Although the marketing campaign and the creation of the OS revolution have been a success regarding the mainstreaming the OS label and the creation of a grand narrative around the OS mode of production, they can be criticized because their modern aspirations. The mere intention of creating a myth that relies in the idea of a revolution is too modern and has dubious intentions of erasing the past, of selling innovations.
Decelerating the Revolution
Bruno Latour, who has elaborated one of the most compelling critics of modernity, has been clear in stating, “revolution is only one resource among many others in histories that have nothing revolutionary, nothing irreversible, about them.” (48) This resource has been used repetitively in order to provide the illusion that time passes very fast, that the temporal arrow keeps progressing, advancing. “The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; the more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museums. Maniacal destruction is counterbalanced by an equally maniacal conservation.” (Latour, 69)
In order to decelerate the OS revolution and appreciate what is trying to abolish it is necessary to do a sort of archeological work and look at the historical roots of the non-proprietary software development model: the hacker culture and the GNU project. In this way it is possible to reconsider the ethical, political, and idealist principles that lay underneath the shiny practical advantages.
Hacker Culture and Ethics
The history of the hacker culture can be traced back to the 1950s and located in the campus of few American universities that hosted giant interactive computers. It was around this period of time, in the experimental environment of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, that a group of engineering and science students developed an underground technical culture while playing/building/creating with expensive computer equipment, telephone circuits, and electronics.
The members of the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), in particular the ones who belonged to the Signal and Power committee, started to use the term “hack” for referring to “a project undertaken or a product built not solely to fulfill some constructive goal, but with some wild pleasure take in mere involvement.” (Levy, 9) The term involved some sort of approval and recognition of technical virtuosity, of ingenious solution to a problem, of innovation and style.
“Hackers” were driven by the joy of playing that characterize hobbyists, the desire for mastering technology of engineers, and the passion for learning and knowledge of scientists. Some of the “hacks” made by TMRCʼs members included building of a telephone-fingerprinting network, getting off-hour access to expensive computer equipment (eg. TX-0 from the Lincoln Laboratory, PDP-1 from the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics lab), and writing programs that enable computers to perform unexpected things such as games, music, drawings.
Having a freewheeling, hands-on, and improvisational approach, TMRCʼs hackers created a set of practices and customs that were never recorded in a manual or manifesto. Those practices, however, became the set of precepts that years later became know as the hacker ethic. In his work on the history of hacker culture, Steven Levy identifies six basic principles:
1) Access to computers—and anything which might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.
2) All information should be free.
3) Mistrust authority—promote decentralization.
4) Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not criteria such as degrees, age, race, sex, or position.
5) You can create art and beauty on a computer. 6) Computers can change your life for the better. (Levy, 27-33)
The hacker ethic shows that the customs of sharing of information, openness of systems, peer collaboration, and playful work, that later became associated with the OS revolution, were already present in the early stages of the hacker culture. Because those practices emerged from the context of the academic world, scientific laboratories, and hobbyist groups, it makes sense to think that that the scientific and do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures have also influenced the making of the OS mode of production.
As computer technology became cheaper and more available, hacker culture expanded to other contexts outside the academic world, and the hacker ethic became more influential for technological innovation. For instance, during the 1970s, a group of hackers got together around the Homebrew Computer Club in California with the purpose of bringing the power of computers to the people and spreading the hacker ethic to the world. The result of their efforts was the building of the first micro-computer.
Years later, in 1985, IBM decided to sell the Personal Computer and the commoditization of computers began. As Söderberg claims, “by channeling their play-drive into computer building, hardware hackers forced the industry to embrace their dream of decentralized computing.” (18) Such dream of decentralized computing was also expressed with the engagement of hackers in the development of digital network architectures and protocols, their participation on several of the networks that came to conform the Internet, and their protagonist role as developers of the World Wide Web. Considering these technological and sociological developments, it becomes clear that the most recent mainstreaming of the OS label and the marketing campaign of the OS revolution are rooted in the hacker culture and ethic.
The GNU project
The GNU project is the other missing piece of history necessary for decelerating the OS revolution. Richard Stallman, a physicist and computer programmer, started this project in 1983 as a reaction to the increasing use and distribution of proprietary and copyrighted software. By starting the GNU project, Stallman intended not only to create a non-proprietary Unix-like operating system composed of hundreds of utility programs, but also to build a community of free users and developers that could freely share their creativity with the whole society. Inspired by Stallmanʼs political ideas of freedom, society, and cooperation, the launching of the GNU project was also the beginning of what later became known as the Free Software Movement.*
In The GNU Manifesto Stallman claims, “if anything deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. (36) Thanks to having grown up in the world of non-copyrighted computer software and to having lived the hacker culture of the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, Stallman easily understood proprietary software as a social problem.
The increasing use of copyright in computer programs during the second half of the 1970s became a social problem because it was damaging the customs of sharing of information, cooperation, and creative solving of problems that were at the core of the hacker culture and ethic.
It was destroying the principles that hold together the hacker community. Since the users of proprietary programs could not have access to the source code, their creativity to customize and to reuse pieces of code was limited. Furthermore, since giving a copy of proprietary software to someone else turned out to be illegal, they could not cooperate with other users and friends, they could not share. As Stallman states,
“when there is a deliberate choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.”(The GNU Manifesto, 36).
The radical ideas of freedom, society, and cooperation that inspired the GNU project deserve a closer look because they are the ones that have been consciously erased from the myth of OS revolution. Stallman ́s idea of freedom is related to the freedom of the software users to run, copy, distribute, share, study, modify and improve computer programs. Hence, “free software” is related to liberty, not to price. The freedom of the users is like the one present in the expression “free speech,” not as the one of the expression “free beer.” In The Free Software Definition Stallman explains how “free software” gives the users four essential freedoms:
“-The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
-The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
-The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
-The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.”(41)
To achieve and guarantee these freedoms, Stallman creates the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the Copyleft method. In this way free software becomes protected from the danger of being transformed into proprietary software. The invention of the GPL license intervenes in how private property and authorship work, giving them a collective and communal turn. As Soderberg points out,
“free licenses protect collective efforts of anonymous mass of developers from individual property grabs. Under the GPL, the creator inverts the individualizing force of copyright by denouncing his individual rights and has these returned back to him as a collective right. He enjoys the collective right not to be excluded from a shared body of work.” (20)
According to Stallman, society can become a better one if its citizens cultivate the spirit of cooperation and sharing. As he argues in Why Software Should Not Have Owner, “society needs to encourage the spirit of voluntary cooperation in its citizens. When software owners tell us that helping our neighbors in a natural way is “piracy”, they pollute our society’s civic spirit.” (48) Stallmanʼs vision of a better society implies a notion of friendship sustained by the practices that “free software” encourages and guarantees.
In Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation Stallman explains, “for beings that can think and learn, sharing useful knowledge is a fundamental act of friendship. When these beings use computers, this act of friendship takes the form of sharing software. Friends share with each other. Friends help each other. This is the nature of friendship. And, in fact, this spirit of goodwill -the spirit of helping your neighbor, voluntarily- is society’s most important resource.” (164) Furthermore, a better society will also make information available to its citizens so they can use it as if it were “free software.” As Stallman claimed,
“free software is a new mechanism for democracy to operate.” (Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation, 176)
It is not surprising that Richard Stallmanʼs idealism resembles in many ways the hacker ethic. As a matter of fact, the GNU project and the emergence of the Free Software Movement can be understood as a commitment to save the practices and customs of the hacker culture. The marketing campaign of the OS revolution, will remove from its mythology both the hacker ethic and Stallmanʼs idealism in order to de-politicize the OS mode of production and to make it appear more “new,” more modern, more appealing to the corporate and mainstream world.
Conclusion
Computer technology reminds not only a central icon of contemporary modern myths but also a central tool for information production and communication. Untangling the meaning of open source as a revolution is useful to understand the current state of the Computer Age and the global information society. The latest developments of the World Wide Web, the emergence of social media forms of production, the rising importance of digital economy and free labor for capitalism, and the hyper production of information goods, are better understood once we know how the OS revolution has been crafted as a myth.
The myth has been crafted as a marketing campaign that targets the corporate world and focuses in emptying the political and ethical principles that historically originated the OS mode of production. As a modern myth, the OS revolution erases the past in a sort of bulldozing operation. However, finding the underneath layers reveal that there is no so much acceleration in the OS revolution. The OS mode of production and its mainstreaming are part of the evolution of the hacker culture, a technical culture created around computer technology. Reviewing the hacker ethic and the GNU project decelerates the OS revolution, and proves that the principles of freedom, access to information, and friendship, have been essential to the historical development of the OS mode of production.
Analyzing the so-called OS revolution opens up questions regarding who is really in control of computer technology in the global capitalist society. The attempt of OS revolutionaries to depoliticize the development methodology with the intention of co-opting the corporate world is kind of contradictory. On the one hand, as more and more corporations and venture capitalists decide to participate on OS projects providing money, work force, and repackaging the produced information goods, the customs of volunteer cooperation and free sharing of information start to be corrupted. Peer-to-peer collaborative work turns into free labor exploited by capitalism. On the other hand, by popularizing the OS mode of production more people becomes aware of its practical benefits, decide to join more projects, get connected to the Internet, and produce more tools and infrastructure for OS development. This OS contradiction is at the center of the development of late capitalism and the information economy. In order to resolve it, or at least to be conscious of it, we need to re-politicize the OS mode of production and to bring up to the front the radical ideas of freedom that inspired the hacker ethic and the GNU project.
* In 1985 Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in order to support the social movement that was forming around the GNU project.
References
Busch, Otto von. Abstract hacktivism: the making of a hacker culture. London ; Istanbul : Open Mute, 2006.
Himanen, Pekka, with Linus Torvalds and Manuel Castells. The hacker ethic, and the spirit of the information age. New York : Random House, 2001.
Latour, Bruno. We have never been modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Garden City, N.Y. : Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984.
Söderberg, Johan. Hacking capitalism : the free and open source software movement. New York : Routledge, 2008.
Stallman, Richard. “The GNU Manifesto” (1984) Free software, free society. Boston, MA : Free Software Foundation, 2002.
Stallman, Richard. “Why Software Should Not Have Owner.” (1994) Free software, free society. Boston, MA : Free Software Foundation, 2002.
Stallman, Richard. “The Free Software Definition.” (1996) Free software, free society. Boston, MA : Free Software Foundation, 2002.
Stallman, Richard. “Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation” (2001) Free software, free society. Boston, MA : Free Software Foundation, 2002.
