announced, quite modestly, to the list as "a garage
project to explore some possible new directions I thought *might* be useful for
the group to pursue."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S. Thau, Subject:
My Garage Project, 12 June 1995, 21:14 GMT. }~ Another list member, Randy
Terbush, tried it out and gave it rave reviews, and by the end of June there
were two users exclaiming its virtues. But since it hadn’t ever really been
officially identified as a fork, or an alternate development pathway, this led
Rob Harthill to ask: "So what’s the situation regarding Shambhala and Apache,
are those of you who have switched to it giving up on Apache and this project?
If so, do you need a separate list to discuss Shambhala?"~{ Apache developer
mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 9:44 MDT. }~
={ Terbush, Randy }

Harthill had assumed that the NCSA code-base was "tried and tested" and that
Shambhala represented a split, a fork: "The question is, should we all go in
one direction, continue as things stand or Shambahla [sic] goes off on its
own?"~{ Apache developer mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30
June 1995, 14:50 MDT. }~ His query drew out the miscommunication in detail:
that Thau had planned it as a "drop-in" replacement for the NCSA httpd, and
that his intentions were to make it the core of the Apache server, if he could
get it to work. Harthill, who had spent no small amount of time working hard at
patching the existing server code, was not pleased, and made the core issues
explicit.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) :
     individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +4
}

_1 Maybe it was rst’s [Robert Thau’s] choice of phrases, such as "garage
project" and it having a different name, maybe I didn’t read his mailings
thoroughly enough, maybe they weren’t explicit enough, whatever. . . . It’s a
shame that nobody using Shambhala (who must have realized what was going on)
didn’t raise these issues weeks ago. I can only presume that rst was too modest
to push Shambhala, or at least discussion of it, onto us more vigourously. I
remember saying words to the effect of "this is what I plan to do, stop me if
you think this isn’t a good idea." Why the hell didn’t anyone say something? .
. . [D]id others get the same impression about rst’s work as I did? Come on
people, if you want to be part of this group, collaborate!~{ Apache developer
mailing list, Rob Harthill, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 30 June 1995, 16:48 GMT. }~
,{[pg 228]},
={ collaboration :
     different meanings of +2
}

Harthill’s injunction to collaborate seems surprising in the context of a
mailing list and project created to facilitate collaboration, but the
injunction is specific: collaborate by making plans and sharing goals. Implicit
in his words is the tension between a project with clear plans and goals, an
overarching design to which everyone contributes, as opposed to a group
platform without clear goals that provides individuals with a setting to try
out alternatives. Implicit in his words is the spectrum between debugging an
existing piece of software with a stable identity and rewriting the fundamental
aspects of it to make it something new. The meaning of collaboration bifurcates
here: on the one hand, the privileging of the autonomous work of individuals
which is submitted to a group peer review and then incorporated; on the other,
the privileging of a set of shared goals to which the actions and labor of
individuals is subordinated.~{ Gabriella Coleman captures this nicely in her
discussion of the tension between the individual virtuosity of the hacker and
the corporate populism of groups like Apache or, in her example, the Debian
distribution of Linux. See Coleman, The Social Construction of Freedom. }~
={ debugging :
     patching vs. +2 ;
   goals, lack of in Free Software +2
}

Indeed, the very design of Shambhala reflects the former approach of
privileging individual work: like UNIX and EMACS before it, Shambhala was
designed as a modular system, one that could "make some of that process [the
patch-and-vote process] obsolete, by allowing stuff which is not universally
applicable (e.g., database back-ends), controversial, or just half-baked, to be
shipped anyway as optional modules."~{ Apache developer mailing list, Robert S.
Thau, Subject: Re: Shambhala, 1 July 1995, 14:42 EDT. }~ Such a design
separates the core platform from the individual experiments that are conducted
on it, rather than creating a design that is modular in the hierarchical sense
of each contributor working on an assigned section of a project. Undoubtedly,
the core platform requires coordination, but extensions and modifications can
happen without needing to transform the whole project.~{ A slightly different
explanation of the role of modularity is discussed in Steven Weber, The Success
of Open Source, 173-75. }~ Shambhala represents a certain triumph of the "shut
up and show me the code" aesthetic: Thau’s "modesty" is instead a recognition
that he should be quiet until it "works well enough to talk about," whereas
Harthill’s response is frustration that no one has talked about what Thau was
planning to do before it was even attempted. The consequence was that
Harthill’s work seemed to be in vain, replaced by the work of a more virtuosic
hacker’s demonstration of a superior direction.
={ modifiability :
     modularity in software
}

In the case of Apache one can see how coordination in Free Software is not just
an afterthought or a necessary feature of distributed work, but is in fact at
the core of software production itself, governing the norms and forms of life
that determine what will count as good software, how it will progress with
respect to a context and ,{[pg 229]}, background, and how people will be
expected to interact around the topic of design decisions. The privileging of
adaptability brings with it a choice in the mode of collaboration: it resolves
the tension between the agonistic competitive creation of software, such as
Robert Thau’s creation of Shambhala, and the need for collective coordination
of complexity, such as Harthill’s plea for collaboration to reduce duplicated
or unnecessary work.

2~ Check Out and Commit
={ Linux (Free Software project) :
     Source Code Management tools and +21 ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs) +21
}

The technical and social forms that Linux and Apache take are enabled by the
tools they build and use, from bug-tracking tools and mailing lists to the Web
servers and kernels themselves. One such tool plays a very special role in the
emergence of these organizations: Source Code Management systems (SCMs). SCMs
are tools for coordinating people and code; they allow multiple people in
dispersed locales to work simultaneously on the same object, the same source
code, without the need for a central coordinating overseer and without the risk
of stepping on each other’s toes. The history of SCMs—especially in the case of
Linux—also illustrates the recursive-depth problem: namely, is Free Software
still free if it is created with non-free tools?
={ Source Code Management tools (SCMs) :
     definition of +1 ;
   recursive public :
     layers of
}

SCM tools, like the Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) and Subversion, have
become extremely common tools for Free Software programmers; indeed, it is rare
to find a project, even a project conducted by only one individual, which does
not make use of these tools. Their basic function is to allow two or more
programmers to work on the same files at the same time and to provide feedback
on where their edits conflict. When the number of programmers grows large, an
SCM can become a tool for managing complexity. It keeps track of who has
"checked out" files; it enables users to lock files if they want to ensure that
no one else makes changes at the same time; it can keep track of and display
the conflicting changes made by two users to the same file; it can be used to
create "internal" forks or "branches" that may be incompatible with each other,
but still allows programmers to try out new things and, if all goes well, merge
the branches into the trunk later on. In sophisticated forms it can be used to
"animate" successive changes to a piece of code, in order to visualize its
evolution. ,{[pg 230]},
={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs) :
     see also Concurrent Versioning System (cvs)
}

Beyond mere coordination functions, SCMs are also used as a form of
distribution; generally SCMs allow anyone to check out the code, but restrict
those who can check in or "commit" the code. The result is that users can get
instant access to the most up-to-date version of a piece of software, and
programmers can differentiate between stable releases, which have few bugs, and
"unstable" or experimental versions that are under construction and will need
the help of users willing to test and debug the latest versions. SCM tools
automate certain aspects of coordination, not only reducing the labor involved
but opening up new possibilities for coordination.
={ bugs ;
   software tools +1 ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs) :
     as tool for distribution +1
}

The genealogy of SCMs can be seen in the example of Ken Thompson’s creation of
a diff tape, which he used to distribute changes that had been contributed to
UNIX. Where Thompson saw UNIX as a spectrum of changes and the legal department
at Bell Labs saw a series of versions, SCM tools combine these two approaches
by minutely managing the revisions, assigning each change (each diff) a new
version number, and storing the history of all of those changes so that
software changes might be precisely undone in order to discover which changes
cause problems. Written by Douglas McIlroy, "diff" is itself a piece of
software, one of the famed small UNIX tools that do one thing well. The program
diff compares two files, line by line, and prints out the differences between
them in a structured format (showing a series of lines with codes that indicate
changes, additions, or removals). Given two versions of a text, one could run
diff to find the differences and make the appropriate changes to synchronize
them, a task that is otherwise tedious and, given the exactitude of source
code, prone to human error. A useful side-effect of diff (when combined with an
editor like ed or EMACS) is that when someone makes a set of changes to a file
and runs diff on both the original and the changed file, the output (i.e., the
changes only) can be used to reconstruct the original file from the changed
file. Diff thus allows for a clever, space-saving way to save all the changes
ever made to a file, rather than retaining full copies of every new version,
one saves only the changes. Ergo, version control. diff—and programs like
it—became the basis for managing the complexity of large numbers of programmers
working on the same text at the same time.
={ McIlroy, Douglas ;
   AT&T :
     Bell Laboratories ;
   diff (software tool) :
     history of +2 ;
   Thompson, Ken
}

One of the first attempts to formalize version control was Walter Tichy’s
Revision Control System (RCS), from 1985.~{ Tichy, "RCS." }~ RCS kept track of
the changes to different files using diff and allowed programmers ,{[pg 231]},
to see all of the changes that had been made to that file. RCS, however, could
not really tell the difference between the work of one programmer and another.
All changes were equal, in that sense, and any questions that might arise about
why a change was made could remain unanswered.
={ RCS (software tool) +1 :
     see also Source Code Management tools
}

In order to add sophistication to RCS, Dick Grune, at the Vrije Universiteit,
Amsterdam, began writing scripts that used RCS as a multi-user,
Internet-accessible version-control system, a system that eventually became the
Concurrent Versioning System. cvs allowed multiple users to check out a copy,
make changes, and then commit those changes, and it would check for and either
prevent or flag conflicting changes. Ultimately, cvs became most useful when
programmers could use it remotely to check out source code from anywhere on the
Internet. It allowed people to work at different speeds, different times, and
in different places, without needing a central person in charge of checking and
comparing the changes. cvs created a form of decentralized version control for
very-large-scale collaboration; developers could work offline on software, and
always on the most updated version, yet still be working on the same object.
={ Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) :
     history of +1 ;
   Grune, Dick
}

Both the Apache project and the Linux kernel project use SCMs. In the case of
Apache the original patch-and-vote system quickly began to strain the patience,
time, and energy of participants as the number of contributors and patches
began to grow. From the very beginning of the project, the contributor Paul
Richards had urged the group to make use of cvs. He had extensive experience
with the system in the Free-BSD project and was convinced that it provided a
superior alternative to the patch-and-vote system. Few other contributors had
much experience with it, however, so it wasn’t until over a year after Richards
began his admonitions that cvs was eventually adopted. However, cvs is not a
simple replacement for a patch-and-vote system; it necessitates a different
kind of organization. Richards recognized the trade-off. The patch-and-vote
system created a very high level of quality assurance and peer review of the
patches that people submitted, while the cvs system allowed individuals to make
more changes that might not meet the same level of quality assurance. The cvs
system allowed branches—stable, testing, experimental—with different levels of
quality assurance, while the patch-and-vote system was inherently directed at
one final and stable version. As the case of Shambhala ,{[pg 232]}, exhibited,
under the patch-and-vote system experimental versions would remain unofficial
garage projects, rather than serve as official branches with people responsible
for committing changes.
={ Richards, Paul ;
   Shambhala :
     see also Apache ;
   Apache (Free Software project) +1 ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) :
     FreeBSD ;
   FreeBSD ;
   Linux (Free Software project) ;
   software development :
     patch and vote method ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs) :
     right to "commit" change +1
}

While SCMs are in general good for managing conflicting changes, they can do so
only up to a point. To allow anyone to commit a change, however, could result
in a chaotic mess, just as difficult to disentangle as it would be without an
SCM. In practice, therefore, most projects designate a handful of people as
having the right to "commit" changes. The Apache project retained its voting
scheme, for instance, but it became a way of voting for "committers" instead
for patches themselves. Trusted committers—those with the mysterious "good
taste," or technical intuition—became the core members of the group.

The Linux kernel has also struggled with various issues surrounding SCMs and
the management of responsibility they imply. The story of the so-called VGER
tree and the creation of a new SCM called Bitkeeper is exemplary in this
respect.~{ See Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source, 117-19; Moody, Rebel
Code, 172-78. See also Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." }~ By
1997, Linux developers had begun to use cvs to manage changes to the source
code, though not without resistance. Torvalds was still in charge of the
changes to the official stable tree, but as other "lieutenants" came on board,
the complexity of the changes to the kernel grew. One such lieutenant was Dave
Miller, who maintained a "mirror" of the stable Linux kernel tree, the VGER
tree, on a server at Rutgers. In September 1998 a fight broke out among Linux
kernel developers over two related issues: one, the fact that Torvalds was
failing to incorporate (patch) contributions that had been forwarded to him by
various people, including his lieutenants; and two, as a result, the VGER cvs
repository was no longer in synch with the stable tree maintained by Torvalds.
Two different versions of Linux threatened to emerge.
={ Miller, Dave ;
   Source Code Management tools (SCMs) :
     see also Bitkeeper ;
   Concurrent Versioning System (cvs) :
     Linux and ;
   Linux (Free Software project) :
     VGER tree and +2 ;
   Bitkeeper (Source Code Management software) +12 ;
   Torvalds, Linus :
     in bitkeeper controversy +12
}

A great deal of yelling ensued, as nicely captured in Moody’s Rebel Code,
culminating in the famous phrase, uttered by Larry McVoy: "Linus does not
scale." The meaning of this phrase is that the ability of Linux to grow into an
ever larger project with increasing complexity, one which can handle myriad
uses and functions (to "scale" up), is constrained by the fact that there is
only one Linus Torvalds. By all accounts, Linus was and is excellent at what he
does—but there is only one Linus. The danger of this situation is the danger of
a fork. A fork would mean one or more new versions would proliferate under new
leadership, a situation much like ,{[pg 233]}, the spread of UNIX. Both the
licenses and the SCMs are designed to facilitate this, but only as a last
resort. Forking also implies dilution and confusion—competing versions of the
same thing and potentially unmanageable incompatibilities.
={ McVoy, Larry +11 ;
   Moody, Glyn ;
   forking :
     in Linux +1
}

The fork never happened, however, but only because Linus went on vacation,
returning renewed and ready to continue and to be more responsive. But the
crisis had been real, and it drove developers into considering new modes of
coordination. Larry McVoy offered to create a new form of SCM, one that would
allow a much more flexible response to the problem that the VGER tree
represented. However, his proposed solution, called Bitkeeper, would create far
more controversy than the one that precipitated it.

McVoy was well-known in geek circles before Linux. In the late stages of the
open-systems era, as an employee of Sun, he had penned an important document
called "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal." It was an internal Sun
Microsystems document that argued for the company to make its version of UNIX
freely available. It was a last-ditch effort to save the dream of open systems.
It was also the first such proposition within a company to "go open source,"
much like the documents that would urge Netscape to Open Source its software in
1998. Despite this early commitment, McVoy chose not to create Bitkeeper as a
Free Software project, but to make it quasi-proprietary, a decision that raised
a very central question in ideological terms: can one, or should one, create
Free Software using non-free tools?
={ Free Software :
     nonfree tools and +9 ;
   Sun Microsystems
}

On one side of this controversy, naturally, was Richard Stallman and those
sharing his vision of Free Software. On the other were pragmatists like
Torvalds claiming no goals and no commitment to "ideology"—only a commitment to
"fun." The tension laid bare the way in which recursive publics negotiate and
modulate the core components of Free Software from within. Torvalds made a very
strong and vocal statement concerning this issue, responding to Stallman’s
criticisms about the use of non-free software to create Free Software: "Quite
frankly, I don’t _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think
ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less
ideology, and a whole lot more ‘I do this because it’s FUN and because others
might find it useful, not because I got religion.’"~{ Linus Torvalds, "Re:
[PATCH] Remove Bitkeeper Documentation from Linux Tree," 20 April 2002,
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0204.2/1018.html. Quoted in
Shaikh and Cornford, "Version Management Tools." }~
={ coordination (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +8 ;
   Fun, and development of Linux ;
   Stallman, Richard
}

Torvalds emphasizes pragmatism in terms of coordination: the right tool for the
job is the right tool for the job. In terms of licenses, ,{[pg 234]}, however,
such pragmatism does not play, and Torvalds has always been strongly committed
to the GPL, refusing to let non-GPL software into the kernel. This strategic
pragmatism is in fact a recognition of where experimental changes might be
proposed, and where practices are settled. The GPL was a stable document,
sharing source code widely was a stable practice, but coordinating a project
using SCMs was, during this period, still in flux, and thus Bitkeeper was a
tool well worth using so long as it remained suitable to Linux development.
Torvalds was experimenting with the meaning of coordination: could a non-free
tool be used to create Free Software?
={ General Public License (GPL) :
     passim
}

McVoy, on the other hand, was on thin ice. He was experimenting with the
meaning of Free Software licenses. He created three separate licenses for
Bitkeeper in an attempt to play both sides: a commercial license for paying
customers, a license for people who sell Bitkeeper, and a license for "free
users." The free-user license allowed Linux developers to use the software for
free—though it required them to use the latest version—and prohibited them from
working on a competing project at the same time. McVoy’s attempt to have his
cake and eat it, too, created enormous tension in the developer community, a
tension that built from 2002, when Torvalds began using Bitkeeper in earnest,
to 2005, when he announced he would stop.

The tension came from two sources: the first was debates among developers
addressing the moral question of using non-free software to create Free
Software. The moral question, as ever, was also a technical one, as the second
source of tension, the license restrictions, would reveal.

The developer Andrew Trigdell, well known for his work on a project called
Samba and his reverse engineering of a Microsoft networking protocol, began a
project to reverse engineer Bitkeeper by looking at the metadata it produced in
the course of being used for the Linux project. By doing so, he crossed a line
set up by McVoy’s experimental licensing arrangement: the "free as long as you
don’t copy me" license. Lawyers advised Trigdell to stay silent on the topic
while Torvalds publicly berated him for "willful destruction" and a moral lapse
of character in trying to reverse engineer Bitkeeper. Bruce Perens defended
Trigdell and censured Torvalds for his seemingly contradictory ethics.~{ Andrew
Orlowski, "‘Cool it, Linus’—Bruce Perens," Register, 15 April 2005,
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/04/15/perens_on_torvalds/page2.html. }~ McVoy
never sued Trigdell, and Bitkeeper has limped along as a commercial project,
because, ,{[pg 235]}, much like the EMACS controversy of 1985, the Bitkeeper
controversy of 2005 ended with Torvalds simply deciding to create his own SCM,
called git.
={ Perens, Bruce ;
   Trigdell, Andrew ;
   reverse engineering ;
   EMACS (text editor) :
     controversy about
}

The story of the VGER tree and Bitkeeper illustrate common tensions within
recursive publics, specifically, the depth of the meaning of free. On the one
hand, there is Linux itself, an exemplary Free Software project made freely
available; on the other hand, however, there is the ability to contribute to
this process, a process that is potentially constrained by the use of
Bitkeeper. So long as the function of Bitkeeper is completely
circumscribed—that is, completely planned—there can be no problem. However, the
moment one user sees a way to change or improve the process, and not just the
kernel itself, then the restrictions and constraints of Bitkeeper can come into
play. While it is not clear that Bitkeeper actually prevented anything, it is
also clear that developers clearly recognized it as a potential drag on a
generalized commitment to adaptability. Or to put it in terms of recursive
publics, only one layer is properly open, that of the kernel itself; the layer
beneath it, the process of its construction, is not free in the same sense. It
is ironic that Torvalds—otherwise the spokesperson for antiplanning and
adaptability—willingly adopted this form of constraint, but not at all
surprising that it was collectively rejected.
={ adaptability :
     as a form of critique +3 ;
   critique, Free Software as +3 ;
   recursive public :
     layers of +1
}

The Bitkeeper controversy can be understood as a kind of experiment, a
modulation on the one hand of the kinds of acceptable licenses (by McVoy) and
on the other of acceptable forms of coordination (Torvalds’s decision to use
Bitkeeper). The experiment was a failure, but a productive one, as it
identified one kind of non-free software that is not safe to use in Free
Software development: the SCM that coordinates the people and the code they
contribute. In terms of recursive publics the experiment identified the proper
depth of recursion. Although it might be possible to create Free Software using
some kinds of non-free tools, SCMs are not among them; both the software
created and the software used to create it need to be free.~{ Similar debates
have regularly appeared around the use of non-free compilers, non-free
debuggers, non-free development environments, and so forth. There are, however,
a large number of people who write and promote Free Software that runs on
proprietary operating systems like Macintosh and Windows, as well as a
distinction between tools and formats. So, ,{[pg 341]}, for instance, using
Adobe Photoshop to create icons is fine so long as they are in standard open
formats like PNG or JPG, and not proprietary forms such as GIF or photoshop. }~

The Bitkeeper controversy illustrates again that adaptability is not about
radical invention, but about critique and response. Whereas controlled design
and hierarchical planning represent the domain of governance—control through
goal-setting and orientation of a collective or a project—adaptability
privileges politics, properly speaking, the ability to critique existing design
and to ,{[pg 236]}, propose alternatives without restriction. The tension
between goal-setting and adaptability is also part of the dominant ideology of
intellectual property. According to this ideology, IP laws promote invention of
new products and ideas, but restrict the re-use or transformation of existing
ones; defining where novelty begins is a core test of the law. McVoy made this
tension explicit in his justifications for Bitkeeper: "Richard [Stallman] might
want to consider the fact that developing new software is extremely expensive.
He’s very proud of the collection of free software, but that’s a collection of
re-implementations, but no profoundly new ideas or products. . . . What if the
free software model simply can’t support the costs of developing new ideas?"~{
Quoted in Jeremy Andrews, "Interview: Larry McVoy," Kernel Trap, 28 May 2002,
http://Kerneltrap.org/node/222. }~
={ novelty, of Free Software +1 }

Novelty, both in the case of Linux and in intellectual property law more
generally, is directly related to the interplay of social and technical
coordination: goal direction vs. adaptability. The ideal of adaptability
promoted by Torvalds suggests a radical alternative to the dominant ideology of
creation embedded in contemporary intellectual-property systems. If Linux is
"new," it is new through adaptation and the coordination of large numbers of
creative contributors who challenge the "design" of an operating system from
the bottom up, not from the top down. By contrast, McVoy represents a moral
imagination of design in which it is impossible to achieve novelty without
extremely expensive investment in top-down, goal-directed, unpolitical
design—and it is this activity that the intellectual-property system is
designed to reward. Both are engaged, however, in an experiment; both are
engaged in "figuring out" what the limits of Free Software are.
={ figuring out ;
   moral and technical order
}

2~ Coordination Is Design

Many popular accounts of Free Software skip quickly over the details of its
mechanism to suggest that it is somehow inevitable or obvious that Free
Software should work—a self-organizing, emergent system that manages complexity
through distributed contributions by hundreds of thousands of people. In The
Success of Open Source Steven Weber points out that when people refer to Open
Source as a self-organizing system, they usually mean something more like "I
don’t understand how it works."~{ Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source,
132. }~ ,{[pg 237]},
={ Weber, Steven }

Eric Raymond, for instance, suggests that Free Software is essentially the
emergent, self-organizing result of "collaborative debugging": "Given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."~{ Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. }~
The phrase implies that the core success of Free Software is the distributed,
isolated, labor of debugging, and that design and planning happen elsewhere
(when a developer "scratches an itch" or responds to a personal need). On the
surface, such a distinction seems quite obvious: designing is designing, and
debugging is removing bugs from software, and presto!—Free Software. At the
extreme end, it is an understanding by which only individual geniuses are
capable of planning and design, and if the initial conditions are properly set,
then collective wisdom will fill in the details.
={ Raymond, Eric Steven ;
   adaptability :
     planning vs. +5 ;
   bugs +5 ;
   debugging :
     patching vs. +5
}

However, the actual practice and meaning of collective or collaborative
debugging is incredibly elastic. Sometimes debugging means fixing an error;
sometimes it means making the software do something different or new. (A common
joke, often made at Microsoft’s expense, captures some of this elasticity:
whenever something doesn’t seem to work right, one says, "That’s a feature, not
a bug.") Some programmers see a design decision as a stupid mistake and take
action to correct it, whereas others simply learn to use the software as
designed. Debugging can mean something as simple as reading someone else’s code
and helping them understand why it does not work; it can mean finding bugs in
someone else’s software; it can mean reliably reproducing bugs; it can mean
pinpointing the cause of the bug in the source code; it can mean changing the
source to eliminate the bug; or it can, at the limit, mean changing or even
re-creating the software to make it do something different or better.~{
Gabriella Coleman, in "The Social Construction of Freedom," provides an
excellent example of a programmer’s frustration with font-lock in EMACS,
something that falls in between a bug and a feature. The programmer’s
frustration is directed at the stupidity of the design (and implied designers),
but his solution is not a fix, but a work-around—and it illustrates how
debugging does not always imply collaboration. }~ For academics, debugging can
be a way to build a career: "Find bug. Write paper. Fix bug. Write paper.
Repeat."~{ Dan Wallach, interview, 3 October 2003. }~ For commercial software
vendors, by contrast, debugging is part of a battery of tests intended to
streamline a product.
={ Microsoft }

Coordination in Free Software is about adaptability over planning. It is a way
of resolving the tension between individual virtuosity in creation and the
social benefit in shared labor. If all software were created, maintained, and
distributed only by individuals, coordination would be superfluous, and
software would indeed be part of the domain of poetry. But even the
paradigmatic cases of virtuosic creation—EMACS by Richard Stallman, UNIX by Ken
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie—clearly represent the need for creative forms ,{[pg
238]}, of coordination and the fundamental practice of reusing, reworking,
rewriting, and imitation. UNIX was not created de novo, but was an attempt to
streamline and rewrite Multics, itself a system that evolved out of Project MAC
and the early mists of time-sharing and computer hacking.~{ Mitchell Waldrop’s
The Dream Machine details the family history well. }~ EMACS was a reworking of
the TECO editor. Both examples are useful for understanding the evolution of
modes of coordination and the spectrum of design and debugging.
={ Ritchie, Dennis +2 ;
   Adaptability :
     planning vs. +5 ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) :
     individual virtuosity vs. hierarchical planning +1 ;
   Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD) (version of UNIX) +1 ;
   modifiability +3 ;
   planning +2 ;
   UNIX operating system :
     development of +1
}

UNIX was initially ported and shared through mixed academic and commercial
means, through the active participation of computer scientists who both
received updates and contributed fixes back to Thompson and Ritchie. No formal
system existed to manage this process. When Thompson speaks of his
understanding of UNIX as a "spectrum" and not as a series of releases (V1, V2,
etc.), the implication is that work on UNIX was continuous, both within Bell
Labs and among its widespread users. Thompson’s use of the diff tape
encapsulates the core problem of coordination: how to collect and redistribute
the changes made to the system by its users.
={ AT&T :
     Bell Laboratories +1 ;
   diff (software tool)
}

Similarly, Bill Joy’s distribution of BSD and James Gosling’s distribution of
GOSMACS were both ad hoc, noncorporate experiments in "releasing early and
often." These distribution schemes had a purpose (beyond satisfying demand for
the software). The frequent distribution of patches, fixes, and extensions
eased the pain of debugging software and satisfied users’ demands for new
features and extensions (by allowing them to do both themselves). Had Thompson
and Ritchie followed the conventional corporate model of software production,
they would have been held responsible for thoroughly debugging and testing the
software they distributed, and AT&T or Bell Labs would have been responsible
for coming up with all innovations and extensions as well, based on marketing
and product research. Such an approach would have sacrificed adaptability in
favor of planning. But Thompson’s and Ritchie’s model was different: both the
extension and the debugging of software became shared responsibilities of the
users and the developers. Stallman’s creation of EMACS followed a similar
pattern; since EMACS was by design extensible and intended to satisfy myriad
unforeseen needs, the responsibility rested on the users to address those
needs, and sharing their extensions and fixes had obvious social benefit.
={ Gosling, James ;
   Joy, Bill ;
   GOSMACS (version of EMACS)
}

The ability to see development of software as a spectrum implies more than just
continuous work on a product; it means seeing the ,{[pg 239]}, product itself
as something fluid, built out of previous ideas and products and transforming,
differentiating into new ones. Debugging, from this perspective, is not
separate from design. Both are part of a spectrum of changes and improvements
whose goals and direction are governed by the users and developers themselves,
and the patterns of coordination they adopt. It is in the space between
debugging and design that Free Software finds its niche.
={ software development :
     as spectrum
}

2~ Conclusion: Experiments and Modulations
={ experimentation +2 }

% experimentation index link added

Coordination is a key component of Free Software, and is frequently identified
as the central component. Free Software is the result of a complicated story of
experimentation and construction, and the forms that coordination takes in Free
Software are specific outcomes of this longer story. Apache and Linux are both
experiments—not scientific experiments per se but collective social experiments
in which there are complex technologies and legal tools, systems of
coordination and governance, and moral and technical orders already present.

Free Software is an experimental system, a practice that changes with the
results of new experiments. The privileging of adaptability makes it a peculiar
kind of experiment, however, one not directed by goals, plans, or hierarchical
control, but more like what John Dewey suggested throughout his work: the
experimental praxis of science extended to the social organization of
governance in the service of improving the conditions of freedom. What gives
this experimentation significance is the centrality of Free Software—and
specifically of Linux and Apache—to the experimental expansion of the Internet.
As an infrastructure or a milieu, the Internet is changing the conditions of
social organization, changing the relationship of knowledge to power, and
changing the orientation of collective life toward governance. Free Software
is, arguably, the best example of an attempt to make this transformation
public, to ensure that it uses the advantages of adaptability as critique to
counter the power of planning as control. Free Software, as a recursive public,
proceeds by proposing and providing alternatives. It is a bit like Kant’s
version of enlightenment: insofar as geeks speak (or hack) as scholars, in a
public realm, they have a right to propose criticisms and changes of any sort;
as soon as they relinquish ,{[pg 240]}, that commitment, they become private
employees or servants of the sovereign, bound by conscience and power to carry
out the duties of their given office. The constitution of a public realm is not
a universal activity, however, but a historically specific one: Free Software
confronts the specific contemporary technical and legal infrastructure by which
it is possible to propose criticisms and offer alternatives. What results is a
recursive public filled not only with individuals who govern their own actions
but also with code and concepts and licenses and forms of coordination that
turn these actions into viable, concrete technical forms of life useful to
inhabitants of the present.
={ Dewey, John ;
   Kant, Immanuel ;
   critique, Free Software as ;
   geeks :
     as moderns ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge ;
   recursive public
}

:B~ Part III modulations

1~part_iii [Part III] -#

_1 The question cannot be answered by argument. Experimental method means
experiment, and the question can be answered only by trying, by organized
effort. The reasons for making the trial are not abstract or recondite. They
are found in the confusion, uncertainty and conflict that mark the modern
world. . . . The task is to go on, and not backward, until the method of
intelligence and experimental control is the rule in social relations and
social direction. - john dewey, Liberalism and Social Action
={ Dewey, John ;
   experimentation
}

1~ 8. "If We Succeed, We Will Disappear"

% ,{[pg 243]},

In early 2002, after years of reading and learning about Open Source and Free
Software, I finally had a chance to have dinner with famed libertarian,
gun-toting, Open Source-founding impresario Eric Raymond, author of The
Cathedral and the Bazaar and other amateur anthropological musings on the
subject of Free Software. He had come to Houston, to Rice University, to give a
talk at the behest of the Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI).
Visions of a mortal confrontation between two anthropologists-manqué filled my
head. I imagined explaining point by point why his references to
self-organization and evolutionary psychology were misguided, and how the long
tradition of economic anthropology contradicted basically everything he had to
say about gift-exchange. Alas, two things conspired against this epic, if
bathetic, showdown.
={ Raymond, Eric Steven +4 ;
   Cathedral and the Bazaar ;
   Free Software :
     anthropology and +1 ;
   Rice University +3
}

% cath baz, left out quotation marks for current index sort

First, there was the fact that (as so often happens in meetings among geeks)
there was only one woman present at dinner; she was ,{[pg 244]}, young, perhaps
unmarried, but not a student—an interested female hacker. Raymond seated
himself beside this woman, turned toward her, and with a few one-minute-long
exceptions proceeded to lavish her with all of his available attention. The
second reason was that I was seated next to Richard Baraniuk and Brent
Hendricks. All at once, Raymond looked like the past of Free Software, arguing
the same arguments, using the same rhetoric of his online publications, while
Baraniuk and Hendricks looked like its future, posing questions about the
transformation—the modulation—of Free Software into something surprising and
new.
={ Baraniuk, Richard +36 ;
   gender ;
   Hendricks, Brent +36 ;
   modulation :
     of Free Software ;
   participant observation
}

Baraniuk, a professor of electrical engineering and a specialist in digital
signal processing, and Hendricks, an accomplished programmer, had started a
project called Connexions, an "open content repository of educational
materials." Far more interesting to me than Raymond’s amateur philosophizing
was this extant project to extend the ideas of Free Software to the creation of
educational materials—textbooks, in particular.
={ Connexions project +7 ;
   Digital signal processing (DSP) ;
   textbooks
}

Rich and Brent were, by the looks of it, equally excited to be seated next to
me, perhaps because I was answering their questions, whereas Raymond was not,
or perhaps because I was a new hire at Rice University, which meant we could
talk seriously about collaboration. Rich and Brent (and Jan Odegard, who, as
director of CITI, had organized the dinner) were keen to know what I could add
to help them understand the "social" aspects of what they wanted to do with
Connexions, and I, in return, was equally eager to learn how they
conceptualized their Free Software-like project: what had they kept the same
and what had they changed in their own experiment? Whatever they meant by
"social" (and sometimes it meant ethical, sometimes legal, sometimes cultural,
and so on), they were clear that there were domains of expertise in which they
felt comfortable (programming, project management, teaching, and a particular
kind of research in computer science and electrical engineering) and domains in
which they did not (the "norms" of academic life outside their disciplines,
intellectual-property law, "culture"). Although I tried to explain the nature
of my own expertise in social theory, philosophy, history, and ethnographic
research, the academic distinctions were far less important than the fact that
I could ask detailed and pointed questions about the project, questions that
indicated to them that I must have some kind of stake in the domains that they
needed filled—in particular, ,{[pg 245]}, around the question of whether
Connexions was the same thing as Free Software, and what the implications of
that might be.
={ culture }

Raymond courted and chattered on, then left, the event of his talk and dinner
of fading significance, but over the following weeks, as I caught up with Brent
and Rich, I became (surprisingly quickly) part of their novel experiment.

2~ After Free Software

My nonmeeting with Raymond is an allegory of sorts: an allegory of what comes
after Free Software. The excitement around that table was not so much about
Free Software or Open Source, but about a certain possibility, a kind of
genotypic urge of which Free Software seemed a fossil phenotype and Connexions
a live one. Rich and Brent were people in the midst of figuring something out.
They were engaged in modulating the practices of Free Software. By modulation I
mean exploring in detail the concrete practices—the how—of Free Software in
order to ask what can be changed, and what cannot, in order to maintain
something (openness?) that no one can quite put his finger on. What drew me
immediately to Connexions was that it was related to Free Software, not
metaphorically or ideologically, but concretely, practically, and
experimentally, a relationship that was more about emergence out of than it was
about the reproduction of forms. But the opposition between emergence and
reproduction immediately poses a question, not unlike that of the identity of
species in evolution: if Free Software is no longer software, what exactly is
it?
={ experimentation +1 :
     see also modulations ;
   modulation :
     practices of +4 ;
   practices :
     five components of Free Software
}

In part III I confront this question directly. Indeed, it was this question
that necessitated part II, the analytic decomposition of the practices and
histories of Free Software. In order to answer the question "Is Connexions Free
Software?" (or vice versa) it was necessary to rethink Free Software as itself
a collective, technical experiment, rather than as an expression of any
ideology or culture. To answer yes, or no, however, merely begs the question
"What is Free Software?" What is the cultural significance of these practices?
The concept of a recursive public is meant to reveal in part the significance
of both Free Software and emergent projects like Connexions; it is meant to
help chart when these emergent projects branch off absolutely (cease to be
public) and when they do not, by ,{[pg 246]}, focusing on how they modulate the
five components that give Free Software its contemporary identity.
={ cultural significance ;
   recursive public +3 ;
   Free Software :
     components of +1
}

Connexions modulates all of the components except that of the movement (there
is, as of yet, no real "Free Textbook" movement, but the "Open Access" movement
is a close second cousin).~{ In January 2005, when I first wrote this analysis,
this was true. By April 2006, the Hewlett Foundation had convened the Open
Educational Resources "movement" as something that would transform the
production and circulation of textbooks like those created by Connexions.
Indeed, in Rich Baraniuk’s report for Hewlett, the first paragraph reads: "A
grassroots movement is on the verge of sweeping through the academic world. The
open education movement is based on a set of intuitions that are shared by a
remarkably wide range of academics: that knowledge should be free and open to
use and re-use; that collaboration should be easier, not harder; that people
should receive credit and kudos for contributing to education and research; and
that concepts and ideas are linked in unusual and surprising ways and not the
simple linear forms that textbooks present. Open education promises to
fundamentally change the way authors, instructors, and students interact
worldwide" (Baraniuk and King, "Connexions"). (In a nice confirmation of just
how embedded participation can become in anthropology, Baraniuk cribbed the
second sentence from something I had written two years earlier as part of a
description of what I thought Connexions hoped to achieve.) The "movement" as
such still does not quite exist, but the momentum for it is clearly part of the
actions that Hewlett hopes to achieve. }~ Perhaps the most complex modulation
concerns coordination—changes to the practice of coordination and collaboration
in academic-textbook creation in particular, and more generally to the nature
of collaboration and coordination of knowledge in science and scholarship
generally.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) ;
   movement (component of Free Software) +2
}

Connexions emerged out of Free Software, and not, as one might expect, out of
education, textbook writing, distance education, or any of those areas that are
topically connected to pedagogy. That is to say, the people involved did not
come to their project by attempting to deal with a problem salient to education
and teaching as much as they did so through the problems raised by Free
Software and the question of how those problems apply to university textbooks.
Similarly, a second project, Creative Commons, also emerged out of a direct
engagement with and exploration of Free Software, and not out of any legal
movement or scholarly commitment to the critique of intellectual-property law
or, more important, out of any desire to transform the entertainment industry.
Both projects are resolutely committed to experimenting with the given
practices of Free Software—to testing their limits and changing them where they
can—and this is what makes them vibrant, risky, and potentially illuminating as
cases of a recursive public.
={ affinity (of geeks) ;
   commons +1 ;
   Creative Commons +1 ;
   pedagogy ;
   recursive public :
     examples of +1
}

While both initiatives are concerned with conventional subject areas
(educational materials and cultural productions), they enter the fray
orthogonally, armed with anxiety about the social and moral order in which they
live, and an urge to transform it by modulating Free Software. This binds such
projects across substantive domains, in that they are forced to be
oppositional, not because they want to be (the movement comes last), but
because they enter the domains of education and the culture industry as
outsiders. They are in many ways intuitively troubled by the existing state of
affairs, and their organizations, tools, legal licenses, and movements are seen
as alternative imaginations of social order, especially concerning creative
freedom and the continued existence of a commons of scholarly knowledge. To the
extent that these projects ,{[pg 247]}, remain in an orthogonal relationship,
they are making a recursive public appear—something the textbook industry and
the entertainment industry are, by contrast, not at all interested in doing,
for obvious financial and political reasons.
={ moral and technical order }

2~ Stories of Connexion
={ Connexions project :
     history and genesis of +26
}

I’m at dinner again. This time, a windowless hotel conference room in the
basement maybe, or perhaps high up in the air. Lawyers, academics, activists,
policy experts, and foundation people are semi-excitedly working their way
through the hotel’s steam-table fare. I’m trying to tell a story to the
assembled group—a story that I have heard Rich Baraniuk tell a hundred
times—but I’m screwing it up. Rich always gets enthusiastic stares of wonder,
light-bulbs going off everywhere, a subvocalized "Aha!" or a vigorous nod. I,
on the other hand, am clearly making it too complicated. Faces and foreheads
are squirmed up into lines of failed comprehension, people stare at the
gravy-sodden food they’re soldiering through, weighing the option of taking
another bite against listening to me complicate an already complicated world. I
wouldn’t be doing this, except that Rich is on a plane, or in a taxi, delayed
by snow or engineers or perhaps at an eponymous hotel in another city.
Meanwhile, our co-organizer Laurie Racine, has somehow convinced herself that I
have the childlike enthusiasm necessary to channel Rich. I’m flattered, but
unconvinced. After about twenty minutes, so is she, and as I try to answer a
question, she stops me and interjects, "Rich really needs to be here. He should
really be telling this story."

Miraculously, he shows up and, before he can even say hello, is conscripted
into telling his story properly. I sigh in relief and pray that I’ve not done
any irreparable damage and that I can go back to my role as straight man. I can
let the superaltern speak for himself. The downside of participant observation
is being asked to participate in what one had hoped first of all to observe. I
do know the story—I have heard it a hundred times. But somehow what I hear,
ears tuned to academic questions and marveling at some of the stranger claims
he makes, somehow this is not the ear for enlightenment that his practiced and
boyish charm delivers to those hearing it for the first time; it is instead an
ear tuned to questions ,{[pg 248]}, of why: why this project? Why now? And
even, somewhat convolutedly, why are people so fascinated when he tells the
story? How could I tell it like Rich?

Rich is an engineer, in particular, a specialist in Digital Signal Processing
(DSP). DSP is the science of signals. It is in everything, says Rich: your cell
phones, your cars, your CD players, all those devices. It is a mathematical
discipline, but it is also an intensely practical one, and it’s connected to
all kinds of neighboring fields of knowledge. It is the kind of discipline that
can connect calculus, bioinformatics, physics, and music. The statistical and
analytical techniques come from all sorts of research and end up in all kinds
of interesting devices. So Rich often finds himself trying to teach students to
make these kinds of connections—to understand that a Fourier transform is not
just another chapter in calculus but a tool for manipulating signals, whether
in bioinformatics or in music.
={ Digital signal processing (DSP) }

Around 1998 or 1999, Rich decided that it was time for him to write a textbook
on DSP, and he went to the dean of engineering, Sidney Burris, to tell him
about the idea. Burris, who is also a DSP man and longtime member of the Rice
University community, said something like, "Rich, why don’t you do something
useful?" By which he meant: there are a hundred DSP textbooks out there, so why
do you want to write the hundred and first? Burris encouraged Rich to do
something bigger, something ambitious enough to put Rice on the map. I mention
this because it is important to note that even a university like Rice, with a
faculty and graduate students on par with the major engineering universities of
the country, perceives that it gets no respect. Burris was, and remains, an
inveterate supporter of Connexions, precisely because it might put Rice "in the
history books" for having invented something truly novel.
={ Burris, C. Sidney ;
   Connexions project :
     textbooks and +4 ;
   Rice University
}

At about the same time as his idea for a textbook, Rich’s research group was
switching over to Linux, and Rich was first learning about Open Source and the
emergence of a fully free operating system created entirely by volunteers. It
isn’t clear what Rich’s aha! moment was, other than simply when he came to an
understanding that such a thing as Linux was actually possible. Nonetheless, at
some point, Rich had the idea that his textbook could be an Open Source
textbook, that is, a textbook created not just by him, but by DSP researchers
all over the world, and made available to everyone to make use of and modify
and improve as they saw fit, just like Linux. Together with Brent Hendricks,
Yan David Erlich, ,{[pg 249]}, and Ross Reedstrom, all of whom, as geeks, had a
deep familiarity with the history and practices of Free and Open Source
Software, Rich started to conceptualize a system; they started to think about
modulations of different components of Free and Open Source Software. The idea
of a Free Software textbook repository slowly took shape.
={ Linux (Free Software project) ;
   Open Source :
     inspiration for Connexions +27 ;
   Reedstrom, Ross
}

Thus, Connexions: an "open content repository of high-quality educational
materials." These "textbooks" very quickly evolved into something else:
"modules" of content, something that has never been sharply defined, but which
corresponds more or less to a small chunk of teachable information, like two or
three pages in a textbook. Such modules are much easier to conceive of in
sciences like mathematics or biology, in which textbooks are often
multiauthored collections, finely divided into short chapters with diagrams,
exercises, theorems, or programs. Modules lend themselves much less well to a
model of humanities or social-science scholarship based in reading texts,
discussion, critique, and comparison—and this bias is a clear reflection of
what Brent, Ross, and Rich knew best in terms of teaching and writing. Indeed,
the project’s frequent recourse to the image of an assembly-line model of
knowledge production often confirms the worst fears of humanists and educators
when they first encounter Connexions. The image suggests that knowledge comes
in prepackaged and colorfully branded tidbits for the delectation of
undergrads, rather than characterizing knowledge as a state of being or as a
process.
={ Connexions project :
     model of learning in | modules in +1
}

The factory image (figure 7) is a bit misleading. Rich’s and Brent’s
imaginations are in fact much broader, which shows whenever they demo the
project, or give a talk, or chat at a party about it. Part of my failure to
communicate excitement when I tell the story of Connexions is that I skip the
examples, which is where Rich starts: what if, he says, you are a student
taking Calculus 101 and, at the same time, Intro to Signals and Systems—no one
is going to explain to you how Fourier transforms form a bridge, or connection,
between them. "Our brains aren’t organized in linear, chapter-by-chapter ways,"
Rich always says, "so why are our textbooks?" How can we give students a way to
see the connection between statistics and genetics, between architecture and
biology, between intellectual-property law and chemical engineering? Rich is
always looking for new examples: a music class for kids that uses information
from physics, or vice versa, for instance. Rich’s great hope is that the ,{[pg
250]}, ,{[pg 251]}, more modules there are in the Connexions commons, the more
fantastic and fascinating might be the possibilities for such novel—and
natural—connections.
={ Connexions project :
     as "factory of knowledge" +3
}

% image placed after end of paragraph

{ 2bits_08_07-100.png }image ~[* The Connexions textbook as a factory. Illustration by Jenn Drummond, Ross Reedstrom, Max Starkenberg, and others, 1999-2004. Used with permission. ]~

Free Software—and, in particular, Open Source in the guise of "self-organizing"
distributed systems of coordination—provide a particular promise of meeting the
challenges of teaching and learning that Rich thinks we face. Rich’s commitment
is not to a certain kind of pedagogical practice, but to the "social" or
"community" benefits of thousands of people working "together" on a textbook.
Indeed, Connexions did not emerge out of education or educational technology;
it was not aligned with any particular theory of learning (though Rich
eventually developed a rhetoric of linked, networked, connected knowledge—hence
the name Connexions—that he uses often to sell the project). There is no school
of education at Rice, nor a particular constituency for such a project
(teacher-training programs, say, or administrative requirements for online
education). What makes Rich’s sell even harder is that the project emerged at
about the same time as the high-profile failure of dotcom bubble-fueled schemes
to expand university education into online education, distance education, and
other systems of expanding the paying student body without actually inviting
them onto campus. The largest of these failed experiments by far was the
project at Columbia, which had reached the stage of implementation at the time
the bubble burst in 2000.~{ See Chris Beam, "Fathom.com Shuts Down as Columbia
Withdraws," Columbia Spectator, 27 January 2003,
http://www.columbiaspectator.com/. Also see David Noble’s widely read critique,
"Digital Diploma Mills." }~
={ Connexions project :
     relationship to education +2 ;
   distance learning +2
}

Thus, Rich styled Connexions as more than just a factory of knowledge—it would
be a community or culture developing richly associative and novel kinds of
textbooks—and as much more than just distance education. Indeed, Connexions was
not the only such project busy differentiating itself from the perceived
dangers of distance education. In April 2001 MIT had announced that it would
make the content of all of its courses available for free online in a project
strategically called OpenCourseWare (OCW). Such news could only bring attention
to MIT, which explicitly positioned the announcement as a kind of final death
blow to the idea of distance education, by saying that what students pay
$35,000 and up for per year is not "knowledge"—which is free—but the experience
of being at MIT. The announcement created pure profit from the perspective of
MIT’s reputation as a generator and disseminator of scientific knowledge, but
the project did not emerge directly out of an interest in mimicking the success
of Open Source. That angle was ,{[pg 252]}, provided ultimately by the
computer-science professor Hal Abelson, whose deep understanding of the history
and growth of Free Software came from his direct involvement in it as a
long-standing member of the computer-science community at MIT. OCW emerged most
proximately from the strange result of a committee report, commissioned by the
provost, on how MIT should position itself in the "distance/e-learning" field.
The surprising response: don’t do it, give the content away and add value to
the campus teaching and research experience instead.~{ "Provost Announces
Formation of Council on Educational Technology," MIT Tech Talk, 29 September
1999, http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/1999/council-0929.html. }~
={ Abelson, Hal ;
   Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) :
     open courseware and +2 ;
   Open CourseWare (OCW) +2 ;
   Connexions project :
     Open CourseWare +2
}

OCW, Connexions, and distance learning, therefore, while all ostensibly
interested in combining education with the networks and software, emerged out
of different demands and different places. While the profit-driven demand of
distance learning fueled many attempts around the country, it stalled in the
case of OCW, largely because the final MIT Council on Educational Technology
report that recommended OCW was issued at the same time as the first plunge in
the stock market (April 2000). Such issues were not a core factor in the
development of Connexions, which is not to say that the problems of funding and
sustainability have not always been important concerns, only that genesis of
the project was not at the administrative level or due to concerns about
distance education. For Rich, Brent, and Ross the core commitment was to
openness and to the success of Open Source as an experiment with massive,
distributed, Internet-based, collaborative production of software—their
commitment to this has been, from the beginning, completely and adamantly
unwavering. Neverthless, the project has involved modulations of the core
features of Free Software. Such modulations depend, to a certain extent, on
being a project that emerges out of the ideas and practices of Free Software,
rather than, as in the case of OCW, one founded as a result of conflicting
goals (profit and academic freedom) and resulting in a strategic use of public
relations to increase the symbolic power of the university over its fiscal
growth.
={ Reedstrom, Ross }

% what of ich and brent? ross in index at this location

When Rich recounts the story of Connexions, though, he doesn’t mention any of
this background. Instead, like a good storyteller, he waits for the questions
to pose themselves and lets his demonstration answer them. Usually someone
asks, "How is Connexions different from OCW?" And, every time, Rich says
something similar: Connexions is about "communities," about changing the way
scholars collaborate and create knowledge, whereas OCW is simply ,{[pg 253]},
an attempt to transfer existing courses to a Web format in order to make the
content of those courses widely available. Connexions is a radical experiment
in the collaborative creation of educational materials, one that builds on the
insights of Open Source and that actually encompasses the OCW project. In
retrospective terms, it is clear that OCW was interested only in modulating the
meaning of source code and the legal license, whereas Connexions seeks also to
modulate the practice of coordination, with respect to academic textbooks.
={ communities ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   modulation :
     practices of +3 ;
   practices :
     five components of Free Software +3 ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +3
}

Rich’s story of the origin of Connexions usually segues into a demonstration of
the system, in which he outlines the various technical, legal, and educational
concepts that distinguish it. Connexions uses a standardized document format,
the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), and a Creative Commons copyright license
on every module; the Creative Commons license allows people not only to copy
and distribute the information but to modify it and even to use it for
commercial gain (an issue that causes repeated discussion among the team
members). The material ranges from detailed explanations of DSP concepts
(naturally) to K-12 music education (the most popular set of modules). Some
contributors have added entire courses; others have created a few modules here
and there. Contributors can set up workgroups to manage the creation of
modules, and they can invite other users to join. Connexions uses a
version-control system so that all of the changes are recorded; thus, if a
module used in one class is changed, the person using it for another class can
continue to use the older version if they wish. The number of detailed and
clever solutions embodied in the system never ceases to thoroughly impress
anyone who takes the time to look at it.
={ Connexions project :
     model of learning +2 ;
   copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +2
}

But what always animates people is the idea of random and flexible connection,
the idea that a textbook author might be able to build on the work of hundreds
of others who have already contributed, to create new classes, new modules, and
creative connections between them, or surprising juxtapositions—from the
biologist teaching a class on bioinformatics who needs to remind students of
certain parts of calculus without requiring a whole course; to the architect
who wants a studio to study biological form, not necessarily in order to do
experiments in biology, but to understand buildings differently; to the music
teacher who wants students to understand just enough physics to get the
concepts of pitch and ,{[pg 254]}, timbre; to or the physicist who needs a
concrete example for the explanation of waves and oscillation.

The idea of such radical recombinations is shocking for some (more often for
humanities and social-science scholars, rather than scientists or engineers,
for reasons that clearly have to do with an ideology of authentic and
individualized creative ability). The questions that result—regarding
copyright, plagiarism, control, unauthorized use, misuse, misconstrual,
misreading, defamation, and so on—generally emerge with surprising force and
speed. If Rich were trying to sell a version of "distance learning," skepticism
and suspicion would quickly overwhelm the project; but as it is, Connexions
inverts almost all of the expectations people have developed about textbooks,
classroom practice, collaboration, and copyright. More often than not people
leave the discussion converted—no doubt helped along by Rich’s storytelling
gift.

2~ Modulations: From Free Software to Connexions
={ modulation :
     practices of +10 ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +10
}

Connexions surprises people for some of the same reasons as Free Software
surprises people, emerging, as it does, directly out of the same practices and
the same components. Free Software provides a template made up of the five
components: shared source code, a concept of openness, copyleft licenses, forms
of coordination, and a movement or ideology. Connexions starts with the idea of
modulating a shared "source code," one that is not software, but educational
textbook modules that academics will share, port, and fork. The experiment that
results has implications for the other four components as well. The
implications lead to new questions, new constraints, and new ideas.
={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   communities ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   practices :
     five components of Free Software ;
   Connexions project :
     as Free Software project +3
}

% added index

The modulation of source code introduces a specific and potentially confusing
difference from Free Software projects: Connexions is both a conventional Free
Software project and an unconventional experiment based on Free Software. There
is, of course, plenty of normal source code, that is, a number of software
components that need to be combined in order to allow the creation of digital
documents (the modules) and to display, store, transmit, archive, and measure
the creation of modules. The creation and management of this software is
expected to function more or less like all Free Software projects: it is
licensed using Free Software licenses, it is ,{[pg 255]}, built on open
standards of various kinds, and it is set up to take contributions from other
users and developers. The software system for managing modules is itself built
on a variety of other Free Software components (and a commitment to using only
Free Software). Connexions has created various components, which are either
released like conventional Free Software or contributed to another Free
Software project. The economy of contribution and release is a complex one;
issues of support and maintenance, as well as of reputation and recognition,
figure into each decision. Others are invited to contribute, just as they are
invited to contribute to any Free Software project.~{ The software consists of
a collection of different Open Source Software cobbled together to provide the
basic platform (the Zope and Plone content-management frameworks, the
PostGresQL database, the python programming language, and the cvs
version-control software). }~
={ openness (component of Free Software) +2 :
     modulations of +4
}

At the same time, there is "content," the ubiquitous term for digital creations
that are not software. The creation of content modules, on the other hand
(which the software system makes technically possible), is intended to function
like a Free Software project, in which, for instance, a group of engineering
professors might get together to collaborate on pieces of a textbook on DSP.
The Connexions project does not encompass or initiate such collaborations, but,
rather, proceeds from the assumption that such activity is already happening
and that Connexions can provide a kind of alternative platform—an alternative
infrastructure even—which textbook-writing academics can make use of instead of
the current infrastructure of publishing. The current infrastructure and
technical model of textbook writing, this implies, is one that both prevents
people from taking advantage of the Open Source model of collaborative
development and makes academic work "non-free." The shared objects of content
are not source code that can be compiled, like source code in C, but documents
marked up with XML and filled with "educational" content, then "displayed"
either on paper or onscreen.
={ content +5 ;
   infrastructure :
     of publishing +3 ;
   textbooks :
     model in Connexions +3
}

The modulated meaning of source code creates all kinds of new
questions—specifically with respect to the other four components. In terms of
openness, for instance, Connexions modulates this component very little; most
of the actors involved are devoted to the ideals of open systems and open
standards, insofar as it is a Free Software project of a conventional type. It
builds on UNIX (Linux) and the Internet, and the project leaders maintain a
nearly fanatical devotion to openness at every level: applications, programming
languages, standards, protocols, mark-up languages, interface tools. Every
place where there is an open (as opposed to a ,{[pg 256]}, proprietary)
solution—that choice trumps all others (with one noteworthy exception).~{ The
most significant exception has been the issue of tools for authoring content in
XML. For most of the life of the Connexions project, the XML mark-up language
has been well-defined and clear, but there has been no way to write a module in
XML, short of directly writing the text and the tags in a text editor. For all
but a very small number of possible users, this feels too much like
programming, and they experience it as too frustrating to be worth it. The
solution (albeit temporary) was to encourage users to make use of a proprietary
XML editor (like a word processor, but capable of creating XML content).
Indeed, the Connexions project’s devotion to openness was tested by one of the
most important decisions its participants made: to pursue the creation of an
Open Source XML text editor in order to provide access to completely open tools
for creating completely open content. }~ James Boyle recently stated it well:
"Wherever possible, design the system to run with open content, on open
protocols, to be potentially available to the largest possible number of users,
and to accept the widest possible range of experimental modifications from
users who can themselves determine the development of the technology."~{ Boyle,
"Mertonianism Unbound," 14. }~
={ Boyle, James ;
   enlightenment ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +6 ;
   modifiability +4 ;
   openness (component of Free Software) :
     proprietary vs. +4 | sustainability vs. +4
}

With respect to content, the devotion to openness is nearly identical, because
conventional textbook publishers "lock in" customers (students) through the
creation of new editions and useless "enhanced" content, which jacks up prices
and makes it difficult for educators to customize their own courses. "Openness"
in this sense trades on the same reasoning as it did in the 1980s: the most
important aspect of the project is the information people create, and any
proprietary system locks up content and prevents people from taking it
elsewhere or using it in a different context.

Indeed, so firm is the commitment to openness that Rich and Brent often say
something like, "If we are successful, we will disappear." They do not want to
become a famous online textbook publisher; they want to become a famous
publishing infrastructure. Being radically open means that any other competitor
can use your system—but it means they are using your system, and this is the
goal. Being open means not only sharing the "source code" (content and
modules), but devising ways to ensure the perpetual openness of that content,
that is, to create a recursive public devoted to the maintenance and
modifiability of the medium or infrastructure by which it communicates.
Openness trumps "sustainability" (i.e., the self-perpetuation of the financial
feasibility of a particular organization), and where it fails to, the
commitment to openness has been compromised.

The commitment to openness and the modulation of the meaning of source code
thus create implications for the meaning of Free Software licenses: do such
licenses cover this kind of content? Are new licenses necessary? What should
they look like? Connexions was by no means the first project to stimulate
questions about the applicability of Free Software licenses to texts and
documents. In the case of EMACS and the GPL, for example, Richard Stallman had
faced the problem of licensing the manual at the same time as the source code
for the editor. Indeed, such issues would ultimately result in a GNU Free
Documentation License intended narrowly to ,{[pg 257]}, cover software manuals.
Stallman, due to his concern, had clashed during the 1990s with Tim O’Reilly,
publisher and head of O’Reilly Press, which had long produced books and manuals
for Free Software programs. O’Reilly argued that the principles reflected in
Free Software licenses should not be applied to instructional books, because
such books provided a service, a way for more people to learn how to use Free
Software, and in turn created a larger audience. Stallman argued the opposite:
manuals, just like the software they served, needed to be freely modifiable to
remain useful.
={ Stallman, Richard ;
   EMACS (text editor) ;
   Free Documentation License (FDL) +1 ;
   General Public License (GPL) :
     passim ;
   Free Documentation License (FDL) +1 ;
   Software manuals
}

By the late 1990s, after Free Software and Open Source had been splashed across
the headlines of the mainstream media, a number of attempts to create licenses
modeled on Free Software, but applicable to other things, were under way. One
of the earliest and most general was the Open Content License, written by the
educational-technology researcher David Wiley. Wiley’s license was intended for
use on any kind of content. Content could include text, digital photos, movies,
music, and so on. Such a license raises new issues. For example, can one
designate some parts of a text as "invariant" in order to prevent them from
being changed, while allowing other parts of the text to be changed (the model
eventually adopted by the GNU Free Documentation License)? What might the
relationship between the "original" and the modified version be? Can one expect
the original author to simply incorporate suggested changes? What kinds of
forking are possible? Where do the "moral rights" of an author come into play
(regarding the "integrity" of a work)?
={ Wiley, Davis ;
   authorship :
     moral rights of ;
   Open content licenses
}

At the same time, the modulation of source code to include academic textbooks
has extremely complex implications for the meaning and context of coordination:
scholars do not write textbooks like programmers write code, so should they
coordinate in the same ways? Coordination of a textbook or a course in
Connexions requires novel experiments in textbook writing. Does it lend itself
to academic styles of work, and in which disciplines, for what kinds of
projects? In order to cash in on the promise of distributed, collaborative
creation, it would be necessary to find ways to coordinate scholars.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of
}

So, when Rich and Brent recognized in me, at dinner, someone who might know how
to think about these issues, they were acknowledging that the experiment they
had started had created a certain turbulence in their understanding of Free
Software and, ,{[pg 258]}, in turn, a need to examine the kinds of legal,
cultural, and social practices that would be at stake.~{ The movement is the
component that remains unmodulated: there is no "free textbook" movement
associated with Connexions, even though many of the same arguments that lead to
a split between Free Software and Open Source occur here: the question of
whether the term free is confusing, for example, or the role of for-profit
publishers or textbook companies. In the end, most (though not all) of the
Connexions staff and many of its users are content to treat it as a useful tool
for composing novel kinds of digital educational material—not as a movement for
the liberation of educational content. }~

2~ Modulations: From Connexions to Creative Commons

I’m standing in a parking lot in 100 degree heat and 90 percent humidity. It is
spring in Houston. I am looking for my car, and I cannot find it. James Boyle,
author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens and distinguished professor of law at
Duke University, is standing near me, staring at me, wearing a wool suit,
sweating and watching me search for my car under the blazing sun. His look says
simply, "If I don’t disembowel you with my Palm Pilot stylus, I am going to
relish telling this humiliating story to your friends at every opportunity I
can." Boyle is a patient man, with the kind of arch Scottish humor that can
make you feel like his best friend, even as his stories of the folly of man
unfold with perfect comic pitch and turn out to be about you. Having laughed my
way through many an uproarious tale of the foibles of my fellow creatures, I am
aware that I have just taken a seat among them in Boyle’s theater of human
weakness. I repeatedly press the panic button on my key chain, in the hopes
that I am near enough to my car that it will erupt in a frenzy of honking and
flashing that will end the humiliation.
={ Boyle, James +3 ;
   Connexions project :
     connection to Creative Commons +2 ;
   Creative Commons +26 :
     connection to Connexions +2
}

The day had started well. Boyle had folded himself into my Volkswagen (he is
tall), and we had driven to campus, parked the car in what no doubt felt like a
memorable space at 9 A.M., and happily gone to the scheduled meeting—only to
find that it had been mistakenly scheduled for the following day. Not my fault,
though now, certainly, my problem. The ostensible purpose of Boyle’s visit was
to meet the Connexions team and learn about what they were doing. Boyle had
proposed the visit himself, as he was planning to pass through Houston anyway.
I had intended to pester him with questions about the politics and
possibilities of licensing the content in Connexions and with comparisons to
MIT’s OCW and other such commons projects that Boyle knew of.

Instead of attending the meeting, I took him back to my office, where I learned
more about why he was interested in Connexions. Boyle’s interest was not
entirely altruistic (nor was it designed to spend valuable quarter hours
standing in a scorched parking lot as I looked for my subcompact car). What
interested Boyle was finding ,{[pg 259]}, a constituency of potential users for
Creative Commons, the nonprofit organization he was establishing with Larry
Lessig, Hal Abelson, Michael Carroll, Eric Eldred, and others—largely because
he recognized the need for a ready constituency in order to make Creative
Commons work. The constituency was needed both to give the project legitimacy
and to allow its founders to understand what exactly was needed, legally
speaking, for the creation of a whole new set of Free Software-like licenses.
={ Abelson, Hal +2 ;
   Eldred, Eric +3 ;
   Lessig, Lawrence +24
}

Creative Commons, as an organization and as a movement, had been building for
several years. In some ways, Creative Commons represented a simple modulation
of the Free Software license: a broadening of the license’s concept to cover
other types of content. But the impetus behind it was not simply a desire to
copy and extend Free Software. Rather, all of the people involved in Creative
Commons were those who had been troubling issues of intellectual property,
information technology, and notions of commons, public domains, and freedom of
information for many years. Boyle had made his name with a book on the
construction of the information society by its legal (especially intellectual
property) structures. Eldred was a publisher of public-domain works and the
lead plaintiff in a court case that went to the Supreme Court in 2002 to
determine whether the recent extension of copyright term limits was
constitutional. Abelson was a computer scientist with an active interest in
issues of privacy, freedom, and law "on the electronic frontier." And Larry
Lessig was originally interested in constitutional law, a clerk for Judge
Richard Posner, and a self-styled cyberlaw scholar, who was, during the 1990s,
a driving force for the explosion of interest in cyberlaw, much of it carried
out at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
={ Berkman Center for Internet and Society +1 ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   Creative Commons :
     origin and history of +4
}

With the exception of Abelson—who, in addition to being a famous computer
scientist, worked for years in the same building that Richard Stallman camped
out in and chaired the committee that wrote the report recommending OCW—none of
the members of Creative Commons cut their teeth on Free Software projects (they
were lawyers and activists, primarily) and yet the emergence of Open Source
into the public limelight in 1998 was an event that made more or less instant
and intuitive sense to all of them. During this time, Lessig and members of the
Berkman Center began an "open law" project designed to mimic the Internet-based
collaboration of the Open Source project among lawyers who might want to ,{[pg
260]}, contribute to the Eldred case. Creative Commons was thus built as much
on a commitment to a notion of collaborative creation—the use of the Internet
especially—but more generally on the ability of individuals to work together to
create new things, and especially to coordinate the creation of these things by
the use of novel licensing agreements.

Creative Commons provided more than licenses, though. It was part of a social
imaginary of a moral and technical order that extended beyond software to
include creation of all kinds; notions of technical and moral freedom to make
use of one’s own "culture" became more and more prominent as Larry Lessig
became more and more involved in struggles with the entertainment industry over
the "control of culture." But for Lessig, Creative Commons was a fall-back
option; the direct route to a transformation of the legal structure of
intellectual property was through the Eldred case, a case that built huge
momentum throughout 2001 and 2002, was granted cert by the Supreme Court, and
was heard in October of 2002. One of the things that made the case remarkable
was the series of strange bedfellows it produced; among the economists and
lawyers supporting the repeal of the 1998 "Sonny Bono" Copyright Term Extension
Act were the arch free-marketeers and Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman,
James Buchanan, Kenneth Arrow, Ronald Coase, and George Akerlof. As Boyle
pointed out in print, conservatives and liberals and libertarians all have
reasons to be in favor of scaling back copyright expansion.~{ Boyle,
"Conservatives and Intellectual Property." }~ Lessig and his team lost the
case, and the Supreme Court essentially affirmed Congress’s interpretation of
the Constitution that "for limited times" meant only that the time period be
limited, not that it be short.
={ moral and technical order ;
   social imaginary
}

Creative Commons was thus a back-door approach: if the laws could not be
changed, then people should be given the tools they needed to work around those
laws. Understanding how Creative Commons was conceived requires seeing it as a
modulation of both the notion of "source code" and the modulation of "copyright
licenses." But the modulations take place in that context of a changing legal
system that was so unfamiliar to Stallman and his EMACS users, a legal system
responding to new forms of software, networks, and devices. For instance, the
changes to the Copyright Act of 1976 created an unintended effect that Creative
Commons would ultimately seize on. By eliminating the requirement to register
copyrighted works (essentially granting copyright as soon as the ,{[pg 261]},
work is "fixed in a tangible medium"), the copyright law created a situation
wherein there was no explicit way in which a work could be intentionally placed
in the public domain. Practically speaking an author could declare that a work
was in the public domain, but legally speaking the risk would be borne entirely
by the person who sought to make use of that work: to copy it, transform it,
sell it, and so on. With the explosion of interest in the Internet, the problem
ramified exponentially; it became impossible to know whether someone who had
placed a text, an image, a song, or a video online intended for others to make
use of it—even if the author explicitly declared it "in the public domain."
Creative Commons licenses were thus conceived and rhetorically positioned as
tools for making explicit exactly what uses could be made of a specific work.
They protected the rights of people who sought to make use of "culture" (i.e.,
materials and ideas and works they had not authored), an approach that Lessig
often summed up by saying, "Culture always builds on the past."
={ copyright :
     requirement to register ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   Creative Commons :
     activism of +1 ;
   public domain +4
}

The background to and context of the emergence of Creative Commons was of
course much more complicated and fraught. Concerns ranged from the plights of
university libraries with regard to high-priced journals, to the problem of
documentary filmmakers unable to afford, or even find the owners of, rights to
use images or snippets in films, to the high-profile fights over online music
trading, Napster, and the RIAA. Over the course of four years, Lessig and the
other founders of Creative Commons would address all of these issues in books,
in countless talks and presentations and conferences around the world, online
and off, among audiences ranging from software developers to entrepreneurs to
musicians to bloggers to scientists.
={ Napster ;
   Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
}

Often, the argument for Creative Commons draws heavily on the concept of
culture besieged by the content industries. A story which Lessig enjoys
telling—one that I heard on several occasions when I saw him speak at
conferences—was that of Mickey Mouse. An interesting, quasi-conspiratorial
feature of the twentieth-century expansion of intellectual-property law is that
term limits seem to have been extended right around the time Mickey Mouse was
about to become public property. True or not, the point Lessig likes to make is
that the Mouse is not the de novo creation of the mind of Walt Disney that
intellectual-property law likes to pretend it is, but built on the past of
culture, in particular, on Steamboat Willie, ,{[pg 262]}, Charlie Chaplin,
Krazy Kat, and other such characters, some as inspiration, some as explicit
material. The greatness in Disney’s creation comes not from the mind of Disney,
but from the culture from which it emerged. Lessig will often illustrate this
in videos and images interspersed with black-typewriter-font-bestrewn slides
and a machine-gun style that makes you think he’s either a beat-poet manqué or
running for office, or maybe both.
={ Lessig, Lawrence :
     style of presentations +1 ;
   Disney, Walt ;
   Mickey Mouse
}

Other examples of intellectual-property issues fill the books and talks of
Creative Commons advocates, stories of blocked innovation, stifled creativity,
and—the scariest point of all (at least for economist-lawyers)—inefficiency due
to over-expansive intellectual-property laws and overzealous corporate
lawyer-hordes.~{ Lessig’s output has been prodigious. His books include Code
and Other Laws of Cyber Space, The Future of Ideas, Free Culture, and Code:
Version 2.0. He has also written a large number of articles and is an active
blogger (http://www.lessig.org/blog/). }~ Lessig often preaches to the
converted (at venues like South by Southwest Interactive and the O’Reilly Open
Source conferences), and the audiences are always outraged at the state of
affairs and eager to learn what they can do. Often, getting involved in the
Creative Commons is the answer. Indeed, within a couple of years, Creative
Commons quickly became more of a movement (a modulation of the Free/Open Source
movement) than an experiment in writing licenses.

On that hot May day in 2002, however, Creative Commons was still under
development. Later in the day, Boyle did get a chance to meet with the
Connexions project team members. The Connexions team had already realized that
in pursuing an experimental project in which Free Software was used as a
template they created a need for new kinds of licenses. They had already
approached the Rice University legal counsel, who, though well-meaning, were
not grounded at all in a deep understanding of Free Software and were thus
naturally suspicious of it. Boyle’s presence and his detailed questions about
the project were like a revelation—a revelation that there were already people
out there thinking about the very problem the Connexions team faced and that
the team would not need to solve the problem themselves or make the Rice
University legal counsel write new open-content licenses. What Boyle offered
was the possibility for Connexions, as well as for myself as intermediary, to
be involved in the detailed planning and license writing that was under way at
Creative Commons. At the same time, it gave Creative Commons an extremely
willing "early-adopter" for the license, and one from an important corner of
the world: scholarly research and teaching.~{ There were few such projects
under way, though there were many in the planning stages. Within a year, the
Public Library of Science had launched itself, spearheaded by Harold Varmus,
the former director of the National Institutes of Health. At the time, however,
the only other large scholarly project was the MIT Open Course Ware project,
which, although it had already agreed to use Creative Commons licenses, had
demanded a peculiar one-off license. }~ My task, after recovering from the
,{[pg 263]}, shame of being unable to find my car, was to organize a workshop
in August at which members of Creative Commons, Connexions, MIT’s OCW, and any
other such projects would be invited to talk about license issues.
={ Boyle, James ;
   Connexions project :
     connection to Creative Commons +2 | Open CourseWare +2 ;
   Creative Commons :
     connection to Connexions +2 ;
   Rice University :
     legal counsel of ;
   Open CourseWare (OCW) +2
}

2~ Participant Figuring Out
={ figuring out +15 }

The workshop I organized in August 2002 was intended to allow Creative Commons,
Connexions, and MIT’s OCW project to try to articulate what each might want
from the other. It was clear what Creative Commons wanted: to convince as many
people as possible to use their licenses. But what Connexions and OCW might
have wanted, from each other as well as from Creative Commons, was less clear.
Given the different goals and trajectories of the two projects, their needs for
the licenses differed in substantial ways—enough so that the very idea of using
the same license was, at least temporarily, rendered impossible by MIT. While
OCW was primarily concerned about obtaining permissions to place existing
copyrighted work on the Web, Connexions was more concerned about ensuring that
new work remain available and modifiable.
={ moral and technical order +1 }

In retrospect, this workshop clarified the novel questions and problems that
emerged from the process of modulating the components of Free Software for
different domains, different kinds of content, and different practices of
collaboration and sharing. Since then, my own involvement in this activity has
been aimed at resolving some of these issues in accordance with an imagination
of openness, an imagination of social order, that I had learned from my long
experience with geeks, and not from my putative expertise as an anthropologist
or a science-studies scholar. The fiction that I had at first adopted—that I
was bringing scholarly knowledge to the table—became harder and harder to
maintain the more I realized that it was my understanding of Free Software,
gained through ongoing years of ethnographic apprenticeship, that was driving
my involvement.
={ geeks ;
   social imaginary +1
}

Indeed, the research I describe here was just barely undertaken as a research
project. I could not have conceived of it as a fundable activity in advance of
discovering it; I could not have imagined the course of events in any of the
necessary detail to write a proper proposal for research. Instead, it was an
outgrowth of thinking and ,{[pg 264]}, participating that was already under
way, participation that was driven largely by intuition and a feeling for the
problem represented by Free Software. I wanted to help figure something out. I
wanted to see how "figuring out" happens. While I could have organized a
fundable research project in which I picked a mature Free Software project,
articulated a number of questions, and spent time answering them among this
group, such a project would not have answered the questions I was trying to
form at the time: what is happening to Free Software as it spreads beyond the
world of hackers and software? How is it being modulated? What kinds of limits
are breached when software is no longer the central component? What other
domains of thought and practice were or are "readied" to receive and understand
Free Software and its implications?~{ The fact that I organized a workshop to
which I invited "informants" and to which I subsequently refer as research
might strike some, both in anthropology and outside it, as wrong. But it is
precisely the kind of occasion I would argue has become central to the
problematics of method in cultural anthropology today. On this subject, see
Holmes and Marcus, "Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization."
Such strategic and seemingly ad hoc participation does not exclude one from
attempting to later disentangle oneself from such participation, in order to
comment on the value and significance, and especially to offer critique. Such
is the attempt to achieve objectivity in social science, an objectivity that
goes beyond the basic notions of bias and observer-effect so common in the
social sciences. "Objectivity" in a broader social sense includes the
observation of the conceptual linkages that both precede such a workshop
(constituted the need for it to happen) and follow on it, independent of any
particular meeting. The complexity of mobilizing objectivity in discussions of
the value and significance of social or economic phenomena was well articulated
a century ago by Max Weber, and problems of method in the sense raised by him
seem to me to be no less fraught today. See Max Weber, "Objectivity in the
Social Sciences." }~
={ modifiability +6 ;
   modulation :
     practices of +2
}

My experience—my participant-observation—with Creative Commons was therefore
primarily done as an intermediary between the Connexions project (and, by
implication, similar projects under way elsewhere) and Creative Commons with
respect to the writing of licenses. In many ways this detailed, specific
practice was the most challenging and illuminating aspect of my participation,
but in retrospect it was something of a red herring. It was not only the
modulation of the meaning of source code and of legal licenses that
differentiated these projects, but, more important, the meaning of
collaboration, reuse, coordination, and the cultural practice of sharing and
building on knowledge that posed the trickiest of the problems.

My contact at Creative Commons was not James Boyle or Larry Lessig, but Glenn
Otis Brown, the executive director of that organization (as of summer 2002). I
first met Glenn over the phone, as I tried to explain to him what Connexions
was about and why he should join us in Houston in August to discuss licensing
issues related to scholarly material. Convincing him to come to Texas was an
easier sell than explaining Connexions (given my penchant for complicating it
unnecessarily), as Glenn was an Austin native who had been educated at the
University of Texas before heading off to Harvard Law School and its corrupting
influence at the hands of Lessig, Charlie Nesson, and John Perry Barlow.
={ Barlow, John Perry ;
   Brown, Glen Otis +10 ;
   Nesson, Charlie
}

Glenn galvanized the project. With his background as a lawyer, and especially
his keen interest in intellectual-property law, and his long-standing love of
music of all kinds Glenn lent incredible enthusiasm to his work. Prior to
joining Creative Commons, he had ,{[pg 265]}, clerked for the Hon. Stanley
Marcus on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, in Miami, where he worked on
the so-called Wind Done Gone case.~{ Suntrust v. Houghton Mifflin Co., U.S.
Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, 2001, 252 F. 3d 1165. }~ His participation
in the workshop was an experiment of his own; he was working on a story that he
would tell countless times and which would become one of the core examples of
the kind of practice Creative Commons wanted to encourage.

A New York Times story describes how the band the White Stripes had allowed
Steven McDonald, the bassist from Redd Kross, to lay a bass track onto the
songs that made up the album White Blood Cells. In a line that would eventually
become a kind of mantra for Creative Commons, the article stated: "Mr. McDonald
began putting these copyrighted songs online without permission from the White
Stripes or their record label; during the project, he bumped into Jack White,
who gave him spoken assent to continue. It can be that easy when you skip the
intermediaries."~{ Neil Strauss, "An Uninvited Bassist Takes to the Internet,"
New York Times, 25 August 2002, sec. 2, 23. }~ The ease with which these two
rockers could collaborate to create a modified work (called, of course, Redd
Blood Cells) without entering a studio, or, more salient, a law firm, was
emblematic of the notion that "culture builds on the past" and that it need not
be difficult to do so.
={ Redd, Kross ;
   White Stripes +1
}

Glenn told the story with obvious and animated enthusiasm, ending with the
assertion that the White Stripes didn’t have to give up all their rights to do
this, but they didn’t have to keep them all either; instead of "All Rights
Reserved," he suggested, they could say "Some Rights Reserved." The story not
only manages to capture the message and aims of Creative Commons, but is also a
nice indication of the kind of dual role that Glenn played, first as a lawyer,
and second as a kind of marketing genius and message man. The possibility of
there being more than a handful of people like Glenn around was not lost on
anyone, and his ability to switch between the language of law and that of
nonprofit populist marketing was phenomenal.~{ Indeed, in a more
self-reflective moment, Glenn once excitedly wrote to me to explain that what
he was doing was "code-switching" and that he thought that geeks who constantly
involved themselves in technology, law, music, gaming, and so on would be prime
case studies for a code-switching study by anthropologists. }~
={ Creative Commons :
     marketing of
}

At the workshop, participants had a chance to hash out a number of different
issues related to the creation of licenses that would be appropriate to
scholarly content: questions of attribution and commercial use, modification
and warranty; differences between federal copyright law concerning licenses and
state law concerning commercial contracts. The starting point for most people
was Free Software, but this was not the only starting point. There were at
least two other broad threads that fed into the discussion and into the general
understanding of the state of affairs facing projects like ,{[pg 266]},
Connexions or OCW. The first thread was that of digital libraries, hypertext,
human-computer interaction research, and educational technology. These
disciplines and projects often make common reference to two pioneers, Douglas
Englebart and Theodore Nelson, and more proximately to things like Apple’s
HyperCard program and a variety of experiments in personal academic computing.
The debates and history that lead up to the possibility of Connexions are
complex and detailed, but they generally lack attention to legal detail. With
the exception of a handful of people in library and information science who
have made "digital" copyright into a subspecialty, few such projects, over the
last twenty-five years, have made the effort to understand, much less
incorporate, issues of intellectual property into their purview.
={ attribution :
     copyright licenses and ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     commercial use and | derivative uses and ;
   Connexions project :
     relationship to hypertext
}

The other thread combines a number of more scholarly interests that come out of
the disciplines of economics and legal theory: institutional economics,
critical legal realism, law and economics—these are the scholastic
designations. Boyle and Lessig, for example, are both academics; Boyle does not
practice law, and Lessig has tried few cases. Nonetheless, they are both
inheritors of a legal and philosophical pragmatism in which value is measured
by the transformation of policy and politics, not by the mere extension or
specification of conceptual issues. Although both have penned a large number of
complicated theoretical articles (and Boyle is well known in several academic
fields for his book Shamans, Software, and Spleens and his work on authorship
and the law), neither, I suspect, would ever sacrifice the chance to make a set
of concrete changes in legal or political practice given the choice. This point
was driven home for me in a conversation I had with Boyle and others at dinner
on the night of the launch of Creative Commons, in December 2002. During that
conversation, Boyle said something to the effect of, "We actually made
something; we didn’t just sit around writing articles and talking about the
dangers that face us—we made something." He was referring as much to the
organization as to the legal licenses they had created, and in this sense Boyle
qualifies very much as a polymathic geek whose understanding of technology is
that it is an intervention into an already constituted state of affairs, one
that demonstrates its value by being created and installed, not by being
assessed in the court of scholarly opinions. ,{[pg 267]},
={ Boyle, James +2 ;
   Lessig, Lawrence :
     law and economics and +2 ;
   institutional economics +2 ;
   intervention, technology as ;
   polymaths ;
   technology :
     as argument +3
}

Similarly, Lessig’s approach to writing and speaking is unabashedly aimed at
transforming the way people approach intellectual-property law and, even more
generally, the way they understand the relationship between their rights and
their culture.~{ See Kelty, "Punt to Culture." }~ Lessig’s approach, at a
scholarly level, is steeped in the teachings of law and economics (although, as
he has playfully pointed out, a "second" Chicago school) but is focused more on
the understanding and manipulation of norms and customs ("culture") than on law
narrowly conceived.~{ Lessig, "The New Chicago School." }~

Informing both thinkers is a somewhat heterodox economic consensus drawn
primarily from institutional economics, which is routinely used to make policy
arguments about the efficacy or efficiency of the intellectual-property system.
Both are also informed by an emerging consensus on treating the public domain
in the same manner in which environmentalists treated the environment in the
1960s.~{ Hence, Boyle’s "Second Enclosure Movement" and "copyright conservancy"
concepts (see Boyle, "The Second Enclosure Movement"; Bollier, Silent Theft).
Perhaps the most sophisticated and compelling expression of the
institutional-economics approach to understanding Free Software is the work of
Yochai Benkler, especially "Sharing Nicely" and "Coase’s Penguin." See also
Benkler, Wealth of Networks. }~ These approaches begin with long-standing
academic and policy concerns about the status and nature of "public goods," not
directly with the problem of Free Software or the Internet. In some ways, the
concern with public goods, commons, the public domain, and collective action
are part of the same "reorientation of power and knowledge" I identify
throughout Two Bits: namely, the legitimation of the media of knowledge
creation, communication, and circulation. Most scholars of institutional
economics and public policy are, however, just as surprised and bewildered by
the fact of Free Software as the rest of the world has been, and they have
sought to square the existing understanding of public goods and collective
action with this new phenomenon.~{ Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source is
exemplary. }~
={ public domain :
     environmentalism and ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge
}

All of these threads form the weft of the experiment to modulate the components
of Free Software to create different licenses that cover a broader range of
objects and that deal with people and organizations that are not software
developers. Rather than attempt to carry on arguments at the level of theory,
however, my aim in participating was to see how and what was argued in practice
by the people constructing these experiments, to observe what constraints,
arguments, surprises, or bafflements emerged in the course of thinking through
the creation of both new licenses and a new form of authorship of scholarly
material. Like those who study "science in action" or the distinction between
"law on the books" and "law in action," I sought to observe the realities of a
practice ,{[pg 268]}, heavily determined by textual and epistemological
frameworks of various sorts.~{ Carrington and King, "Law and the Wisconsin
Idea." }~
={ modulation :
     of Free Software ;
   experimentation +1 ;
   participant observation +1
}

In my years with Connexions I eventually came to see it as something in between
a natural experiment and a thought experiment: it was conducted in the open,
and it invited participation from working scholars and teachers (a natural
experiment, in that it was not a closed, scholarly endeavor aimed at
establishing specific results, but an essentially unbounded, functioning system
that people could and would come to depend on), and yet it proceeded by making
a series of strategic guesses (a thought experiment) about three related
things: (1) what it is (and will be) possible to do technically; (2) what it is
(and will be) possible to do legally; and (3) what scholars and educators have
done and now do in the normal course of their activities.

At the same time, this experiment gave shape to certain legal questions that I
channeled in the direction of Creative Commons, issues that ranged from
technical questions about the structure of digital documents, requirements of
attribution, and URLs to questions about moral rights, rights of disavowal, and
the meaning of "modification." The story of the interplay between Connexions
and Creative Commons was, for me, a lesson in a particular mode of legal
thinking which has been described in more scholarly terms as the difference
between the Roman or, more proximately, the Napoleonic tradition of legal
rationalism and the Anglo-American common-law tradition.~{ In particular, Glenn
Brown suggested Oliver Wendell Holmes as a kind of origin point both for
critical legal realism and for law and economics, a kind of filter through
which lawyers get both their Nietzsche ,{[pg 344]}, and their liberalism (see
Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Path of the Law"). Glenn’s opinion was that what he
called "punting to culture" (by which he meant writing minimalist laws which
allow social custom to fill in the details) descended more or less directly
from the kind of legal reasoning embodied in Holmes: "Note that [Holmes] is
probably best known in legal circles for arguing that questions of morality be
removed from legal analysis and left to the field of ethics. this is what makes
him the godfather of both the posners of the world, and the crits, and the
strange hybrids like lessig" (Glenn Brown, personal communication, 11 August
2003). }~ It was a practical experience of what exactly the difference is
between legal code and software code, with respect to how those two things can
be made flexible or responsive.

1~ 9. Reuse, Modification, and the Nonexistence of Norms
={ norms +12 }

% ,{[pg 269]},

The Connexions project was an experiment in modulating the practices of Free
Software. It was not inspired by so much as it was based on a kind of template
drawn from the experience of people who had some experience with Free Software,
including myself. But how exactly do such templates get used? What is traced
and what is changed? In terms of the cultural significance of Free Software,
what are the implications of these changes? Do they maintain the orientation of
a recursive public, or are they attempts to apply Free Software for other
private concerns? And if they are successful, what are the implications for the
domains they affect: education, scholarship, scientific knowledge, and cultural
production? What effects do these changes have on the norms of work and the
meaning and shape of knowledge in these domains? ,{[pg 270]},
={ recursive public +2 ;
   cultural significance
}

In this chapter I explore in ethnographic detail how the modulations of Free
Software undertaken by Connexions and Creative Commons are related to the
problems of reuse, modification, and the norms of scholarly production. I
present these two projects as responses to the contemporary reorientation of
knowledge and power; they are recursive publics just as Free Software is, but
they expand the domain of practice in new directions, that is, into the
scholarly world of textbooks and research and into the legal domains of
cultural production more generally.
={ reorientation of power and knowledge +2 }

In the course of "figuring out" what they are doing, these two projects
encounter a surprising phenomenon: the changing meaning of the finality of a
scholarly or creative work. Finality is not certainty. While certainty is a
problematic that is well and often studied in the philosophy of science and in
science studies, finality is less so. What makes a work stay a work? What makes
a fact stay a fact? How does something, certain or not, achieve stability and
identity? Such finality, the very paradigm of which is the published book,
implies stability. But Connexions and Creative Commons, through their
experiments with Free Software, confront the problem of how to stabilize a work
in an unstable context: that of shareable source code, an open Internet,
copyleft licenses, and new forms of coordination and collaboration.~{
Actor-network theory comes closest to dealing with such "ontological" issues
as, for example, airplanes in John Law’s Aircraft Stories, the disease
atheroscleroris in Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple, or in vitro fertilization
in Charis Thompson’s Making Parents. The focus here on finality is closely
related, but aims at revealing the temporal characteristics of highly
modifiable kinds of knowledge-objects, like textbooks or databases, as in
Geoffrey Bowker’s Memory Practices in the Sciences. }~ The meaning of finality
will have important effects on the ability to constitute a politics around any
given work, whether a work of art or a work of scholarship and science. The
actors in Creative Commons and Connexions realize this, and they therefore form
yet another instance of a recursive public, precisely because they seek ways to
define the meaning of finality publicly and openly—and to make modifiability an
irreversible aspect of the process of stabilizing knowledge.
={ Actor Network Theory ;
   figuring out ;
   finality +57 :
     certainty and stability vs. ;
   modifiability :
     implications for finality +40
}

The modulations of Free Software performed by Connexions and Creative Commons
reveal two significant issues. The first is the troublesome matter of the
meaning of reuse, as in the reuse of concepts, ideas, writings, articles,
papers, books, and so on for the creation of new objects of knowledge. Just as
software source code can be shared, ported, and forked to create new versions
with new functions, and just as software and people can be coordinated in new
ways using the Internet, so too can scholarly and scientific content. I explore
the implications of this comparison in this chapter. The central gambit of both
Connexions and Creative Commons (and much of scientific practice generally) is
that new work builds on ,{[pg 271]}, previous work. In the sciences the notion
that science is cumulative is not at issue, but exactly how scientific
knowledge accumulates is far from clear. Even if "standing on the shoulders of
giants" can be revealed to hide machinations, secret dealings, and
Machiavellian maneuvering of the most craven sort, the very concept of
cumulative knowledge is sound. Building a fact, a result, a machine, or a
theory out of other, previous works—this kind of reuse as progress is not in
question. But the actual material practice of writing, publication, and the
reuse of other results and works is something that, until very recently, has
been hidden from view, or has been so naturalized that the norms of practice
are nearly invisible to practitioners themselves.
={ norms :
     existence of +1 ;
   publication :
     transformation by Internet +39 ;
   participant observation +1
}

This raises the other central concern of this chapter: that of the existence or
nonexistence of norms. For an anthropologist to query whether or not norms
exist might seem to theorize oneself out of a job; one definition of
anthropology is, after all, the making explicit of cultural norms. But the turn
to "practices" in anthropology and science studies has in part been a turn away
from "norms" in their classic sociological and specifically Mertonian fashion.
Robert Merton’s suggestion that science has been governed by
norms—disinterestedness, communalism, organized skepticism, objectivity—has
been repeatedly and roundly criticized by a generation of scholars in the
sociology of scientific knowledge who note that even if such norms are asserted
by actors, they are often subverted in the doing.~{ Merton, "The Normative
Structure of Science." }~ But a striking thing has happened recently; those
Mertonian norms of science have in fact become the more or less explicit goals
in practice of scientists, engineers, and geeks in the wake of Free Software.
If Mertonian norms do not exist, then they are being invented. This, of course,
raises novel questions: can one create norms? What exactly would this mean? How
are norms different from culture or from legal and technical constraints? Both
Connexions and Creative Commons explicitly pose this question and search for
ways to identify, change, or work with norms as they understand them, in the
context of reuse.
={ Goals, lack of in Free Software :
     norms as ;
   Merton, Robert :
     Mertonian norms
}

2~ Whiteboards: What Was Publication?

More than once, I have found myself in a room with Rich Baraniuk and Brent
Hendricks and any number of other employees of the ,{[pg 272]}, Connexions
project, staring at a whiteboard on which a number of issues and notes have
been scrawled. Usually, the notes have a kind of palimpsestic quality, on
account of the array of previous conversations that are already there,
rewritten in tiny precise script in a corner, or just barely erased beneath our
discussion. These conversations are often precipitated by a series of questions
that Brent, Ross Reedstrom, and the development team have encountered as they
build and refine the system. They are never simple questions. A visitor staring
at the whiteboard might catch a glimpse of the peculiar madness that afflicts
the project: a mixture of legal terms, technical terms, and terms like
scholarly culture or DSP communities. I’m consulted whenever this mixture of
terms starts to worry the developers in terms of legality, culture, or the
relationship between the two. I’m generally put in the position of speaking
either as a lawyer (which, legally speaking, I am not supposed to do) or as an
anthropologist (which I do mainly by virtue of holding a position in an
anthropology department). Rarely are the things I say met with assent: Brent
and Ross, like most hackers, are insanely well versed in the details of
intellectual-property law, and they routinely correct me when I make bold but
not-quite-true assertions about it. Nonetheless, they rarely feel well versed
enough to make decisions about legal issues on their own, and often I have been
called—on again as a thoughtful sounding board, and off again as intermediary
with Creative Commons.
={ Baraniuk, Richard ;
   Hendricks, Brent ;
   Reedstrom, Ross ;
   Digital signal processing (DSP)
}

This process, I have come to realize, is about figuring something out. It is
not just a question of solving technical problems to which I might have some
specific domain knowledge. Figuring out is modulation; it is template-work.
When Free Software functions as a template for projects like Connexions, it
does so literally, by allowing us to trace a known form of practice (Free
Software) onto a less well known, seemingly chaotic background and to see where
the forms match up and where they do not. One very good way to understand what
this means in a particular case—that is, to see more clearly the modulations
that Connexions has performed—is to consider the practice and institution of
scholarly publication through the template of Free Software.
={ Free Software :
     modulations of
}

Consider the ways scholars have understood the meaning and significance of
print and publication in the past, prior to the Internet and the contemporary
reorientation of knowledge and power. The list of ambitious historians and
theorists of the relationship ,{[pg 273]}, of media to knowledge is long:
Lucien Febvre, Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan, Jack Goody, Roger Chartier,
Friedrich Kittler, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Adrian Johns, to name a few.~{ See
Johns, The Nature of the Book; Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of
Change; McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media; Febvre and
Martin, The Coming of the Book; Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue;
Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France and The Order of
Books; Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900 and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.
}~ With the exception of Johns, however, the history of publication does not
start with the conventional, legal, and formal practices of publication so much
as it does with the material practices and structure of the media themselves,
which is to say the mechanics and technology of the printed book.~{ There is
less communication between the theorists and historians of copyright and
authorship and those of the book; the former are also rich in analyses, such as
Jaszi and Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship; Mark Rose, Authors and
Owners; St. Amour, The Copywrights; Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs.
}~ Ong’s theories of literacy and orality, Kittler’s re-theorization of the
structure of media evolution, Goody’s anthropology of the media of accounting
and writing—all are focused on the tangible media as the dependent variable of
change. By contrast, Johns’s The Nature of the Book uncovers the contours of
the massive endeavor involved in making the book a reliable and robust form for
the circulation of knowledge in the seventeenth century and after.
={ Goody, Jack ;
   Eisenstein, Elizabeth +1 ;
   Johns, Adrian +3 ;
   Kittler, Friedrich ;
   Ong, Walter ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge ;
   printing press +2
}

Prior to Johns’s work, arguments about the relationship of print and power fell
primarily into two camps: one could overestimate the role of print and the
printing press by suggesting that the "fixity" of a text and the creation of
multiple copies led automatically to the spread of ideas and the rise of
enlightenment. Alternately, one could underestimate the role of the book by
suggesting that it was merely a transparent media form with no more or less
effect on the circulation or evaluation of ideas than manuscripts or
television. Johns notes in particular the influence of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s
scholarship on the printing press (and Bruno Latour’s dependence on this in
turn), which very strongly identified the characteristics of the printed work
with the cultural changes seen to follow, including the success of the
scientific revolution and the experimental method.~{ Eisenstein, The Printing
Press as an Agent of Change. Eisenstein’s work makes direct reference to
McLuhan’s thesis in The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Latour relies on these works and
others in "Drawing Things Together." }~ For example, Eisenstein argued that
fixity—the fact that a set of printed books can be exact copies of each
other—implied various transformations in knowledge. Johns, however, is at pains
to show just how unreliable texts are often perceived to be. From which sources
do they come? Are they legitimate? Do they have the backing or support of
scholars or the crown? In short, fixity can imply sound knowledge only if there
is a system of evaluation already in place. Johns suggests a reversal of this
now common-sense notion: "We may consider fixity not as an inherent quality,
but as a transitive one. . . . We may adopt the principle that fixity exists
only inasmuch as it is recognized and acted upon by people—and not otherwise.
The consequence of this change in perspective is that print culture itself is
immediately laid open to analysis. It becomes ,{[pg 274]}, a result of manifold
representations, practices and conflicts, rather than just the manifold cause
with which we are often presented. In contrast to talk of a ‘print logic’
imposed on humanity, this approach allows us to recover the construction of
different print cultures in particular historical circumstances."~{ Johns, The
Nature of the Book, 19-20. }~
={ Latour, Bruno ;
   enlightenment ;
   fixity +7
}

Johns’s work focuses on the elaborate and difficult cultural, social, and
economic work involved, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in
transforming the European book into the kind of authority it is taken to be
across the globe today. The creation and standardization not just of books but
of a publishing infrastructure involved the kind of careful social engineering,
reputation management, and skills of distinction, exclusion, and consensus that
science studies has effectively explored in science and engineering. Hence,
Johns focuses on "print-in-the-making" and the relationship of the print
culture of that period to the reliability of knowledge. Instead of making broad
claims for the transformation of knowledge by print (eerily similar in many
respects to the broad claims made for the Internet), Johns explores the clash
of representations and practices necessary to create the sense, in the
twentieth century, that there really is or was only one print culture.
={ infrastructure :
     of publishing
}

The problem of publication that Connexions confronts is thus not simply caused
by the invention or spread of the Internet, much less that of Free Software.
Rather, it is a confrontation with the problems of producing stability and
finality under very different technical, legal, and social conditions—a problem
more complex even than the "different print cultures in particular historical
circumstances" that Johns speaks of in regard to the book. Connexions faces two
challenges: that of figuring out the difference that today introduces with
respect to yesterday, and that of creating or modifying an infrastructure in
order to satisfy the demands of a properly authoritative knowledge. Connexions
textbooks of necessity look different from conventional textbooks; they consist
of digital documents, or "modules," that are strung together and made available
through the Web, under a Creative Commons license that allows for free use,
reuse, and modification. This version of "publication" clearly has implications
for the meaning of authorship, ownership, stewardship, editing, validation,
collaboration, and verification.
={ authorship ;
   Connexions project :
     textbooks and +15 ;
   Connexions project :
     meaning of publication +15 ;
   publication :
     as notional event +1
}

The conventional appearance of a book—in bookstores, through mail-order, in
book clubs, libraries, or universities—was an event that signified, as the name
suggests, its official public appearance ,{[pg 275]}, in the world. Prior to
this event, the text circulated only privately, which is to say only among the
relatively small network of people who could make copies of it or who were
involved in its writing, editing, proofreading, reviewing, typesetting, and so
on. With the Internet, the same text can be made instantly available at each of
these stages to just as many or more potential readers. It effectively turns
the event of publication into a notional event—the click of a button—rather
than a highly organized, material event. Although it is clear that the practice
of publication has become denaturalized or destabilized by the appearance of
new information technologies, this hardly implies that the work of stabilizing
the meaning of publication—and producing authoritative knowledge as a
result—has ceased. The tricky part comes in understanding how Free Software is
used as a template by which the authority of publication in the Gutenberg
Galaxy is being transformed into the authority of publication in the Turing
Universe.
={ Connexions project :
     stages of producing a document in
}

2~ Publication in Connexions

In the case of Connexions there are roughly three stages to the creation of
content. The first, temporally speaking, is whatever happens before Connexions
is involved, that is, the familiar practices of what I would call composition,
rather than simply writing. Some project must be already under way, perhaps
started under the constraints of and in the era of the book, perhaps conceived
as a digital textbook or an online textbook, but still, as of yet, written on
paper or saved in a Word document or in LaTeX, on a scholar’s desktop. It could
be an individual project, as in the case of Rich’s initial plan to write a DSP
textbook, or it could be a large collaborative project to write a textbook.
={ LaTeX (typesetting language) ;
   Connexions project :
     stages of producing a document in +3
}

The second stage is the one in which the document or set of documents is
translated ("Connexified") into the mark-up system used by Connexions.
Connexions uses the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML), in particular a subset
of tags that are appropriate to textbooks. These "semantic" tags (e.g., <term>)
refer only to the meaning of the text they enclose, not to the "presentation"
or syntactic look of what they enclose; they give the document the necessary
structure it needs to be transformed in a number of creative ways. Because XML
is related only to content, and not to ,{[pg 276]}, presentation (it is
sometimes referred to as "agnostic"), the same document in Connexions can be
automatically made to look a number of different ways, as an onscreen
presentation in a browser, as a pdf document, or as an on-demand published work
that can be printed out as a book, complete with continuous page numbering,
footnotes (instead of links), front and back matter, and an index. Therein lies
much of Connexions’s technical wizardry.
={ Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) +1 }

During the second stage, that of being marked up in XML, the document is not
quite public, although it is on the Internet; it is in what is called a
workgroup, where only those people with access to the particular workgroup (and
those have been invited to collaborate) can see the document. It is only when
the document is finished, ready to be distributed, that it will enter the
third, "published" stage—the stage at which anyone on the Internet can ask for
the XML document and the software will display it, using style sheets or
software converters, as an HTML page, a pdf document for printing, or as a
section of a larger course. However, publication does not here signify
finality; indeed, one of the core advantages of Connexions is that the document
is rendered less stable than the book-object it mimics: it can be updated,
changed, corrected, deleted, copied, and so on, all without any of the
rigmarole associated with changing a published book or article. Indeed, the
very powerful notion of fixity theorized by McLuhan and Eisenstein is rendered
moot here. The fact that a document has been printed (and printed as a book) no
longer means that all copies will be the same; indeed, it may well change from
hour to hour, depending on how many people contribute (as in the case of Free
Software, which can go through revisions and updates as fast, or faster, than
one can download and install new versions). With Wikipedia entries that are
extremely politicized or active, for example, a "final" text is impossible,
although the dynamics of revision and counter-revision do suggest outlines for
the emergence of some kinds of stability. But Connexions differs from Wikipedia
with respect to this finality as well, because of the insertion of the second
stage, during which a self-defined group of people can work on a nonpublic text
before committing changes that a public can see.
={ Eisenstein, Elizabeth ;
   McLuhan, Marshall ;
   Hypertext Transfer Mark-up Language (HTML) ;
   Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia) +1 ;
   finality :
     in Wikipedia and Connexions +1
}

It should be clear, given the example of Connexions, or any similar project
such as Wikipedia, that the changing meaning of "publication" in the era of the
Internet has significant implications, both practical (they affect the way
people can both write and publish ,{[pg 277]}, their works) and legal (they fit
uneasily into the categories established for previous media). The tangibility
of a textbook is quite obviously transformed by these changes, but so too is
the cultural significance of the practice of writing a textbook. And if
textbooks are written differently, using new forms of collaboration and
allowing novel kinds of transformation, then the validation, certification, and
structure of authority of textbooks also change, inviting new forms of open and
democratic participation in writing, teaching, and learning. No longer are all
of the settled practices of authorship, collaboration, and publication
configured around the same institutional and temporal scheme (e.g., the book
and its publishing infrastructure). In a colloquial sense, this is obvious, for
instance, to any musician today: recording and releasing a song to potentially
millions of listeners is now technically possible for anyone, but how that fact
changes the cultural significance of music creation is not yet clear. For most
musicians, creating music hasn’t changed much with the introduction of digital
tools, since new recording and composition technologies largely mimic the
recording practices that preceded them (for example, a program like Garage Band
literally looks like a four-track recorder on the screen). Similarly, much of
the practice of digital publication has been concerned with recreating
something that looks like traditional publication.~{ On this subject, cf. Pablo
Boczkowski’s study of the digitization of newspapers, Digitizing the News. }~
={ music :
     production
}

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Connexions team spent a great deal of time at the
outset of the project creating a pdf-document-creation system that would
essentially mimic the creation of a conventional textbook, with the push of a
button.~{ Conventional here is actually quite historically proximate: the
system creates a pdf document by translating the XML document into a LaTeX
document, then into a pdf document. LaTeX has been, for some twenty years, a
standard text-formatting and typesetting language used by some ,{[pg 345]},
sectors of the publishing industry (notably mathematics, engineering, and
computer science). Were it not for the existence of this standard from which to
bootstrap, the Connexions project would have faced a considerably more
difficult challenge, but much of the infrastructure of publishing has already
been partially transformed into a computer-mediated and -controlled system
whose final output is a printed book. Later in Connexions’s lifetime, the group
coordinated with an Internet-publishing startup called Qoop.com to take the
final step and make Connexions courses available as print-on-demand,
cloth-bound textbooks, complete with ISBNs and back-cover blurbs. }~ But even
this process causes a subtle transformation: the concept of "edition" becomes
much harder to track. While a conventional textbook is a stable entity that
goes through a series of printings and editions, each of which is marked on its
publication page, a Connexions document can go through as many versions as an
author wants to make changes, all the while without necessarily changing
editions. In this respect, the modulation of the concept of source code
translates the practices of updating and "versioning" into the realm of
textbook writing. Recall the cases ranging from the "continuum" of UNIX
versions discussed by Ken Thompson to the complex struggles over version
control in the Linux and Apache projects. In the case of writing source code,
exactitude demands that the change of even a single character be tracked and
labeled as a version change, whereas a ,{[pg 278]}, conventional-textbook
spelling correction or errata issuance would hardly create the need for a new
edition.
={ Apache (Free Software project) ;
   editions, print vs. electronic +3 :
     see also versions ;
   Linux (Free Software project) ;
   UNIX operating system :
     allegiance to versions of
}

In the Connexions repository all changes to a text are tracked and noted, but
the identity of the module does not change. "Editions" have thus become
"versions," whereas a substantially revised or changed module might require not
reissuance but a forking of that module to create one with a new identity.
Editions in publishing are not a feature of the medium per se; they are
necessitated by the temporal and spatial practices of publication as an event,
though this process is obviously made visible only in the book itself. In the
same way, versioning is now used to manage a process, but it results in a very
different configuration of the medium and the material available in that
medium. Connexions traces the template of software production (sharing,
porting, and forking and the norms and forms of coordination in Free Software)
directly onto older forms of publication. Where the practices match, no change
occurs, and where they don’t, it is the reorientation of knowledge and power
and the emergence of recursive publics that serves as a guide to the
development of the system.
={ reorientation of power and knowledge +4 }

Legally speaking, the change from editions to versions and forks raises
troubling questions about the boundaries and status of a copyrighted work. It
is a peculiar feature of copyright law that it needs to be updated regularly
each time the media change, in order to bring certain old practices into line
with new possibilities. Scattered throughout the copyright statutes is evidence
of old new media: gramophones, jukeboxes, cable TV, photocopiers, peer-to-peer
file-sharing programs, and so on. Each new form of communication shifts the
assumptions of past media enough that they require a reevaluation of the
putative underlying balance of the constitutional mandate that gives (U.S.)
intellectual-property law its inertia. Each new device needs to be understood
in terms of creation, storage, distribution, production, consumption, and
tangibility, in order to assess the dangers it poses to the rights of inventors
and artists.
={ copyright :
     specificity of media and +1
}

Because copyright law "hard codes" the particular media into the statutes,
copyright law is comfortable with, for example, book editions or musical
recordings. But in Connexions, new questions arise: how much change constitutes
a new work, and thus demands a new copyright license? If a licensee receives
one copy of a work, to which versions will he or she retain rights after
changes? Because ,{[pg 279]}, of the complexity of the software involved, there
are also questions that the law simply cannot deal with (just as it had not
been able to do in the late 1970s with respect to the definition of software):
is the XML document equivalent to the viewable document, or must the style
sheet also be included? Where does the "content" begin and the "software" end?
Until the statutes either incorporate these new technologies or are changed to
govern a more general process, rather than a particular medium, these questions
will continue to emerge as part of the practice of writing.
={ Connexions project :
     line between content and software
}

This denaturalization of the notion of "publication" is responsible for much of
the surprise and concern that greets Connexions and projects like it. Often,
when I have shown the system to scholars, they have displayed boredom mixed
with fear and frustration: "It can never replace the book." On the one hand,
Connexions has made an enormous effort to make its output look as much like
conventional books as possible; on the other hand, the anxiety evinced is
justified, because what Connexions seeks to replace is not the book, which is
merely ink and paper, but the entire publishing process. The fact that it is
not replacing the book per se, but the entire process whereby manuscripts are
made into stable and tangible objects called books is too overwhelming for most
scholars to contemplate—especially scholars who have already mastered the
existing process of book writing and creation. The fact that the legal system
is built to safeguard something prior to and not fully continuous with the
practice of Connexions only adds to the concern that such a transformation is
immodest and risky, that it endangers a practice with centuries of stability
behind it. Connexions, however, is not the cause of destabilization; rather, it
is a response to or recognition of a problem. It is not a new problem, but one
that periodically reemerges: a reorientation of knowledge and power that
includes questions of enlightenment and rationality, democracy and
self-governance, liberal values and problems of the authority and validation of
knowledge. The salient moments of correlation are not the invention of the
printing press and the Internet, but the struggle to make published books into
a source of authoritative knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and the struggle to find ways to do the same with the Internet today.~{ See
Johns, The Nature of the Book; Warner, The Letters of the Republic. }~
={ printing press }

Connexions is, in many ways, understood by its practitioners to be both a
response to the changing relations of knowledge and power, ,{[pg 280]}, one
that reaffirms the fundamental values of academic freedom and the circulation
of knowledge, and also an experiment with, even a radicalization of, the ideals
of both Free Software and Mertonian science. The transformation of the meaning
of publication implies a fundamental shift in the status, in the finality of
knowledge. It seeks to make of knowledge (knowledge in print, not in minds)
something living and constantly changing, as opposed to something static and
final. The fact that publication no longer signifies finality—that is, no
longer signifies a state of fixity that is assumed in theory (and frequently in
practice) to account for a text’s reliability—has implications for how the text
is used, reused, interpreted, valued, and trusted.~{ On fixity, see
Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change which cites McLuhan’s The
Gutenberg Galaxy. The stability of texts is also questioned routinely by
textual scholars, especially those who work with manuscripts and complicated
varoria (for an excellent introduction, see Bornstein and Williams,
Palimpsest). Michel Foucault’s "What Is an Author?" addresses a related but
orthogonal problematic and is unconcerned with the relatively sober facts of a
changing medium. }~ Whereas the traditional form of the book is the same across
all printed versions or else follows an explicit practice of appearing in
editions (complete with new prefaces and forewords), a Connexions document
might very well look different from week to week or year to year.~{ A salient
and recent point of comparison can be found in the form of Lawrence Lessig’s
"second edition" of his book Code, which is titled Code: Version 2.0 (version
is used in the title, but edition is used in the text). The first book was
published in 1999 ("ancient history in Internet time"), and Lessig convinced
the publisher to make it available as a wiki, a collaborative Web site which
can be directly edited by anyone with access. The wiki was edited and updated
by hordes of geeks, then "closed" and reedited into a second edition with a new
preface. It is a particularly tightly controlled example of collaboration;
although the wiki and the book were freely available, the modification and
transformation of them did not amount to a simple free-for-all. Instead, Lessig
leveraged his own authority, his authorial voice, and the power of Basic Books
to create something that looks very much like a traditional second edition,
although it was created by processes unimaginable ten years ago. }~ While a
textbook might also change significantly to reflect the changing state of
knowledge in a given field, it is an explicit goal of Connexions to allow this
to happen "in real time," which is to say, to allow educators to update
textbooks as fast as they do scientific knowledge.~{ The most familiar
comparison is Wikipedia, which was started after Connexions, but grew far more
quickly and dynamically, largely due to the ease of use of the system (a bone
of some contention among the Connexions team). Wikipedia has come under assault
primarily for being unreliable. The suspicion and fear that surround Wikipedia
are similar to those that face Connexions, but in the case of Wikipedia
entries, the commitment to openness is stubbornly meritocratic: any article can
be edited by anyone at anytime, and it matters not how firmly one is identified
as an expert by rank, title, degree, or experience—a twelve year old’s
knowledge of the Peloponnesian War is given the same access and status as an
eighty-year-old classicist’s. Articles are not owned by individuals, and ,{[pg
346]}, all work is pseudonymous and difficult to track. The range of quality is
therefore great, and the mainstream press has focused largely on whether
Wikipedia is more or less reliable than conventional encyclopedias, not on the
process of knowledge production. See, for instance, George Johnson, "The
Nitpicking of the Masses vs. the Authority of the Experts," New York Times, 3
January 2006, Late Edition—Final, F2; Robert McHenry, "The Faith-based
Encyclopedia," TCS Daily, 15 November 2004,
http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html. }~
={ Merton, Robert :
     Mertonian norms ;
   Connexions project :
     roles in ;
   finality :
     fixity vs. ;
   fixity
}

These implications are not lost on the Connexions team, but neither are they
understood as goals or as having simple solutions. There is a certain immodest,
perhaps even reckless, enthusiasm surrounding these implications, an enthusiasm
that can take both polymath and transhumanist forms. For instance, the
destabilization of the contemporary textbook-publishing system that Connexions
represents is (according to Rich) a more accurate way to represent the
connections between concepts than a linear textbook format. Connexions thus
represents a use of technology as an intervention into an existing context of
practice. The fact that Connexions could also render the reliability or
trustworthiness of scholarly knowledge unstable is sometimes discussed as an
inevitable outcome of technical change—something that the world at large, not
Connexions, must learn to deal with.
={ intervention, technology as ;
   polymaths ;
   transhumanism
}

To put it differently, the "goal" of Connexions was never to destroy
publishing, but it has been structured by the same kind of imaginations of
moral and technical order that pervade Free Software and the construction of
the Internet. In this sense Rich, Brent, and others are geeks in the same sense
as Free Software geeks: they ,{[pg 281]}, share a recursive public devoted to
achieving a moral and technical order in which openness and modifiability are
core values ("If we are successful, we will disappear"). The implication is
that the existing model and infrastructure for the publication of textbooks is
of a different moral and technical order, and thus that Connexions needs to
innovate not only the technology (the source code or the openness of the
system) or the legal arrangements (licenses) but also the very norms and forms
of textbook writing itself (coordination and, eventually, a movement). If
publication once implied the appearance of reliable, final texts—even if the
knowledge therein could be routinely contested by writing more texts and
reviews and critiques—Connexions implies the denaturalization of not knowledge
per se, but of the process whereby that knowledge is stabilized and rendered
reliable, trustworthy.
={ Hendricks, Brent ;
   geeks ;
   communities :
     norms and +1 ;
   recursive public
}

A keyword for the transformation of textbook writing is community, as in the
tagline of the Connexions project: "Sharing Knowledge and Building
Communities." Building implies that such communities do not yet exist and that
the technology will enable them; however, Connexions began with the assumption
that there exist standard academic practices and norms of creating teaching
materials. As a result, Connexions both enables these practices and norms, by
facilitating a digital version of the textbook, and intervenes in them, by
creating a different process for creating a textbook. Communities are both
assumed and desired. Sometimes they are real (a group of DSP engineers,
networked around Rich and others who work in his subspecialty), and sometimes
they are imagined (as when in the process of grant writing we claim that the
most important component of the success of the project is the "seeding" of
scholarly communities). Communities, furthermore, are not audiences or
consumers, and sometimes not even students or learners. They are imagined to be
active, creative producers and users of teaching materials, whether for
teaching or for the further creation of such materials. The structure of the
community has little to do with issues of governance, solidarity, or pedagogy,
and much more to do with a set of relationships that might obtain with respect
to the creation of teaching materials—a community of collaborative production
or collaborative debugging, as in the modulation of forms of coordination,
modulated to include the activity of creating teaching materials. ,{[pg 282]},
={ norms :
     academic ;
   coordination (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   Digital signal processing (DSP)
}

2~ Agency and Structure in Connexions
={ Authorship +29 ;
   Connexions project :
     roles in +29 ;
   Roles, in Connexions +29
}

One of the most animated whiteboard conversations I remember having with Brent
and Ross concerned difference between the possible "roles" that a Connexions
user might occupy and the implications this could have for both the technical
features of the system and the social norms that Connexions attempts to
maintain and replicate. Most software systems are content to designate only
"users," a generic name-and-password account that can be given a set of
permissions (and which has behind it a long and robust tradition in
computer-operating-system and security research). Users are users, even if they
may have access to different programs and files. What Connexions needed was a
way to designate that the same person might have two different exogenous roles:
a user might be the author, but not the owner of the content, and vice versa.
For instance, perhaps Rice University maintains the copyright for a work, but
the author is credited for its creation. Such a situation—known, in legal
terms, as "work for hire"—is routine in some universities and most
corporations. So while the author is generally given the freedom and authority
to create and modify the text as he or she sees fit, the university asserts
copyright ownership in order to retain the right to commercially exploit the
work. Such a situation is far from settled and is, of course, politically
fraught, but the Connexions system, in order to be useful at all to anyone,
needed to accommodate this fact. Taking an oppositional political stand would
render the system useless in too many cases or cause it to become precisely the
kind of authorless, creditless system as Wikipedia—a route not desired by many
academics. In a perfectly open world all Connexions modules might each have
identical authors and owners, but pragmatism demands that the two roles be kept
separate.
={ Hendricks, Brent +14 ;
   copyright :
     works for hire ;
   credit +5 ;
   users, status in Connexions ;
   Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia)
}

Furthermore, there are many people involved every day in the creation of
academic work who are neither the author nor the owner: graduate students and
undergraduates, research scientists, technicians, and others in the grand,
contested, complex academic ecology. In some disciplines, all contributors may
get authorship credit and some of them may even share ownership, but often many
of those who do the work get mentioned only in acknowledgments, or not at all.
Again, although the impulse of the creators of Connexions might be to level the
playing field and allow only one kind of user, the fact of the matter is that
academics simply would not use ,{[pg 283]}, such a system.~{ Again, a
comparison with Wikipedia is apposite. Wikipedia is, morally speaking, and
especially in the persona of its chief editor, Jimbo Wales, totally devoted to
merit-based equality, with users getting no special designation beyond the
amount and perceived quality of the material they contribute. Degrees or
special positions of employment are anathema. It is a quintessentially
American, anti-intellectual-fueled, Horatio Alger-style approach in which the
slate is wiped clean and contributors are given a chance to prove themselves
independent of background. Connexions, by contrast, draws specifically from the
ranks of intellectuals or academics and seeks to replace the infrastructure of
publishing. Wikipedia is interested only in creating a better encyclopedia. In
this respect, it is transhumanist in character, attributing its distinctiveness
and success to the advances in technology (the Internet, wiki, broadband
connections, Google). Connexions on the other hand is more polymathic, devoted
to intervening into the already complexly constituted organizational practice
of scholarship and academia. }~ The need for a role such as "maintainer" (which
might also include "editor"), which was different from author or owner, thus
also presented itself.
={ Connexions project :
     roles in
}

As Brent, Ross, and I stared at the whiteboard, the discovery of the need for
multiple exogenous roles hit all of us in a kind of slow-motion shockwave. It
was not simply that the content needed to have different labels attached to it
to keep track of these people in a database—something deeper was at work: the
law and the practice of authorship actually dictated, to a certain extent, what
the software itself should look like. All of sudden, the questions were
preformatted, so to speak, by the law and by certain kinds of practices that
had been normalized and thus were nearly invisible: who should have permission
to change what? Who will have permission to add or drop authors? Who will be
allowed to make what changes, and who will have the legal right to do so and
who the moral or customary right? What implications follow from the choices the
designers make and the choices we present to authors or maintainers?
={ permission +9 }

The Creative Commons licenses were key to revealing many of these questions.
The licenses were in themselves modulations of Free Software licenses, but
created with people like artists, musicians, scholars, and filmmakers in mind.
Without them, the content in Connexions would be unlicensed, perhaps intended
to be in the public domain, but ultimately governed by copyright statutes that
provided no clear answers to any of these questions, as those statutes were
designed to deal with older media and a different publication process. Using
the Creative Commons licenses, on the other hand, meant that the situation of
the content in Connexions became well-defined enough, in a legal sense, to be
used as a constraint in defining the structure of the software system. The
license itself provided the map of the territory by setting parameters for
things such as distribution, modification, attribution, and even display,
reading, or copying.
={ attribution :
     copyright licensing and +3 ;
   Creative Commons +2 ;
   public domain :
     Creative Commons licenses and +2
}

For instance, when the author and owner are different, it is not at all obvious
who should be given credit. Authors, especially academic authors, expect to be
given credit (which is often all they get) for an article or a textbook they
have written, yet universities often retain ownership of those textbooks, and
ownership would seem to imply a legal right to be identified as both owner and
author (e.g., Forrester Research reports or UNESCO reports, which hide the
,{[pg 284]}, identity of authors). In the absence of any licenses, such a
scenario has no obvious solution or depends entirely on the specific context.
However, the Creative Commons licenses specified the meaning of attribution and
the requirement to maintain the copyright notice, thus outlining a procedure
that gave the Connexions designers fixed constraints against which to measure
how they would implement their system.
={ authorship :
     ownership vs. +3
}

A positive result of such constraints is that they allow for a kind of
institutional flexibility that would not otherwise be possible. Whether a
university insists on expropriating copyright or allows scholars to keep their
copyrights, both can use Connexions. Connexions is more "open" than traditional
textbook publishing because it allows a greater number of heterogeneous
contributors to participate, but it is also more "open" than something like
Wikipedia, which is ideologically committed to a single definition of
authorship and ownership (anonymous, reciprocally licensed collaborative
creation by authors who are also the owners of their work). While Wikipedia
makes such an ideological commitment, it cannot be used by institutions that
have made the decision to operate as expropriators of content, or even in cases
wherein authors willingly allow someone else to take credit. If authors and
owners must be identical, then either the author is identified as the owner,
which is illegal in some cases, or the owner is identified as the author, a
situation no academic is willing to submit to.

The need for multiple roles also revealed other peculiar and troubling
problems, such as the issue of giving an "identity" to long-dead authors whose
works are out of copyright. So, for instance, a piece by A. E. Housman was
included as a module for a class, and while it is clear that Housman is the
author, the work is no longer under copyright, so Housman is no longer the
copyright holder (nor is the society which published it in 1921). Yet
Connexions requires that a copyright be attached to each module to allow it to
be licensed openly. This particular case, of a dead author, necessitated two
interesting interventions. Someone has to actually create an account for
Housman and also issue the work as an "edition" or derivative under a new
copyright. In this case, the two other authors are Scott McGill and Christopher
Kelty. A curious question arose in this context: should we be listed both as
authors and owners (and maintainers), or only as owners and maintainers? And if
someone uses the module in a new context (as they have the right to do, ,{[pg
285]}, under the license), will they be required to give attribution only to
Housman, or also to McGill and Kelty as well? What rights to ownership do
McGill and Kelty have over the digital version of the public-domain text by
Housman?~{ An even more technical feature concerned the issue of the order of
authorship. The designers at first decided to allow Connexions to simply
display the authors in alphabetical order, a practice adopted by some
disciplines, like computer science. However, in the case of the Housman example
this resulted in what looked like a module authored principally by me, and only
secondarily by A. E. Housman. And without the ability to explicitly designate
order of authorship, many disciplines had no way to express their conventions
along these lines. As a result, the system was redesigned to allow users to
designate the order of authorship as well. }~
={ Housman, A. E. ;
   McGill, Scott ;
   public domain :
     literary texts in
}

The discussion of roles circulated fluidly across concepts like law (and legal
licenses), norms, community, and identity. Brent and Ross and others involved
had developed sophisticated imaginations of how Connexions would fit into the
existing ecology of academia, constrained all the while by both standard goals,
like usability and efficiency, and by novel legal licenses and concerns about
the changing practices of authors and scholars. The question, for instance, of
how a module can be used (technically, legally) is often confused with, or
difficult to disentangle from, how a module should be used (technically,
legally, or, more generally, "socially"—with usage shaped by the community who
uses it). In order to make sense of this, Connexions programmers and
participants like myself are prone to using the language of custom and norm,
and the figure of community, as in "the customary norms of a scholarly
community."
={ communities :
     norms and
}

2~ From Law and Technology to Norm
={ communities :
     norms and +20
}

The meaning of publication in Connexions and the questions about roles and
their proper legal status emerged from the core concern with reuse, which is
the primary modulation of Free Software that Connexions carries out: the
modulation of the meaning of source code to include textbook writing. What
makes source code such a central component of Free Software is the manner in
which it is shared and transformed, not the technical features of any
particular language or program. So the modulation of source code to include
textbooks is not just an attempt to make textbooks exact, algorithmic, or
digital, but an experiment in sharing textbook writing in a similar fashion.
={ coordination (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +9 ;
   sharing source code (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   modifiability +3
}

This modulation also affects the other components: it creates a demand for
openness in textbook creation and circulation; it demands new kinds of
copyright licenses (the Creative Commons licenses); and it affects the meaning
of coordination among scholars, ranging from explicit forms of collaboration
and co-creation to the entire spectrum of uses and reuses that scholars
normally make of their ,{[pg 286]}, peers’ works. It is this modulation of
coordination that leads to the second core concern of Connexions: that of the
existence of "norms" of scholarly creation, use, reuse, publication, and
circulation.
={ copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of | derivative uses and +7 ;
   openness (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   norms :
     coordination and
}

Since software programmers and engineers are prone to thinking about things in
concrete, practical, and detailed ways, discussions of creation, use, and
circulation are rarely conducted at the level of philosophical abstraction.
They are carried out on whiteboards, using diagrams.
={ figuring out +3 }

The whiteboard diagram transcribed in figure 8 was precipitated by a fairly
precise question: "When is the reuse of something in a module (or of an entire
module) governed by ‘academic norms’ and when is it subject to the legal
constraints of the licenses?" For someone to quote a piece of text from one
module in another is considered normal practice and thus shouldn’t involve
concerns about legal rights and duties to fork the module (create a new
modified version, perhaps containing only the section cited, which is something
legal licenses explicitly allow). But what if someone borrows, say, all of the
equations in a module about information theory and uses them to illustrate a
very different point in a different module. Does he or she have either a normal
or a legal right to do so? Should the equations be cited? What should that
citation look like? What if the equations are particularly hard to mark-up in
the MathML language and therefore represent a significant investment in time on
the part of the original author? Should the law govern this activity, or should
norms?
={ forking :
     in Connexions +16 ;
   norms :
     academic +5
}

{ 2bits_09_08-100.png }image ~[* Whiteboard diagram: the cascade of reuse in Connexions. Conception by Ross Reedstrom, Brent Hendricks, and Christopher Kelty. Transcribed in the author’s fieldnotes, 2003. ]~

There is a natural tendency among geeks to answer these questions solely with
respect to the law; it is, after all, highly codified and seemingly
authoritative on such issues. However, there is often no need to engage the
law, because of the presumed consensus ("academic norms") about how to proceed,
even if those norms conflict with the law. But these norms are nowhere
codified, and this makes geeks (and, increasingly, academics themselves)
uneasy. As in the case of a requirement of attribution, the constraints of a
written license are perceived to be much more stable and reliable than those of
culture, precisely because culture is what remains contested and contestable.
So the idea of creating a new "version" of a text is easier to understand when
it is clearly circumscribed as a legally defined "derivative work." The
Connexions software was therefore implemented in such a way that the legal
right to create a derived work (to fork a module) could be done with the press
of ,{[pg 287]}, a button: a distinct module is automatically created, and it
retains the name of the original author and the original owner, but now also
includes the new author’s name as author and maintainer. That new author can
proceed to make any number of changes.
={ attribution :
     copyright licenses and
}

But is forking always necessary? What if the derivative work contains only a
few spelling corrections and slightly updated information? Why not change the
existing module (where such changes would be more akin to issuing a new
edition), rather than create a legally defined derivative work? Why not simply
suggest the changes to the original author? Why not collaborate? While a legal
license gives people the right to do all of these things without ever
consulting the person who licensed it, there may well be occasions ,{[pg 288]},
when it makes much more sense to ignore those rights in favor of other norms.
The answers to these questions depend a great deal on the kind and the intent
of the reuse. A refined version of the whiteboard diagram, depicted in figure
9, attempts to capture the various kinds of reuse and their intersection with
laws, norms, and technologies.
={ collaboration :
     forking vs. +3 ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     forking and
}

{ 2bits_09_09-100.png }image ~[* Whiteboard diagram transformed: forms of reuse in Connexions. Conception by Christopher Kelty, 2004. ]~

The center of the diagram contains a list of different kinds of imaginable
reuses, arrayed from least interventionist at the top to most interventionist
at the bottom, and it implies that as the intended transformations become more
drastic, the likelihood of collaboration with the original author decreases.
The arrow on the left indicates the legal path from cultural norms to protected
fair uses; the arrow on the right indicates the technical path from built-in
legal constraints based on the licenses to software tools that make
collaboration (according to presumed scholarly norms) easier than the
alternative (exercising the legal right to make a derivative work). With the
benefit of hindsight, it seems that the arrows on either side should actually
be a circle that connect laws, technologies, and norms in a chain of influence
and constraint, since it is clear in retrospect that the norms of authorial
practice have actually changed (or at least have been made explicit) based on
the existence of licenses and the types of tools available (such as blogs and
Wikipedia).
={ experimentation +1 ;
   Wikipedia (collaborative encyclopedia)
}

The diagram can best be understood as a way of representing, to Connexions
itself (and its funders), the experiment under way with the components of Free
Software. By modulating source code to include the writing of scholarly
textbooks, Connexions made visible the need for new copyright licenses
appropriate to this content; by making the system Internet-based and relying on
open standards such as XML and Open Source components, Connexions also
modulated the concept of openness to include textbook publication; and by
making the system possible as an open repository of freely licensed textbook
modules, Connexions made visible the changed conditions of coordination, not
just between two collaborating authors, but within the entire system of
publication, citation, use, reuse, borrowing, building on, plagiarizing,
copying, emulating, and so on. Such changes to coordination may or may not take
hold. For many scholars, they pose an immodest challenge to a working system
that has developed over centuries, but for others they represent the removal of
arbitrary constraints that prevent ,{[pg 289]}, novel and innovative forms of
knowledge creation and association rendered possible in the last thirty to
forty years (and especially in the last ten). For some, these modulations might
form the basis for a final modulation—a Free Textbooks movement—but as yet no
such movement exists.
={ Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) ;
   movement (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of +2
}

In the case of shared software source code, one of the principal reasons for
sharing it was to reuse it: to build on it, to link to it, to employ it in ways
that made building more complex objects into an easier task. The very design
philosophy of UNIX well articulates the necessity of modularity and reuse, and
the idea is no less powerful in other areas, such as textbooks. But just as the
reuse of software is not simply a feature of software’s technical
characteristics, the idea of "reusing" scholarly materials implies all kinds of
questions that are not simply questions of recombining texts. The ability to
share source code—and the ability to create complex software based on
it—requires modulations of both the legal meaning of software, as in the case
of EMACS, and the organizational form, as in the ,{[pg 290]}, emergence of Free
Software projects other than the Free Software Foundation (the Linux kernel,
Perl, Apache, etc.).
={ Free Software Foundation +1 ;
   textbooks :
     model in Connexions +1
}

In the case of textbook reuse (but only after Free Software), the technical and
the legal problems that Connexions addresses are relatively well specified:
what software to use, whether to use XML, the need for an excellent user
interface, and so on. However, the organizational, cultural, or practical
meaning of reuse is not yet entirely clear (a point made by figures 8 and 9).
In many ways, the recognition that there are cultural norms among academics
mirrors the (re)discovery of norms and ethics among Free Software hackers.~{ I
refer here to Eric Raymond’s "discovery" that hackers possess unstated norms
that govern what they do, in addition to the legal licenses and technical
practices they engage in (see Raymond, "Homesteading the Noosphere"). For a
critique and background on hacker ethics and norms, see Coleman, "The Social
Construction of Freedom." }~ But the label "cultural norms" is a mere catch-all
for a problem that is probably better understood as a mixture of concrete
technical, organizational, and legal questions and as more or less abstract
social imaginaries through which a particular kind of material order is
understood and pursued—the creation of a recursive public. How do programmers,
lawyers, engineers, and Free Software advocates (and anthropologists) "figure
out" how norms work? How do they figure out ways to operationalize or make use
of them? How do they figure out how to change them? How do they figure out how
to create new norms? They do so through the modulations of existing practices,
guided by imaginaries of moral and technical order. Connexions does not tend
toward becoming Free Software, but it does tend toward becoming a recursive
public with respect to textbooks, education, and the publication of pedagogical
techniques and knowledge. The problematic of creating an independent,
autonomous public is thus the subterranean ground of both Free Software and
Connexions.
={ figuring out ;
   norms :
     cultural | practices and technology vs. +8 ;
   practices :
     norms vs. +8 ;
   recursive public ;
   public :
     autotelic and independent :
     see also recursive public
}

To some extent, then, the matter of reuse raises a host of questions about the
borders and boundaries in and of academia. Brent, Ross, and I assumed at the
outset that communities have both borders and norms, and that the two are
related. But, as it turns out, this is not a safe assumption. At neither the
technical nor the legal level is the use of the software restricted to
academics—indeed, there is no feasible way to do that and still offer it on the
Internet—nor does anyone involved wish it to be so restricted. However, there
is an implicit sense that the people who will contribute content will primarily
be academics and educators (just as Free Software participants are expected,
but not required to be programmers). As figure 9 makes clear, there may well be
tremendous variation in the kinds of reuse that people wish to make, even
within academia. ,{[pg 291]}, Scholars in the humanities, for instance, are
loath to even imagine others creating derivative works with articles they have
written and can envision their work being used only in the conventional manner
of being read, cited, and critiqued. Scholars in engineering, biology, or
computer science, on the other hand, may well take pleasure in the idea or act
of reuse, if it is adequately understood to be a "scientific result" or a
suitably stable concept on which to build.~{ Bruno Latour’s Science in Action
makes a strong case for the centrality of "black boxes" in science and
engineering for precisely this reason. }~ Reuse can have a range of different
meanings depending not only on whether it is used by scholars or academics, but
within that heterogeneous group itself.
={ Hendricks, Brent ;
   Reedstrom, Ross ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     derivative uses and
}

The Connexions software does not, however, enforce disciplinary differences. If
anything it makes very strong and troubling claims that knowledge is knowledge
and that disciplinary constraints are arbitrary. Thus, for instance, if a
biologist wishes to transform a literary scholar’s article on Darwin’s tropes
to make it reflect current evolutionary theory, he or she could do so; it is
entirely possible, both legally and technically. The literary scholar could
react in a number of ways, including outrage that the biologist has misread or
misunderstood the work or pleasure in seeing the work refined. Connexions
adheres rigorously to its ideas of openness in this regard; it neither
encourages nor censures such behavior.
={ modifiability :
     relation of different disciplines to
}

By contrast, as figure 9 suggests, the relationship between these two scholars
can be governed either by the legal specification of rights contained in the
licenses (a privately ordered legal regime dependent on a national-cum-global
statutory regime) or by the customary means of collaboration enabled, perhaps
enhanced, by software tools. The former is the domain of the state, the legal
profession, and a moral and technical order that, for lack of a better word,
might be called modernity. The latter, however, is the domain of the cultural,
the informal, the practical, the interpersonal; it is the domain of ethics
(prior to its modernization, perhaps) and of tradition.
={ modernity :
     tradition and +1 ;
   moral and technical order
}

If figure 9 is a recapitulation of modernity and tradition (what better role
for an anthropologist to play!), then the presumptive boundaries around
"communities" define which groups possess which norms. But the very design of
Connexions—its technical and legal exactitude—immediately brings a potentially
huge variety of traditions into conflict with one another. Can the biologist
and the literary scholar be expected to occupy the same universe of norms? Does
the fact of being academics, employees of a university, ,{[pg 292]}, or readers
of Darwin ensure this sharing of norms? How are the boundaries policed and the
norms communicated and reinforced?
={ norms +4 :
     existence of +4
}

The problem of reuse therefore raises a much broader and more complex question:
do norms actually exist? In particular, do they exist independent of the
particular technical, legal, or organizational practice in which groups of
people exist—outside the coordinated infrastructure of scholarship and science?
And if Connexions raises this question, can the same question not also be asked
of the elaborate system of professions, disciplines, and organizations that
coordinate the scholarship of different communities? Are these norms, or are
they "technical" and "legal" practices? What difference does formalization
make? What difference does bureaucratization make?~{ I should note, in my
defense, that my efforts to get my informants to read Max Weber, Ferdinand
Tönnies, Henry Maine, or Emile Durkheim ,{[pg 347]}, proved far less successful
than my creation of nice Adobe Illustrator diagrams that made explicit the
reemergence of issues addressed a century ago. It was not for lack of trying,
however. }~

The question can also be posed this way: should norms be understood as
historically changing constructs or as natural features of human behavior
(regular patterns, or conventions, which emerge inevitably wherever human
beings interact). Are they a feature of changing institutions, laws, and
technologies, or do they form and persist in the same way wherever people
congregate? Are norms features of a "calculative agency," as Michael Callon
puts it, or are they features of the evolved human mind, as Marc Hauser
argues?~{ Callon, The Laws of the Markets; Hauser, Moral Minds. }~
={ norms +4 :
     evolution and +2
}

The answer that my informants give, in practice, concerning the mode of
existence of cultural norms is neither. On the one hand, in the Connexions
project the question of the mode of existence of academic norms is unanswered;
the basic assumption is that certain actions are captured and constrained
neither by legal constraints nor technical barriers, and that it takes people
who know or study "communities" (i.e., nonlegal and nontechnical constraints)
to figure out what those actions may be. On some days, the project is modestly
understood to enable academics to do what they do faster and better, but
without fundamentally changing anything about the practice, institutions, or
legal relations; on other days, however, it is a radically transformative
project, changing how people think about creating scholarly work, a project
that requires educating people and potentially "changing the culture" of
scholarly work, including its technology, its legal relations, and its
practices.
={ norms :
     cultural +1
}

In stark contrast (despite the very large degree of simpatico), the principal
members of Creative Commons answer the question of the existence of norms quite
differently than do those in Connexions: ,{[pg 293]}, they assert that norms
not only change but are manipulated and/or channeled by the modulation of
technical and legal practices (this is the novel version of law and economics
that Creative Commons is founded on). Such an assertion leaves very little for
norms or for culture; there may be a deep evolutionary role for rule following
or for choosing socially sanctioned behavior over socially unacceptable
behavior, but the real action happens in the legal and technical domains. In
Creative Commons the question of the existence of norms is answered firmly in
the phrase coined by Glenn Brown: "punt to culture." For Creative Commons,
norms are a prelegal and pretechnical substrate upon which the licenses they
create operate. Norms must exist for the strategy employed in the licenses to
make sense—as the following story illustrates.
={ Brown, Glen Otis ;
   norms :
     channeling by legal means
}

2~ On the Nonexistence of Norms in the Culture of No Culture
={ culture :
     punting to +24
}

More than once, I have found myself on the telephone with Glenn Brown, staring
at notes, a diagram, or some inscrutable collection of legalese. Usually, the
conversations wander from fine legal points to music and Texas politics to
Glenn’s travels around the globe. They are often precipitated by some previous
conversation and by Glenn’s need to remind himself (and me) what we are in the
middle of creating. Or destroying. His are never simple questions. While the
Connexions project started with a repository of scholarly content in need of a
license, Creative Commons started with licenses in need of particular kinds of
content. But both projects required participants to delve into the details of
both licenses and the structure of digital content, which qualified me, for
both projects, as the intermediary who could help explore these intersections.
My phone conversations with Glenn, then, were much like the whiteboard
conversations at Connexions: filled with a mix of technical and legal
terminology, and conducted largely in order to give Glenn the sense that he had
cross-checked his plans with someone presumed to know better. I can’t count the
number of times I have hung up the phone or left the conference room wondering,
"Have I just sanctioned something mad?" Yet rarely have I felt that my
interventions served to do more than confirm suspicions or derail already
unstable arguments. ,{[pg 294]},
={ Brown, Glen Otis +23 }

In one particular conversation—the "punt to culture" conversation—I found
myself bewildered by a sudden understanding of the process of writing legal
licenses and of the particular assumptions about human behavior that need to be
present in order to imagine creating these licenses or ensuring that they will
be beneficial to the people who will use them.

These discussions (which often included other lawyers) happened in a kind of
hypothetical space of legal imagination, a space highly structured by legal
concepts, statutes, and precedents, and one extraordinarily carefully attuned
to the fine details of semantics. A core aspect of operating within this
imagination is the distinction between law as an abstract semantic entity and
law as a practical fact that people may or may not deal with. To be sure, not
all lawyers operate this way, but the warrant for thinking this way comes from
no less eminent an authority than Oliver Wendell Holmes, for whom the "Path of
Law" was always from practice to abstract rule, and not the reverse.~{ Oliver
Wendell Holmes, "The Path of Law." }~ The opposition is unstable, but I
highlight it here because it was frequently used as a strategy for constructing
precise legal language. The ability to imagine the difference between an
abstract rule designating legality and a rule encountered in practice was a
first step toward seeing how the language of the rule should be constructed.
={ Holmes, Oliver Wendell }

I helped write, read, and think about the first of the Creative Commons
licenses, and it was through this experience that I came to understand how the
crafting of legal language works, and in particular how the mode of existence
of cultural or social norms relates to the crafting of legal language. Creative
Commons licenses are not a familiar legal entity, however. They are modulations
of the Free Software license, but they differ in important ways.
={ Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     Creative Commons version +20 ;
   Creative Commons :
     writing of licenses +20 ;
   participant observation :
     writing copyright licenses as +20
}

The Creative Commons licenses allow authors to grant the use of their work in
about a dozen different ways—that is, the license itself comes in versions. One
can, for instance, require attribution, prohibit commercial exploitation, allow
derivative or modified works to be made and circulated, or some combination of
all these. These different combinations actually create different licenses,
each of which grants intellectual-property rights under slightly different
conditions. For example, say Marshall Sahlins decides to write a paper about
how the Internet is cultural; he copyrights the paper ("© 2004 Marshall
Sahlins"), he requires that any use of it or any copies of it maintain the
copyright notice and the attribution of ,{[pg 295]}, authorship (these can be
different), and he furthermore allows for commercial use of the paper. It would
then be legal for a publishing house to take the paper off Sahlins’s
Linux-based Web server and publish it in a collection without having to ask
permission, as long as the paper remains unchanged and he is clearly and
unambiguously listed as author of the paper. The publishing house would not get
any rights to the work, and Sahlins would not get any royalties. If he had
specified noncommercial use, the publisher would instead have needed to contact
him and arrange for a separate license (Creative Commons licenses are
nonexclusive), under which he could demand some share of revenue and his name
on the cover of the book.~{ In December 2006 Creative Commons announced a set
of licenses that facilitate the "follow up" licensing of a work, especially one
initially issued under a noncommercial license. }~ But say he was, instead, a
young scholar seeking only peer recognition and approbation—then royalties
would be secondary to maximum circulation. Creative Commons allows authors to
assert, as its members put it, "some rights reserved" or even "no rights
reserved."
={ intellectual property :
     strategy and +16 ;
   Sahlins, Marshall +2 ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software) :
     derivative uses and +2 | disavowal clause in +6 ;
   attribution :
     dissavowal of +6 ;
   credit +6 :
     see also attribution
}

But what if Sahlins had chosen a license that allowed modification of his work.
This would mean that I, Christopher Kelty, whether in agreement with or in
objection to his work, could download the paper, rewrite large sections of it,
add in my own baroque and idiosyncratic scholarship, and write a section that
purports to debunk (or, what could amount to the same, augment) Sahlins’s
arguments. I would then be legally entitled to re-release the paper as "© 2004
Marshall Sahlins, with modifications © 2007 Christopher Kelty," so long as
Sahlins is identified as the author of the paper. The nature or extent of the
modifications is not legally restricted, but both the original and the modified
version would be legally attributed to Sahlins (even though he would own only
the first paper).

In the course of a number of e-mails, chat sessions, and phone conversations
with Glenn, I raised this example and proposed that the licenses needed a way
to account for it, since it seemed to me entirely possible that were I to
produce a modified work that so distorted Sahlins’s original argument that he
did not want to be associated with the modified paper, then he should have the
right also to repudiate his identification as author. Sahlins should, legally
speaking, be able to ask me to remove his name from all subsequent versions of
my misrepresentation, thus clearing his good name and providing me the freedom
to continue sullying mine into obscurity. After hashing it out with the
expensive Palo Alto legal firm that was officially drafting the licenses, we
came up with text that said: ,{[pg 296]}, "If You create a Derivative Work,
upon notice from any Licensor You must, to the extent practicable, remove from
the Derivative Work any reference to such Licensor or the Original Author, as
requested."
={ norms :
     academic +5
}

The bulk of our discussion centered around the need for the phrase, "to the
extent practicable." Glenn asked me, "How is the original author supposed to
monitor all the possible uses of her name? How will she enforce this clause?
Isn’t it going to be difficult to remove the name from every copy?" Glenn was
imagining a situation of strict adherence, one in which the presence of the
name on the paper was the same as the reputation of the individual, regardless
of who actually read it. On this theory, until all traces of the author’s name
were expunged from each of these teratomata circulating in the world, there
could be no peace, and no rest for the wronged.

I paused, then gave the kind of sigh meant to imply that I had come to my
hard-won understandings of culture through arduous dissertation research: "It
probably won’t need to be strictly enforced in all cases—only in the
significant ones. Scholars tend to respond to each other only in very
circumscribed cases, by writing letters to the editor or by sending responses
or rebuttals to the journal that published the work. It takes a lot of work to
really police a reputation, and it differs from discipline to discipline.
Sometimes, drastic action might be needed, usually not. There is so much misuse
and abuse of people’s arguments and work going on all the time that people only
react when they are directly confronted with serious abuses. And even so, it is
only in cases of negative criticism or misuse that people need respond. When a
scholar uses someone’s work approvingly, but incorrectly, it is usually
considered petulant (at best) to correct them publicly."

"In short," I said, leaning back in my chair and acting the part of expert,
"it’s like, you know, c’mon—it isn’t all law, there are a bunch of, you know,
informal rules of civility and stuff that govern that sort of thing."

Then Glenn said., "Oh, okay, well that’s when we punt to culture."

When I heard this phrase, I leaned too far back and fell over, joyfully
stunned. Glenn had managed to capture what no amount of fieldwork, with however
many subjects, could have. Some combination of American football, a twist of
Hobbes or Holmes, and a lived understanding of what exactly these copyright
licenses are ,{[pg 297]}, meant to achieve gave this phrase a luminosity I
usually associate only with Balinese cock-fights. It encapsulated, almost as a
slogan, a very precise explanation of what Creative Commons had undertaken. It
was not a theory Glenn proposed with this phrase, but a strategy in which a
particular, if vague, theory of culture played a role.
={ culture :
     Creative Commons version of +12
}

For those unfamiliar, a bit of background on U.S. football may help. When two
teams square off on the football field, the offensive team gets four attempts,
called "downs," to move the ball either ten yards forward or into the end zone
for a score. The first three downs usually involve one of two strategies: run
or pass, run or pass. On the fourth down, however, the offensive team must
either "go for it" (run or pass), kick a field goal (if close enough to the end
zone), or "punt" the ball to the other team. Punting is a somewhat
disappointing option, because it means giving up possession of the ball to the
other team, but it has the advantage of putting the other team as far back on
the playing field as possible, thus decreasing its likelihood of scoring.

To "punt to culture," then, suggests that copyright licenses try three times to
legally restrict what a user or consumer of a work can make of it. By using the
existing federal intellectual-property laws and the rules of license and
contract writing, copyright licenses articulate to people what they can and
cannot do with that work according to law. While the licenses do not (they
cannot) force people, in any tangible sense, to do one thing or another, they
can use the language of law and contract to warn people, and perhaps obliquely,
to threaten them. If the licenses end up silent on a point—if there is no
"score," to continue the analogy—then it’s time to punt to culture. Rather than
make more law, or call in the police, the license strategy relies on culture to
fill in the gaps with people’s own understandings of what is right and wrong,
beyond the law. It operationalizes a theory of culture, a theory that
emphasizes the sovereignty of nonstate customs and the diversity of systems of
cultural norms. Creative Commons would prefer that its licenses remain legally
minimalist. It would much prefer to assume—indeed, the licenses implicitly
require—the robust, powerful existence of this multifarious,
hetero-physiognomic, and formidable opponent to the law with neither uniform
nor mascot, hunched at the far end of the field, preparing to, so to speak,
clean law’s clock. ,{[pg 298]},
={ norms :
     cultural
}

Creative Commons’s "culture" thus seems to be a somewhat vague mixture of many
familiar theories. Culture is an unspecified but finely articulated set of
given, evolved, designed, informal, practiced, habitual, local, social, civil,
or historical norms that are expected to govern the behavior of individuals in
the absence of a state, a court, a king, or a police force, at one of any
number of scales. It is not monolithic (indeed, my self-assured explanation
concerned only the norms of "academia"), but assumes a diversity beyond
enumeration. It employs elements of relativism—any culture should be able to
trump the legal rules. It is not a hereditary biological theory, but one that
assumes historical contingency and arbitrary structures.
={ norms :
     channeling by legal means +6
}

Certainly, whatever culture is, it is separate from law. Law is, to borrow
Sharon Traweek’s famous phrase, "a culture of no culture" in this sense. It is
not the cultural and normative practices of legal scholars, judges, lawyers,
legislators, and lobbyists that determine what laws will look like, but their
careful, expert, noncultural ratiocination. In this sense, punting to culture
implies that laws are the result of human design, whereas culture is the result
of human action, but not of human design. Law is systematic and tractable;
culture may have a deep structure, but it is intractable to human design. It
can, however, be channeled and tracked, nudged or guided, by law.
={ Traweek, Sharon ;
   culture :
     law vs. +3
}

Thus, Lawrence Lessig, one of the founders of Creative Commons has written
extensively about the "regulation of social meaning," using cases such as those
involving the use or nonuse of seatbelts or whether or not to allow smoking in
public places. The decision not to wear a seatbelt, for instance, may have much
more to do with the contextual meaning of putting on a seatbelt (don’t you
trust the cab driver?) than with either the existence of the seatbelt (or
automatic seatbelts, for that matter) or with laws demanding their use.
According to Lessig, the best law can do in the face of custom is to change the
meaning of wearing the seatbelt: to give the refusal a dishonorable rather than
an honorable meaning. Creative Commons licenses are based on a similar
assumption: the law is relatively powerless in the face of entrenched academic
or artistic customs, and so the best the licenses can do is channel the meaning
of sharing and reuse, of copyright control or infringement. As Glenn explained
in the context of a discussion about a license that would allow music sampling.
,{[pg 299]},
={ Lessig, Lawrence :
     law and economics and ;
   meaning, regulation through law ;
   music +3 ;
   sampling, musical +3
}

_1 We anticipate that the phrase "as appropriate to the medium, genre, and
market niche" might prompt some anxiety, as it leaves things relatively
undefined. But there’s more method here than you might expect: The definition
of "sampling" or "collage" varies across different media. Rather than try to
define all possible scenarios (including ones that haven’t happened yet)—which
would have the effect of restricting the types of re-uses to a limited set—we
took the more laissez faire approach.

_1 This sort of deference to community values—think of it as "punting to
culture"—is very common in everyday business and contract law. The idea is that
when lawyers have trouble defining the specialized terms of certain
subcultures, they should get out of the way and let those subcultures work them
out. It’s probably not a surprise Creative Commons likes this sort of notion a
lot.~{ Message from the cc-sampling mailing list, Glenn Brown, Subject:
BACKGROUND: "AS APPROPRIATE TO THE MEDIUM, GENRE, AND MARKET NICHE," 23 May
2003, http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/cc-sampling/2003-May/000004.html. }~

As in the case of reuse in Connexions, sampling in the music world can imply a
number of different, perhaps overlapping, customary meanings of what is
acceptable and what is not. For Connexions, the trick was to differentiate the
cases wherein collaboration should be encouraged from the cases wherein the
legal right to "sample"—to fork or to create a derived work—was the appropriate
course of action. For Creative Commons, the very structure of the licenses
attempts to capture this distinction as such and to allow for individuals to
make determinations about the meaning of sampling themselves.~{ Sampling offers
a particularly clear example of how Creative Commons differs from the existing
practice and infrastructure of music creation and intellectual-property law.
The music industry has actually long recognized the fact of sampling as
something musicians do and has attempted to deal with it by making it an
explicit economic practice; the music industry thus encourages sampling by
facilitating the sale between labels and artists of rights to make a sample.
Record companies will negotiate prices, lengths, quality, and quantity of
sampling and settle on a price. \\ This practice is set opposite the
assumption, also codified in law, that the public has a right to a fair use of
copyrighted material without payment or permission. Sampling a piece of music
might seem to fall into this category of use, except that one of the tests of
fair use is that the use not impact any existing market for such uses, and the
fact that the music industry has effectively created a market for the buying
and selling of samples means that sampling now routinely falls outside the fair
uses codified in the statute, thus removing sampling from the domain of fair
use. Creative Commons licenses, on the other hand, say that owners should be
able to designate their material as "sample-able," to give permission ahead of
time, and by this practice to encourage others to do the same. They give an
"honorable" meaning to the practice of sampling for free, rather than the
dishonorable one created by the industry. It thus becomes a war over the
meaning of norms, in the law-and-economics language of Creative Commons and its
founders. }~

At stake, then, is the construction of both technologies and legal licenses
that, as Brent and Rich would assert, "make it easy for users to do the right
thing." The "right thing," however, is precisely what goes unstated: the moral
and technical order that guides the design of both licenses and tools.
Connexions users are given tools that facilitate citation, acknowledgment,
attribution, and certain kinds of reuse instead of tools that privilege
anonymity or facilitate proliferation or encourage nonreciprocal
collaborations. By the same token, Creative Commons licenses, while legally
binding, are created with the aim of changing norms: they promote attribution
and citation; they promote fair use and clearly designated uses; they are
written to give users flexibility to decide what kinds of things should be
allowed and what kinds shouldn’t. Without a doubt, the "right thing" is right
for some people and not for others—and it is thus political. But the criteria
for what is right are not ,{[pg 300]}, merely political; the criteria are what
constitute the affinity of these geeks in the first place, what makes them a
recursive public. They see in these instruments the possibility for the
creation of authentic publics whose role is to stand outside power, outside
markets, and to participate in sovereignty, and through this participation to
produce liberty without sacrificing stability.
={ Baraniuk, Richard ;
   Hendricks, Brent ;
   affinity (of geeks) ;
   fair use ;
   moral and technical order ;
   recursive public
}

2~ Conclusion

What happens when geeks modulate the practices that make up Free Software? What
is the intuition or the cultural significance of Free Software that makes
people want to emulate and modulate it? Creative Commons and Connexions
modulate the practices of Free Software and extend them in new ways. They
change the meaning of shared source code to include shared nonsoftware, and
they try to apply the practices of license writing, coordination, and openness
to new domains. At one level, such an activity is fascinating simply because of
what it reveals: in the case of Connexions, it reveals the problem of
determining the finality of a work. How should the authority, stability, and
reliability of knowledge be assessed when work can be rendered permanently
modifiable? It is an activity that reveals the complexity of the system of
authorization and evaluation that has been built in the past.

The intuition that Connexions and Creative Commons draw from Free Software is
an intuition about the authority of knowledge, about a reorientation of
knowledge and power that demands a response. That response needs to be
technical and legal, to be sure, but it also needs to be public—a response that
defines the meaning of finality publicly and openly and makes modifiability an
irreversible aspect of the process of stabilizing knowledge. Such a commitment
is incompatible with the provision of stable knowledge by unaccountable private
parties, whether individuals or corporations or governments, or by technical
fiat. There must always remain the possibility that someone can question,
change, reuse, and modify according to their needs.

1~conclusion Conclusion

% ,{[pg 301]},

2~ The Cultural Consequences of Free Software

Free Software is changing. In all aspects it looks very different from when I
started, and in many ways the Free Software described herein is not the Free
Software readers will encounter if they turn to the Internet to find it. But
how could it be otherwise? If the argument I make in Two Bits is at all
correct, then modulation must constantly be occurring, for experimentation
never seeks its own conclusion. A question remains, though: in changing, does
Free Software and its kin preserve the imagination of moral and technical order
that created it? Is the recursive public something that survives, orders, or
makes sense of these changes? Does Free Software exist for more than its own
sake?
={ modulation :
     of Free Software +5 ;
   moral and technical order
}

In Two Bits I have explored not only the history of Free Software but also the
question of where such future changes will have come ,{[pg 302]}, from. I argue
for seeing continuity in certain practices of everyday life precisely because
the Internet and Free Software pervade everyday life to a remarkable, and
growing, degree. Every day, from here to there, new projects and ideas and
tools and goals emerge everywhere out of the practices that I trace through
Free Software: Connexions and Creative Commons, open access, Open Source
synthetic biology, free culture, access to knowledge (a2k), open cola, open
movies, science commons, open business, Open Source yoga, Open Source
democracy, open educational resources, the One Laptop Per Child project, to say
nothing of the proliferation of wiki-everything or the "peer production" of
scientific data or consumer services—all new responses to a widely felt
reorientation of knowledge and power.~{ See http://cnx.org,
http://www.creativecommons.org,
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm, http://www.biobricks.org,
http://www.freebeer.org, http://freeculture.org, http://www.cptech.org/a2k,
,{[pg 348]}, http://www.colawp.com/colas/400/cola467_recipe.html,
http://www.elephantsdream.org, http://www.sciencecommons.org,
http://www.plos.org, http://www.openbusiness.cc, http://www.yogaunity.org,
http://osdproject.com, http://www.hewlett.org/Programs/Education/oer/, and
http://olpc.com. }~ How is one to know the difference between all these things?
How is one to understand the cultural significance and consequence of them? Can
one distinguish between projects that promote a form of public sphere that can
direct the actions of our society versus those that favor corporate,
individual, or hierarchical control over decision making?
={ practices +2 :
     five components of Free Software +2 ;
   public +5 :
     see also recursive public +5 ;
   reorientation of power and knowledge +19
}

Often the first response to such emerging projects is to focus on the promises
and ideology of the people involved. On the one hand, claiming to be open or
free or public or democratic is something nearly everyone does (including
unlikely candidates such as the defense intelligence agencies of the United
States), and one should therefore be suspicious and critical of all such
claims.~{ See Clive Thompson, "Open Source Spying," New York Times Magazine, 3
December 2006, 54. }~ While such arguments and ideological claims are
important, it would be a grave mistake to focus only on these statements. The
"movement"—the ideological, critical, or promissory aspect—is just one
component of Free Software and, indeed, the one that has come last, after the
other practices were figured out and made legible, replicable, and modifiable.
On the other hand, it is easy for geeks and Free Software advocates to denounce
emerging projects, to say, "But that isn’t really Open Source or Free
Software." And while it may be tempting to fix the definition of Free Software
once and for all in order to ensure a clear dividing line between the true sons
and the carpetbaggers, to do so would reduce Free Software to mere repetition
without difference, would sacrifice its most powerful and distinctive
attribute: its responsive, emergent, public character.

But what questions should one ask? Where should scholars or curious onlookers
focus their attention in order to see whether or not a recursive public is at
work? Many of these questions are simple, ,{[pg 303]}, practical ones: are
software and networks involved at any level? Do the participants claim to
understand Free Software or Open Source, either in their details or as an
inspiration? Is intellectual-property law a key problem? Are participants
trying to coordinate each other through the Internet, and are they trying to
take advantage of voluntary, self-directed contributions of some kind? More
specifically, are participants modulating one of these practices? Are they
thinking about something in terms of source code, or source and binary? Are
they changing or creating new forms of licenses, contracts, or privately
ordered legal arrangements? Are they experimenting with forms of coordinating
the voluntary actions of large numbers of unevenly distributed people? Are the
people who are contributing aware of or actively pursuing questions of
ideology, distinction, movement, or opposition? Are these practices recognized
as something that creates the possibility for affinity, rather than simply
arcane "technical" practices that are too complex to understand or appreciate?
={ affinity (of geeks) +2 }

In the last few years, talk of "social software" or "Web 2.0" has dominated the
circuit of geek and entrepreneur conferences and discussions: Wikipedia,
MySpace, Flickr, and YouTube, for example. For instance, there are scores and
scores of "social" music sites, with collaborative rating, music sharing, music
discovery, and so forth. Many of these directly use or take inspiration from
Free Software. For all of them, intellectual property is a central and
dominating concern. Key to their novelty is the leveraging and coordinating of
massive numbers of people along restricted lines (i.e., music preferences that
guide music discovery). Some even advocate or lobby for free(er) access to
digital music. But they are not (yet) what I would identify as recursive
publics: most of them are commercial entities whose structure and technical
specifications are closely guarded and not open to modification. While some
such entities may deal in freely licensed content (for instance, Creative
Commons-licensed music), few are interested in allowing strangers to
participate in, modulate, or modify the system as such; they are interested in
allowing users to become consumers in more and more sophisticated ways, and not
necessarily in facilitating a public culture of music. They want information
and knowledge to be free, to be sure, but not necessarily the infrastructure
that makes that information available and knowledge possible. Such entities
lack the "recursive" commitment. ,{[pg 304]},
={ music :
     recursive public and
}

By contrast, some corners of the open-access movement are more likely to meet
this criteria. As the appellation suggests, participants see it as a movement,
not a corporate or state entity, a movement founded on practices of copyleft
and the modulation of Free Software licensing ideas. The use of scientific data
and the tools for making sense of open access are very often at the heart of
controversy in science (a point often reiterated by science and technology
studies), and so there is often an argument about not only the availability of
data but its reuse, modification, and modulation as well. Projects like the
BioBricks Foundation (biobricks.org) and new organizations like the Public
Library of Science (plos.org) are committed to both availability and certain
forms of collective modification. The commitment to becoming a recursive
public, however, raises unprecedented issues about the nature of quality,
reliability, and finality of scientific data and results—questions that will
reverberate throughout the sciences as a result.
={ movement (component of Free Software) :
     modulations of ;
   open access :
     recursive public and
}

Farther afield, questions of "traditional heritage" claims, the compulsory
licensing of pharmaceuticals, or new forms of "crowdsourcing" in labor markets
are also open to analysis in the terms I offer in Two Bits.~{ See especially
Christen, "Tracking Properness" and "Gone Digital"; Brown, Who Owns Native
Culture? and "Heritage as Property." Crowdsourcing fits into other novel forms
of labor arrangements, ranging from conventional outsourcing and off-shoring to
newer forms of bodyshopping and "virtual migration" (see Aneesh, Virtual
Migration; Xiang, "Global Bodyshopping" ). }~ Virtual worlds like Second Life,
"a 3D digital world imagined, created, and owned by its residents," are
increasingly laboratories for precisely the kinds of questions raised here:
such worlds are far less virtual than most people realize, and the experiments
conducted there far more likely to migrate into the so-called real world before
we know it—including both economic and democratic experiments.~{ Golub,
"Copyright and Taboo"; Dibbell, Play Money. }~ How far will Second Life go in
facilitating a recursive public sphere? Can it survive both as a corporation
and as a "world"? And of course, there is the question of the "blogosphere" as
a public sphere, as a space of opinion and discussion that is radically open to
the voices of massive numbers of people. Blogging gives the lie to conventional
journalism’s self-image as the public sphere, but it is by no means immune to
the same kinds of problematic dynamics and polarizations, no more
"rational-critical" than FOX News, and yet . . .
={ blogosphere, as recursive public ;
   Second Life, as recursive public
}

Such examples should indicate the degree to which Two Bits is focused on a much
longer time span than simply the last couple of years and on much broader
issues of political legitimacy and cultural change. Rather than offer immediate
policy prescriptions or seek to change the way people think about an issue, I
have approached ,{[pg 305]}, Two Bits as a work of history and anthropology,
making it less immediately applicable in the hopes that it is more lastingly
usable. The stories I have told reach back at least forty years, if not longer.
While it is clear that the Internet as most people know it is only ten to
fifteen years old, it has been "in preparation" since at least the late 1950s.
Students in my classes—especially hip geeks deep in Free Software
apprenticeship—are bewildered to learn that the arguments and usable pasts they
are rehearsing are refinements and riffs on stories that are as old or older
than their parents. This deeper stability is where the cultural significance of
Free Software lies: what difference does Free Software today introduce with
respect to knowledge and power yesterday?
={ cultural significance ;
   legitimacy, circulation of knowledge and +6
}

Free Software is a response to a problem, in much the same way that the Royal
Society in the sixteenth century, the emergence of a publishing industry in the
eighteenth century, and the institutions of the public sphere in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries were responses. They responded to the collective
challenge of creating regimes of governance that required—and
encouraged—reliable empirical knowledge as a basis for their political
legitimacy. Such political legitimacy is not an eternal or theoretical problem;
it is a problem of constant real-world practice in creating the infrastructures
by which individuals come to inhabit and understand their own governance,
whether by states, corporations, or machines. If power seeks consent of the
governed—and especially the consent of the democratic, self-governing kind that
has become the global dominant ideal since the seventeenth century—it must also
seek to ensure the stability and reliability of the knowledge on which that
consent is propped.
={ public sphere :
     recursive public vs. +4 :
     see also public, recursive public +4
}

Debates about the nature and history of publics and public spheres have served
as one of the main arenas for this kind of questioning, but, as I hope I have
shown here, it is a question not only of public spheres but of practices,
technologies, laws, and movements, of going concerns which undergo modulation
and experimentation in accord with a social imagination of order both moral and
technical. "Recursive public" as a concept is not meant to replace that of
public sphere. I intend neither for actors nor really for many scholars to find
it generally applicable. I would not want to see it suddenly discovered
everywhere, but principally in tracking the transformation, proliferation, and
differentiation of Free Software and its derivatives. ,{[pg 306]},
={ social imaginary }

Several threads from the three parts of Two Bits can now be tied together. The
detailed descriptions of Free Software and its modulations should make clear
that (1) the reason the Internet looks the way it does is due to the work of
figuring out Free Software, both before and after it was recognized as such;
(2) neither the Internet nor the computer is the cause of a reorientation of
knowledge and power, but both are tools that render possible modulations of
settled practices, modulations that reveal a much older problem regarding the
legitimacy of the means of circulation and production of knowledge; (3) Free
Software is not an ethical stance, but a practical response to the revelation
of these older problems; and (4) the best way to understand this response is to
see it as a kind of public sphere, a recursive public that is specific to the
technical and moral imaginations of order in the contemporary world of geeks.
={ figuring out }

It is possible now to return to the practical and political meaning of the
"singularity" of the Internet, that is, to the fact that there is only one
Internet. This does not mean that there are no other networks, but only that
the Internet is a singular entity and not an instance of a general type. How is
it that the Internet is open in the same way to everyone, whether an individual
or a corporate or a national entity? How has it become extensible (and, by
extension, defensible) by and to everyone, regardless of their identity,
locale, context, or degree of power?
={ Internet :
     singularity of +7
}

The singularity of the Internet is both an ontological and an epistemological
fact; it is a feature of the Internet’s technical configurations and modes of
ordering the actions of humans and machines by protocols and software. But it
is also a feature of the technical and moral imaginations of the people who
build, manage, inhabit, and expand the Internet. Ontologically, the creation
and dissemination of standardized protocols, and novel standard-setting
processes are at the heart of the story. In the case of the Internet,
differences in standards-setting processes are revealed clearly in the form of
the famous Request for Comments system of creating, distributing, and modifying
Internet protocols. The RFC system, just as much as the Geneva-based
International Organization for Standards, reveal the fault lines of
international legitimacy in complex societies dependent on networks, software,
and other high-tech forms of knowledge production, organization, and
governance. The legitimacy of standards has massive significance for the
abilities of individual actors to participate in their own recursive publics,
whether they ,{[pg 307]}, be publics that address software and networks or
those that address education and development. But like the relationship between
"law on the books" and "law in action," standards depend on the coordinated
action and order of human practices.
={ International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ;
   Request for Comments (RFC) ;
   standards processes +1 ;
   standards +1
}

What’s more, the seemingly obvious line between a legitimate standard and a
marketable product based on these standards causes nothing but trouble. The
case of open systems in the 1980s high-end computer industry demonstrates how
the logic of standardization is not at all clearly distinguished from the logic
of the market. The open-systems battles resulted in novel forms of
cooperation-within-competition that sought both standardization and competitive
advantage at the same time. Open systems was an attempt to achieve a kind of
"singularity," not only for a network but for a market infrastructure as well.
Open systems sought ways to reform technologies and markets in tandem. What it
ignored was the legal structure of intellectual property. The failure of open
systems reveals the centrality of the moral and technical order of intellectual
property—to both technology and markets—and shows how a reliance on this
imagination of order literally renders impossible the standardization of
singular market infrastructure. By contrast, the success of the Internet as a
market infrastructure and as a singular entity comes in part because of the
recognition of the limitations of the intellectual-property system—and Free
Software in the 1990s was the main experimental arena for trying out
alternatives.
={ collaboration :
     competition vs. ;
   intellectual property +3 ;
   moral and technical order +5 ;
   Open Systems +3
}

The singularity of the Internet rests in turn on a counterintuitive
multiplicity: the multiplicity of the UNIX operating system and its thousands
of versions and imitations and reimplementations. UNIX is a great example of
how novel, unexpected kinds of order can emerge from high-tech practices. UNIX
is neither an academic (gift) nor a market phenomenon; it is a hybrid model of
sharing that emerged from a very unusual technical and legal context. UNIX
demonstrates how structured practices of sharing produce their own kind of
order. Contrary to the current scholarly consensus that Free Software and its
derivatives are a kind of "shadow economy" (a "sharing" economy, a "peer
production" economy, a "noncommercial" economy), UNIX was never entirely
outside of the mainstream market. The meanings of sharing, distribution, and
profitability are related to the specific technical, legal, and organizational
context. Because AT&T was prevented from commercializing UNIX, because UNIX
users were keen to expand and ,{[pg 308]}, adapt it for their own uses, and
because its developers were keen to encourage and assist in such adaptations,
UNIX proliferated and differentiated in ways that few commercial products could
have. But it was never "free" in any sense. Rather, in combination with open
systems, it set the stage for what "free" could come to mean in the 1980s and
1990s. It was a nascent recursive public, confronting the technical and legal
challenges that would come to define the practices of Free Software. To suggest
that it represents some kind of "outside" to a functioning economic market
based in money is to misperceive how transformative of markets UNIX and the
Internet (and Free Software) have been. They have initiated an imagination of
moral and technical order that is not at all opposed to ideologies of
market-based governance. Indeed, if anything, what UNIX and Free Software
represent is an imagination of how to change an entire market-based governance
structure—not just specific markets in things—to include a form of public
sphere, a check on the power of existing authority.
={ AT&T ;
   peer production ;
   UNIX operating system :
     allegiance to versions of ;
   proliferation of software
}

UNIX and Open Systems should thus be seen as early stages of a collective
technical experiment in transforming our imaginations of order, especially of
the moral order of publics, markets, and self-governing peoples. The
continuities and the gradualness of the change are more apparent in these
events than any sudden rupture or discontinuity that the "invention of the
Internet" or the passing of new intellectual-property laws might suggest. The
"reorientation of knowledge and power" is more dance than earthquake; it is
stratified in time, complex in its movements, and takes an experimental form
whose concrete traces are the networks, infrastructures, machines, laws, and
standards left in the wake of the experiments.
={ availability :
     reorientation of power knowledge and +5 ;
   experiment, collective technical +3 ;
   infrastructure
}

Availability, reusability, and modifiability are at the heart of this
reorientation. The experiments of UNIX and open systems would have come to
nothing if they had not also prompted a concurrent experimentation with
intellectual-property law, of which the copyleft license is the central and key
variable. Richard Stallman’s creation of GNU EMACS and the controversy over
propriety that it engendered was in many ways an attempt to deal with exactly
the same problem that UNIX vendors and open-systems advocates faced: how to
build extensibility into the software market—except that Stallman never saw it
as a market. For him, software was and is part of the human itself,
constitutive of our very freedom and, hence, inalienable. Extending software,
through collective mutual ,{[pg 309]}, aid, is thus tantamount to vitality,
progress, and self-actualization. But even for those who insist on seeing
software as mere product, the problem of extensibility remains.
Standardization, standards processes, and market entry all appear as political
problems as soon as extensibility is denied—and thus the legal solution
represented by copyleft appears as an option, even though it raises new and
troubling questions about the nature of competition and profitability.
={ Stallman, Richard ;
   EMACS (text editor) :
     controversy about ;
   modifiability +4 ;
   Copyleft licenses (component of Free Software)
}

New questions about competition and profitability have emerged from the massive
proliferation of hybrid commercial and academic forms, forms that bring with
them different traditions of sharing, credit, reputation, control, creation,
and dissemination of knowledge and products that require it. The new economic
demands on the university—all too easily labeled neoliberalization or
corporatization—mirror changing demands on industry that it come to look more
like universities, that is, that it give away more, circulate more, and
cooperate more. The development of UNIX, in its details, is a symptom of these
changes, and the success of Free Software is an unambiguous witness to them.
={ credit :
     see also attribution
}

The proliferation of hybrid commercial-academic forms in an era of
modifiability and reusability, among the debris of standards, standards
processes, and new experiments in intellectual property, results in a playing
field with a thousand different games, all of which revolve around renewed
experimentation with coordination, collaboration, adaptability, design,
evolution, gaming, playing, worlds, and worlding. These games are indicative of
the triumph of the American love of entrepreneurialism and experimentalism;
they relinquish the ideals of planning and hierarchy almost absolutely in favor
of a kind of embedded, technically and legally complex anarchism. It is here
that the idea of a public reemerges: the ambivalence between relinquishing
control absolutely and absolute distrust of government by the few. A powerful
public is a response, and a solution, so long as it remains fundamentally
independent of control by the few. Hence, a commitment, widespread and growing,
to a recursive public, an attempt to maintain and extend the kinds of
independent, authentic, autotelic public spheres that people encounter when
they come to an understanding of how Free Software and the Internet have
evolved.
={ anarchism ;
   entrepreneurialism
}

The open-access movement, and examples like Connexions, are attempts at
maintaining such publics. Some are conceived as bulwarks ,{[pg 310]}, against
encroaching corporatization, while others see themselves as novel and
innovative, but most share some of the practices hashed out in the evolution of
Free Software and the Internet. In terms of scholarly publishing and open
access, the movement has reignited discussions of ethics, norms, and method.
The Mertonian ideals are in place once more, this time less as facts of
scientific method than as goals. The problem of stabilizing collective
knowledge has moved from being an inherent feature of science to being a
problem that needs our attention. The reorientation of knowledge and power and
the proliferation of hybrid commercial-academic entities in an era of massive
dependence on scientific knowledge and information leads to a question about
the stabilization of that knowledge.
={ Merton, Robert :
     Mertonian norms
}

Understanding how Free Software works and how it has developed along with the
Internet and certain practices of legal and cultural critique may be essential
to understanding the reliable foundation of knowledge production and
circulation on which we still seek to ground legitimate forms of governance.
Without Free Software, the only response to the continuing forms of excess we
associate with illegitimate, unaccountable, unjust forms of governance might
just be mute cynicism. With it, we are in possession of a range of practical
tools, structured responses and clever ways of working through our complexity
toward the promises of a shared imagination of legitimate and just governance.
There is no doubt room for critique—and many scholars will demand it—but
scholarly critique will have to learn how to sit, easily or uneasily, with Free
Software as critique. Free Software can also exclude, just as any public or
public sphere can, but this is not, I think, cause for resistance, but cause
for joining. The alternative would be to create no new rules, no new practices,
no new procedures—that is, to have what we already have. Free Software does not
belong to geeks, and it is not the only form of becoming public, but it is one
that will have a profound structuring effect on any forms that follow.

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Wilson, Samuel M., and Leighton C. Peterson. "The Anthropology of Online
Communities." Annual Reviews of Anthropology 31 (2002): 449-67.

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:B~ Acknowledgement

1~acknowledgement Acknowledgment

% ,{[pg 379]},

Parts of this book have been published elsewhere. A much earlier version of
chapter 1 was published as "Geeks, Social Imaginaries and Recursive Publics,"
Cultural Anthropology 20.2 (summer 2005); chapter 6 as "The EMACS Controversy,"
in Mario Biagioli, Martha Woodmansee, and Peter Jaszi, eds., Contexts of
Invention (forthcoming); and parts of chapter 9 as "Punt to Culture,"
Anthropological Quarterly 77.3.

:B~ Library of Congress

1~loc Library of Congress Catalog

% ,{[pg 380]},

group{

christopher m. kelty
is an assistant professor of anthropology
at Rice University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kelty, Christopher M.

Two bits :
     the cultural significance of free software / Christopher M. Kelty. p. cm. --(Experimental futures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4242-7 (cloth :
     alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8223-4264-9 (pbk. :
     alk. paper)
1. Information society. 2. Open source software—Social aspects. I. Title.
HM851K45 2008
303.48'33—dc22 2007049447

}group

% errata? text uses Leitl, Eugen index uses Leitl, Eugene