Free Software
Toni Prug, toni@irational.org
Date: Aug 2007
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Contents
* Introduction
* Hackers_and_the_Protestant_ethics
o Talk_is_cheap,_show_me_the_code_(sola_code)
o Against_memory
* Free_Software,_politics_and_ideology
o PeerToPeer_and_Free_Drugs_democracy
* Revolutionary_justice
* Hacking_the_regime_of_equal_rights
* Free_Software_and_academia
* Conclusions
* Bibliography
Introduction
``Civilization has reached every part of the world and the
North has realised it cannot conquer by restricting access
to factors of production through waging war; the best
method to maintain the status quo is by denying the South
access to the most important factor which without it all
others are derailed; this factor is information. Thus they
have introduced the concept of International Copyright
Law.'' World Social Forum, Nairobi, Wakasa_and_Gitau_
(2007)
As a young hacker, computer programmer at MIT Artificial
Intelligence Lab, Richard Stallman fixed annoying problems with the
donated printer. When he requested source code for the printer,
which was a common practice at the time, his request was refused
(Williams, 2002: 4-12). What was until then common, and what hackers
believed served progress in the quality of science and engineering -
sharing of software code - was closed down, enclosed by the company
that developed it. Free Software (Stallman, 2002: 41) was born out
of refusal of a single man to submit to the logic of enclosure of
wealth in the intellectual sphere. The set of principles Richard
Stallman stood for ended up embodied in the General Public Licence
(p.195). The body of intellectual wealth released under such licence
has been in expansion since. Vast majority of all the existing
websites on the Internet are operated using Free Software[2]. What is
the importance of all this for sociology? Why is Free Software
social phenomena worth studying?
To start with, the mode of production of Free Software differs from
the modes used in all modern economies and states, whether
capitalist or socialist. The main differences are voluntary
participation, organization of work, and relation to property -
software should not have owners (p.45). Production that occurs
without any form of coercion is rare in modern industrial society.
Voluntary production whose final product ends up running large parts
of today's entire communication and electronic computing has to be a
unique phenomenon in modern history. Production of Free Software was
not profit driven at first, nor directly financed. Yet, it spread
worldwide and influenced the way world is today[3]. Key theoretical
problems this research will investigate are related to hacker
ethics, Free Software and allocation/distribution of wealth in
society. I will show how the use of Max Weber's work to theorize
Free Software can lead us to conclude that, contrary to what many
other authors claimed, spirit of hackers has a lot more similarities
with the Protestantism, than the capitalism itself. Through the work
of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, I will argue for a reading of Free
Software as a political act, act whose consequences can be far
reaching if we applied it - especially its axiomatic approach to
decommodification (Stallman,_2007b) - to any other science and arts
that can be stored and shared digitally. Reading Ranciere, I will
argue that acts of peer-to-peer networks, sharing of millions of
people worldwide can be read as a re-conceptualization of democracy.
Finally, I will ask why are we, the rich North countries, especially
Europe where most of the drugs research comes from public funds, not
using the example of Free Software to act ethically when it comes to
deadly epidemics of malaria and AIDS in parts of the world.
Hackers and the Protestant ethics
For Himanen_(2001), it is the hacker ethics that drives the
development of Free Software. Hacker[4] not meaning just a computer
specialist of certain type, but any person who practices some of the
hacker ethics. It was Levy_(1984) who first formulated main point of
hackers ethics as: a) access to computers (and anything which might
teach you something about the way the world works) should be
unlimited and a total, hands-on approach is imperative; b) all
information should be free; c) mistrust authority and promote
decentralization; d) hackers should be judged by their hacking, not
bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race or position; e) you can
create art and beauty on a computer; f) computers can change your
life for the better[5].
Hackers are inclined to become obsessed with their work. They pursue
it relentlessly, often at the expense of other aspects of life.
Because of this, they have been portrayed as anti-social, weird in
ways which ``normal'' human beings cannot understand. Yet, their
work differs significantly from what we consider today to be a
dominant paradigm of capitalist society, the Protestant work ethic.
According to Himanen, it is social motivations that separate those
two ethics: in the Protestant ethic work has invaded leisure and
aspects of private life, like finding a spouse and having friends,
are frequently carried out work. Those social activities at work
serve in the Protestant ethic to distract attention from the idea
that pursuing one's passion should happen at work too (Himanen,
2001: 51). Although for hackers what they do (but not necessary the
employment) is passion, why would people in such large numbers work
in their leisure time too just to give the result of their work away
in the public domain, for free? The linking of a contribution to
society with passion is what for Himanen characterises the hacker
ethic a powerful model. Recent empirical research in which 680 Free
Software programmers were interviewed concluded that enjoyment is
the biggest reason why hackers do what they do (Lakhani_and_Wolf,
2003). A paradox that remains theoretically unresolved is how can
people with such socialization elements (high priority to work,
frequent aspects of strange communication with other people) and
values of individual freedoms have at the same time such a firm link
to the society and what they consider good for it. The company
Google understands this well and implements aspects of it in
practice by allowing its engineers to spend twenty percent of their
time at work working on their own technical projects, not
necessarily linked with what company does. For a hacker, ``making a
living'' is a depressive, unbearable option that he replaces with
``it's my life'', as Himanen_(2001,_40) correctly observes. The
curse of the Protestant ethic of work as necessary suffering that
one is obliged to withstand, the iron cage built by our rationality,
as Max Weber concluded on the character of this modern lockdown of
humanity (Weber, 1965: 182), thus, even more paradoxically, gets
hacked, reused in unexpected, unintended ways, by the people engaged
in one of most rational tasks, computer programming. Is that not
what hackers are doing to the computing tools and global
communications networks built to a large extent for military and
profit making purposes, reusing them in their own way, redefining
some of the core postulates of our time: why do we work how we work,
what is our relationship with the product of our work and what do we
do with the results? The answer to the question "why" is for hackers
clear: because it is pleasure, not suffering. How? In collaboration,
sharing the results and internals of what is produced, with open
access for anyone whose material conditions allow them to observe
and engage in what is done. Can hackers have the last laugh, as
simultaneous co-creators of the iron-turns-silicon cage and its
hackers?
When Max Weber concluded that the Protestant ethic is a driver for
he development of capitalism, his main argument focused on an ethic
of dedication to work, and, most importantly, of saving the profits,
which in turn leads to the investment of accumulated capital. This
was one of the key elements how, according to Weber, the capitalist
machine got moving. Castells (1996: 200) agrees with Weber and adds
that to explain society today, we need to have ``some kind of
cultural glue'' that makes social actors behave in similar fashion
on a large scale, and that purely rationalist explanations, for
something as large as emergence of capitalism, aren't enough. There
are also recent works (Mikkonen_et_al.,_2007) in which very similar
conclusions are drawn, this time from empirical data collected,
through interviews and questionnaires, from communities of
programmers. The findings reaffirm some findings of Himanen's Hacker
Ethics, most known of all writings in this direction, stating that
motives for participation in open source and free software
production today are mainly for the material benefit of
participants. Yet, Himanen's research left many questions open and
posed hacker ethics as a threat to protestant ethics, while
Mikhonnen's research concludes that some sort of special ethics of
hackers is a myth. Overall, these researches agree with Weber's use
of concept of the Protestant ethic as the spirit of capitalism and
analyze hackers in relation to it, starting from the hacker ethic as
being in opposition to the Protestant ethic, and concluding that
reality is lot simpler, since hackers end up joining the forces of
capitalism and the Protestant ethic in the end.
None of this was convincing enough for me, starting from Weber's use
of only a few elements of Protestantism, followed by a superficial
use of his work in the sociology of hackers during last ten years[6].
They agree with Weber all too quickly, and offer no close reading of
Weber's work, nor of the key concepts (religion, Protestantism,
rationality) that made that work possible. Himanen's work touches
upon the kind of reading that I believe is necessary, but it is
still playing it far too safe in far too many areas[7].
I'm tempted to start from the opposite position. For the benefit of
his conclusions on Protestantism as the spirit of capitalism, Weber
presented Protestantism as a single, unified whole, although he was
fully aware that that was not the case[8]. Using Weber's conclusion
presents us with an all too easy to use, yet deceiving, formula. To
use it as label, as a quote that one can just attach to one's work,
as Castells and others do in explaining social phenomena of hackers
and our computing age, betrays both the complexity and the richness
of Weber's work and of the situation in which we find ourselves
today[9].
Hackers are not a challenge to the Protestant ethic, quite the
contrary. I'm tempted to claim they are far more protestant than
what capitalism can bare, hence their uneasy fit. Open Source is a
movement that, with quite some success, attempted to ``pacify'' Free
Software, to bridge the gap between Free Software and capitalism.
Project Oekonux[10] is a good example of an opposite theoretical
approach. The move of the Open Source[11] initiative to bring Free
Software closer to capitalism shows that: a) there is a gap between
the Free Software movement and capitalism; b) without a significant
institutional intervention and re-interpretation that gap can not be
overcome; c) more than practice (since practice of Open Source
doesn't differ that much), it is the founding documents, principles
that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely that are the bite that
capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form. Re-
interpretation work[12] that Open Source[13], and to a large extent
publisher O'Reilly[14], did, was necessary for inclusion of Free
Software into capitalist economy. The task that I set for myself is
similar to that of the Oekinux project, with a different path of
investigation: to conceptualize, give a theoretical form to that
which resists capitalism in Free Software. An expression of the
hacker ethics needs to be hacked to enable future, social, hacks.
Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code)
Let us read briefly some of the core features of Protestantism and
consider what is it that made me wary of accepting Max Weber's final
conclusions as a useful analytical premise on its own i.e. stripped
of the rest of his research. Although these will be formulated as
questions for further research - since answering the doubts I'm
raising here comprehensively is beyond the scope of this
dissertation - it is necessary to deal with them, given the
prominence other authors give to Weber's work when discussing
hackers and Free Software.
The core arguments on which Weber built his theses, as Towney
summarized so well in his foreword (Weber,_1965), rely on a specific
branch of Calvinism, on the writings of English Puritans in late
seventeenth century, and it is possible (we don't know, as yet) that
quite a different picture might have emerged had Weber focused on
early key Protestants texts, or on any other of the large number of
interpretations of those texts and of the practices of various sects
of Protestantism. For Weber (1965: 36), the most intriguing question
of the sixteenth century, to which he admitted there is no simple
answer, is this: why did a large majority of the economically most
prosperous parts of Europe, the wealthy towns of the time, convert
to Protestantism. The link, he believed, between ``emancipation from
economic traditionalism'' and challenge to the control of the Church
over everyday life definitely existed in some form. Dutch, English
and Americans Puritanism was opposed to joy of life, Weber tells us,
and it would be a mistake to link this awakening in any way with the
Enlightenment, which is, given some its prominent characteristics, a
temptation (p.45). In contrast to the life of village, privileged
traditionalism was confronted with the rational calculations of
capitalism. Protestantism is important for Weber because it formed a
stage prior to the development of rationalist philosophy. However,
such philosophy had its own track of development and to explain it
only in terms of Protestantism would be wrong (p.75). It was the
Pietistic branch, whose ``enhanced abilities of mental concentration
and essential feeling of obligation to one's job'', combined with
self control and economic thinking which calculated possibles of
high earning that was a key element, and a paradox, that linked the
two, an element that was necessary for the rise of capitalism, and
that provided ``most favourable foundation for the conception of
labour as an end in itself, as a calling that is necessary to
capitalism.'' (p.63). People filled with the capitalist spirit are
irrational about their work, since they exist for their business,
and not the other way around (p.70). Central to their capitalist
life-work was provision of humanity with material goods (p.76). Yet,
it is not the extreme rationality in the idea of devotion to labour
that is primary interest for Weber, but its irrationality from the
position of self-interest based on personal happiness that sits at
the centre of his work on spirit of capitalism (p.78). His goal was
not to evaluate the ideas of the Reformation in any sense, nor to
suggest that capitalism wouldn't have developed without
Protestantism, but to investigate to what extent religious ideas
have taken in part in the formation and spread of the capitalist
spirit (p.91). The rejection of the Church, and in some cases of all
rituals (Puritanism), was for Weber the logical conclusion of
religion's historical tendency to remove magic from the world
(p.105). Finally, it was methodical control over one's emotions,
behaviour and time, rejection of joy, dedication to labour, provided
by some protestant branches, that formed the spirit that capitalism
inherited. The core principles of Protestantism should thus read as
something that resembles the spirit of capitalism that we know of
today.
The basic theological points of the Reformation are called the Five
Solas. The first one, Solus Christus (Christ alone) refuses Pope and
church as Christ's representatives and preaches that Christ, and no
one else, mediates between God and man. The second one, Sola
scriptura, refuses the need for a Church to interpret the Scripture
and the Church's monopoly on such interpretation. Protestants
believe that people should read the Scripture on their own and make
up their own minds about it, without external interpretation. The
third one, Sola fide, asserts that it is on the basis of faith alone
that believers are forgiven. The fourth one, Sola gratia, claims
that believers are accepted without any regard for the merit of
their work; God decides on his own. The fifth and last one, Soli Deo
gloria, preaches glory to God alone, and denies that saints of the
Roman Catholic Church, including popes, are worthy of the glory
assigned to them.
Not all of this maps to hackers and Free Software. Yet, if we are to
speak in terms of spirit like Weber did, in terms of the general
mood of the Five Solas, there are striking similarities. Throughout,
like hackers and Free Software, the spirit of Protestantism is in
favour of direct engagement of individuals, and the proliferation of
interpretations and organizations to support these if needed. It
arose against the centralization of the Roman Catholic Church,
privilege in interpretation of people chosen by the Church, and
against the Church's extraction of wealth from its believers. At
that time, those were anti-institutional, anti-hierarchical and
anti-bureaucratic principles. Although the high number of branches
of Protestantism was criticized by Calvin, principle was withheld in
practice. This resembles the hacker's principle of forking a
project: if you don't like what is someone else doing with some
project, you take a copy of the source code[15] and start work on it
in the direction you wish. The principle of scripture alone is
similar to the hacker's dedication to the code, the text that makes
all software what it is. All doubts about interpretations can be
resolved by looking at the source. For all hackers, to dive straight
to the source code is not the last resort, but rather the first
course of action. Interpretation is personal, direct and engagement
with no proxy is in most cases the only right option. Trust in
people's ability to dive straight to the code, to make up their own
mind by reading it, to make a critical evaluation, to decide for
themselves, are key for hackers. This unmediated contact with the
scripture and trust in people is embodied in the Free Software
principle of ``freedom to study how software works and adapt it to
your needs, access to the source code is precondition for this''
Stallman_(2002). Aiding capitalism, allowing economic emancipation
of individuals was for Weber a side effect of Reformation, not its
intended purpose, regardless of its insistence on individual
material gains, and its dislike of capitalism, demonstrated by
Luther, for example. This paradox is best seen in the quote of John
Wesley where it is clear how well Wesley is aware of the paradox
(Weber, 1965: 175). Capitalism didn't follow main principles of
Protestantism, it followed some of them, those that suited it. If it
had followed Protestantism to a large extent, it wouldn't be so
difficult to fit hackers and Free Software into capitalism. The dark
mood in which Weber concludes his book, the last few pages that are
misused as a label so often, state the problem more precisely:
``Puritans wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so''
(p.181). Puritans, not all Protestants.
If there is one important part of the hacker ethics that might go
against the Protestantism, it could be its insistence on doing the
work as enjoyment and improving the technology so that it can serve
humanity and so that humans can be lazy. Two hackers of the highest
standing, Larry Wall (inventor of programming language Perl) and
Yukihiro Matsumoto Matz (inventor of influential programming
language Ruby), both stated it on many occasions: for a true hacker,
laziness is a virtue, and computers are there to serve humans. Both
of them are very religious, and Matz even served as a missionary for
his church. Linus Torvalds, one of the most important hackers today,
is known for statements that can be seen as fundamentalist. Consider
this from the Linux coding style guide: ``Heretic people all over
the world have claimed that this inconsistency is ... well ..
inconsistent, but all right-thinking people know that a) K&R are
_right_ and (b) K&R are right''[16] (K&R are Kernighan and Ritchie,
inventors of programming language C). Or, this from one of his
interviews: ``Which mindset is right? Mine, of course. People who
disagree with me are by definition crazy (Until I change my mind,
when they can suddenly become upstanding citizens)'' (Barr,_2005).
Richard Stallman, because of what some considered inflexibility when
discussing core premises of Free Software, was seen as a
fundamentalist. Debates about preferences to which software, or
which programming tool, to use are frequently referred to as
religious wars[17]. All of this is left mostly untouched under the
framing of business friendly Open Source. This is not a coincidence.
Anything that gets included into capitalist economy has to be
stripped of any previous attributes and represented as a mere
commodity (Zizek,_2006), an entity to be produced, sold and
utilized. There are two sets of complexities that are erased in a
single move of becoming open source: that of Free Software prior to
its inclusion into the capitalist economy, and that of the commodity
form itself - base entity of the capitalist economy.
Against memory
For Badiou (2003: 44), memory became a guardian of historical
consciousness, allowing society to re-evaluate its history on the
basis of new historical facts and discourses. Yet, there comes a
moment, when memory can not settle the issue any more, when a
debate, exchange of argument, of proof and counter-proof, has to
stop and a decision has to be made, a stance has to be taken.
Example Badiou gives us for this is discussion with erudite anti-
semites about the holocaust: we will not enter that discussion, we
will proclaim the matter settled. In the same way, for Badiou's
exemplary revolutionary, Saint Paul, the resurrection of Christ was
not something to be debated, it was ``a pure event, opening of an
epoch, transformation of the relations between the possible and the
impossible'' (2003: 45). This is another way to read Richard
Stallman's encounter with the closed source code and broken printer:
a pure event, site of decision-making where, as we witness today in
the social phenomenon of Free Software, the relationship between the
possible and the impossible was transformed. If this transformation
was not the case, one would have to argue that the phenomenon of
world-wide volunteer collaboration which resulted in of the most
powerful software products in the world today, collaboration between
professionals, hobbyists, students, would have been possible without
the commitments and methodologies of Free Software. Badiou's reading
of Paul enables us to see another paradox in the founding and
development of Free Software, namely, the clash between its founding
principles and those through which it developed. Communal sharing
(Williams, 2002: 85) and open participation in production and
openness to criticism, to alternative options, are key development
methodologies in Free Software. One of the main reasons for doing it
in the first place for Stallman was the pleasure of learning and the
ability to see software immediately doing something useful (2002:
79). Yet, although that is what marked the beginning of his devotion
to the new cause, it was not, and still isn't, open to debate,
discussion, knowledge based evaluation. For Stallman, as for Paul,
it was not question of knowledge but a question of the subject, of a
subjective path. In Badiou's words ``this is the one and only
question, which no protocol of knowledge can help settle'' (Badiou,
2003: 49). Is this not an accurate description of Stallman's event
and decisions? They certainly are not open: not for participation or
collaboration, not for debate or discussion, not for the knowledge.
Thus, we can conclude: Stallman's event and fidelity to it stand in
sharp contrast, indeed in total opposition, to the attributes of the
movement he founded.
Free Software, politics and ideology
A political act, according to Slavoj Zizek and Alan Badiou is not
what we're used to seeing on daily basis in the liberal
parliamentary arena: debates, compromises, voting on issues, forming
partnerships for ongoing consultation with communities, and so on.
Rather it is quite the opposite: subjectively, militantly,
unilaterally, deciding what seems impossible at the time of the
decision, acting in follow up to an event, event that prompts our
reaction/decision, and pursuing the truth of it through fidelity to
it, through fidelity to the event that changes us. For Slavoj Zizek,
that is the definition of actual freedom, freedom to choose outside
of given options and coordinates of the field in which choice is
meant to be made. This is the difference between Zizek's concept of
freedom and liberal, parliamentary, formal freedom, which consists
in participating in the what is already given, already structured
(Zizek, 2001: 115). Could we not say that this is precisely what
Richard Stallman did with his choice of leaving the job he had at
the MIT Lab to devote all his time to re-create the world of
software, from scratch, with an entirely new set of social co-
ordinates? One key element that he didn't envisage, the involvement
of others was the unpredictable without which his creation wouldn't
have been possible. His act resembles the definition of utopia that
Zizek gave on few occasions, best captured in the electrifying
atmosphere of an Argentinian university (Taylor,_2006) where, in
front of nearly 2000 attendants, he restated how it is desperation,
the lack of any other options, the urge to act, to do something that
otherwise might seem totally unreasonable, that defines his notion
of utopia. In that sense, Richard Stallman is one of the prominent
utopists of our time. When pragmatism and neo-liberal fundamentalism
seem to exclude all other options for development of human
societies, such utopian acts of desperation are to be celebrated and
supported.
Like the Magna Carta, the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, or the
Declaration of Rights of Man and of the Citizen, General Public
License, the key Free Software document, sets out axiomatic
principles: equality for all when it comes to using, modifying and
sharing one of the most revolutionary means of production humanity
has ever invented: software, the means for automating machines to
produce what we instruct them to do.
This is Badiou's revolutionary economic justice, but in the
unexpected sphere of software: "all software should be free and the
prospect of charging money for software was a crime against
humanity" (2002: 85). Would it not make sense to expect this kind of
radical stance when it comes basics like shelter, food, health
treatment, education? Why are obvious question like these not being
discussed, even though Free Software has drawn a great deal of
attention? Are the freedoms that Free Software is based on so
specific to software that it makes no sense to think whether the
same can be demanded and achieved for the above-mentioned basic
spheres of material and intellectual life? When asked whether
programmers deserve reward for their creativity, Stallman's reply
was that if anything deserves a reward it is a social contribution.
For him, creativity can be a social contribution only if its results
can be shared (2002: 105). If we applied the same logic to other
spheres of life, the consequences for this statement would be far
reaching. Consider the economy. What would it mean to assert that
economic productivity can be a social contribution only if its
results can be shared? It is already shared, many would say: one
gets a salary for one's work. This would hardly satisfy Stallman's
criteria. For Badiou's Paul, pay can never meet the demand placed on
the society by one's contribution . Pay can only delay the eruption
of that demand, I would add.
Badiou warns us through Passolini's published, but never filmed,
script on Paul, how Passolini saw Paul as a revolutionary wishing to
destroy a model of society based on social inequality, imperialism
and slavery. The Church, a key institution of oppression for dozens
of centuries, which in practice worked against Paul's mission,
integrated the milder parts of Paul's teaching into its own
scripture, on the grounds that it was better to have him on their
side in some acceptable form, stripped of his radical elements, than
to leave him in heresy, free to unleash his teachings in its full
radical potential (Badiou, 2003: 36). This is how, today, we can
define the freedom of piracy in relation to arts, science and Free
Software. These are heretical acts of our times, heretical to the
neo-liberal neo-conservative mix of seemingly unstoppable powers
that today combine military with the regime of law to occupy a wide
range of material, artistic and scientific aspects of life
throughout the world. Today, sharing the wealth of digitally
reproducible arts and sciences has become the heretical act of
making such wealth more common, of creating the space and culture of
more common human action, of exposing the false, imposed logic of
scarcity. These acts are fronts which could redefine future
political battles, on national, supra-national and global levels.
They raise key political issues, issues that have inspired
revolutions that framed the idea of emancipated humanity: questions
of property and the division between public and private. It us up to
us to recognize those questions, to give them forms that are
inescapably political, divisive and antagonistic towards the ruling
capitalist parliamentary ideology, and act through the rupture that
those forms open up, primarily in the hegemonic discourse of private
capital. It is worth recalling how Rancière (2004: 303) posed one of
this key questions and its connection with politics:
''The Declaration of Rights states that all men are born
free and equal. Now the question arises: What is the
sphere of implementation of these predicates? If you
answer, as Arendt does, that it is the sphere of
citizenship, the sphere of political life, separated from
the sphere of private life, you sort out the problem in
advance. The point is, precisely, where do you draw the
line separating one life from the other? Politics is about
that border. It is the activity that brings it back into
question.''
Transfered to the realm of Free Software, it is the declaration of
software sharing as a right - known as freedoms 2 and 3 (Stallman,
2005) - that challenges both the question of the border between
private and public and that of property. In today's capitalist
order, we are free to use the commodities we acquired, free to do
whatever we want with them, to destroy them, give them away, or put
them back into circulation as commodities. With electronically
storable commodities, like some artistic works, science and all
software, commodity users are in the position to multiply those
commodities and offer them to others for use easily through
networked computers. This introduces a rupture with the functioning
of the capitalist economy which may thus be deprived of the
potential profit that could have been realized if the same
multiplied commodities were not shared amongst users, but sold by
the profit-making actors, and bought instead. When commodities are
exchanged between users on a large scale, as they are today on the
peer-to-peer networks, capitalism panics and looks for ways to
prevent this. Most of the exchange on peer-to-peer networks is not
free software, but films, music, software in general, newspapers and
books. Yet, not only that vast majority of those networks are run by
Free Software, it is Free Software principles and work practices
that set the precedent, that made claims that destabilised the flow
of those commodities and the structure of the ideology which governs
that flow today.
Free Software's most controversial claim is that software should be
free to obtain, modify and share. Richard Stallman justifies this
principle by arguing that encourages cooperation, helps social
cohesion and is beneficial for all, and not just for a few, which is
not the case when software is treated like any other commodity. Free
Software is about ethics, and law should follow ethics, not the
other way around. An examples is the creation of copyright and
patents, brought into place because it was thought that it was
beneficial for society to protect and encourage creators of art and
science. Today, discussing software, Stallman claims that this is
not the case any more. What if we apply the same model to all
commodities which can be multiplied and shared electronically,
digitally storable arts, science and entertainment (Stallman, 2002:
73)? In other words, what if all current peer-to-peer Internet
exchange proclaimed the same rights that Stallman proclaimed for
software? One obvious difference is that Stallman is the creator of
software who refused to treat it as a commodity in the capitalist
economy, and who offered a generic way for doing so, while artists
and scientists whose work is being exchanged on the networks didn't
necessarily do the same. Instead, users made the decision,
regardless of what creators think of it. Why? Because they can,
because it is relatively easy to do and because the reward is vast,
easily obtainable amount of entertainment, education and production
(software) material. Isn't this similar to the labourer/capitalist
relation? Capitalists do whatever they want with the product of
workers whose labour they buy. I hear you saying, but what about the
salary? Isn't that the pay in return? Of course it isn't! Labour is
sold under the conditions entirely set by the owners of capital who
require labour. With the exception of a tiny number of stars, there
is no negotiation about the way in which relation between capitalist
and worker will be formed. It is an one-sided offer to the worker:
take it or leave it Today, even for highly skilled workers, that
offer contains clauses which state that copyright for all work,
related to what capitalist enterprise does, done by the worker
belongs to the capitalist. Including any work done during the time
off paid work. Again, with rare exceptions, there is no choice about
this clause, it is a widely spread practice. In short, worker has to
comply with the rules set by the capitalists. He/she has no choice.
The capitalist takes away any participation of the worker in
anything to do with the product, other than the salary. In vast
majority of the cases, in the West, that salary is enough to live
on, participate in the consumption of mass produced commodities, but
no more than that. State does prescribes some rules about those work
relationships but those do not enter the sphere with which we're
concerned with here. The worker has no means by which she can
challenge her relationship with the product of his/her work. The
freedom of choice that capitalists and their state regimes like to
praise so much is confined to the sphere of commodities and
consumption only.
PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy
When digitally storable entertainment, art and science are denied
commodity status, we can see this as a rare case of people
internationally imposing their will against all the odds, against
capitalists, states and laws. As reflected in the sales pitch of the
largest network company in the world, it is widely acknowledged that
peer-to-peer traffic makes up majority of all broadband Internet
traffic (over seventy percent in the highest estimates) and that it
``consumes network resource without creating additional revenue''
(Cisco,_2007). What is this if not gigantic decommodification by any
means available? Through those networks, part of what capitalists
take from people through surplus value, through profits, through
denial of participation in the results of their labour and through
centuries-long undermining of development of democracy, is being
taken back. Users of peer-to-peer networks see no need for such
goods to be treated as property.
Why not call this democracy? Because it shuns the concept of the
liberal right to property? What if people, vasts number of people,
like it is the case with peer-to-peer networks, do not care about
the right to property in the case of digitally storable
entertainment, art and science? Isn't democracy, in the liberal
concept, meant to be the rule of the majority? On this issue, can it
be any clearer what the vast number of people, possibly majority of
people, want? And doesn't this give us a glimpse of how different
society could be if neither creation of laws and policies, nor
structuring of society through political acts according to those
laws and policies (education in UK is again a good example of this),
is done through liberal-capitalist political forms of parliaments,
elections, representatives? Thus, corporate and state repressive
acts against the sharing of digitally storable entertainment, art
and science are anti-democratic acts. Instead, rewriting of laws on
property to support sharing whenever possible, like in these
digitally storable cases, would be an act in the spirit of
democracy. Such democratic acts are prevented through the forms that
liberal-capitalist politics takes. Challenges that peer-to-peer
networks acts of sharing create are not just challenges to the
liberal ideology of property rights and to the ways through which
laws and political institutions treat digitally storable property
according to that ideology, but to the above mentioned political
forms through which liberal-capitalist coalition asserts its anti-
democratic ideology and rule.
For Ranciere (2006: 96)
Democracy is neither a form of government that enables
oligarchies to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a
form of society that governs the power of commodities. It
is the action that constantly wrests the monopoly of
public life from oligarchic governments, and the
omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth.
Yet, regardless of his disagreement for the potential for a
democracy of multitude through immaterial forms of capitalist
production (Foucault (1980: 27) warned Maoists to reject the state
for similar reasons), we're following Ranciere's affirmative
description of democracy: egalitarian society as a set of
egalitarian relations traced to singular, precarious acts. Free
Software is one such act. As well as Swedish pirate party and its
call for removal of pharmaceutical patents (Pirate_Party,_2007).
Given today's drugs, AIDS could be contained worldwide in relatively
short period of time, but corporations and governments stand in the
way of millions dying being protected (Badiou,_2007). Like people
who decide to share online, they choose to do so, because they can,
because nothing, no one, stands in their way. The production of
drugs could follow the example of Free Software, be created in a
more collaborative way, publishing recipes and allowing it to be
freely produced, by anyone, for any purpose. If this was the case,
controllable and curable diseases like malaria and AIDS, who
together kill tens of millions of people every year, could be put
under the control in most of the world. Yet this doesn't happen.
Why? We can assume it is because their work needs different tools
and material conditions, and that prevents them from working in low
cost environments, which confines them to academic and corporate
world. If later is the case, we could conclude that it is the
domination of capital over all other considerations, primacy of
private over public, that prevents decommodification acts of Free
Software to be repeatable in the sphere of free drugs. However, as
the Swedish Pirate Party demonstrates, in Europe, the vast majority
of drug research money already comes from taxes. Hence, a Free
Software model for generic drugs might not be such a remote
proposal. Instead of pushing through a neo-liberal constitution,
Europe could, and should do the opposite act, create an
institutional Free Drugs scientific movement, based on the Free
Software hackers model, following the logic of copyleft (Stallman,
2002: 89), patented for free production and reuse of all
documentation, as a gift of its citizens to the world. One could
argue that after centuries of military domination and exploitation,
something like this is due. When ethics and its laws in the West
allow death on such scale to occur, although the society has the
means to prevent it, we have to ask: what is the difference between
tens of millions dead in two world wars and the dead of malaria and
AIDS today? The former were killed while later are allowed to die.
Ethics complicit in mass death, an annually repeated disaster, not
an one off event like the world wars, is the ethics of the West
today: because our laws allow those deaths to occur.
The Creative Commons and Free Culture movements (Lessig,_2004) are
attempts to provide other creators - in the fields of art and
science, in branches where low-cost production is not entirely
dependent on submission to the dictate of private sphere and of
capital - a simple way of releasing their work into the existing
legal framework under rules related to those of Free Software. While
neo-liberal ideology divides people into strictly managed consumers
whose interaction with society is measured in detail and accordingly
monetarily arranged (recent example of this in the UK are student
fees where the main claim is that it is those who study and their
families that should bear the cost, and not society at large), Free
Software claims that it is worth contributing to society at large,
worth sharing and cooperating. Stallman challenged the conservative
dogma that ``there is no society''[18], showing, through his
axiomatic, unilateral acts, through his fidelity to the event
(broken printer) and principles that came out of it, that there is,
indeed, a society, since, there is something that is socially
beneficial i.e. global collaborative production of globally shared
wealth, in the sphere of software.
At the same time, corporations like IBM and Oracle, some of the main
engines of this world order, of our silicon cage, have been
integrating Free Software into the core of that world order. It is
our task, as Badiou and Passolini did for Paul, to make it
difficult, hopefully impossible, for them and their ideological
partners, to integrate a milder, capitalist friendly, or even
capitalist agnostic, version of Richard Stallman's revolutionary
truth, his fidelity to the event that changed him, and to the world
we share, truly share, when it comes to software. Our task is to
insist on the potential of coordinates that his act has rewritten,
on new coordinates of possibilities that his acts opens up,
coordinates of global collaborative, voluntary, production of common
global wealth, of Free Drugs and similar ideas. In Stallman's own
words: ``constructive anarchism does not mean advocating a dog-eat-
dog jungle. American society is already a dog-eat-dog jungle and its
rules maintain it that way. We [hackers] wish to replace those rules
with a concern for constructive cooperation.'' (Levy, 1984: 416).
Reasons for Free Software are possibly best explained in earliest
words of Stallman from 1983, when he didn't believe that software
should be owned, because such practice ``sabotages humanity as a
whole'' (p.419) - this is precisely what capitalism does in the
example of life saving drugs given above. Today we know that he
wasn't alone feeling this way, because the results of his call for
collaboration are known: it is a success. Given the hostility of
capitalist economy towards the kind of ideas he stood for, it is a
huge success. Yet, what if all obstacles to cooperation and sharing
sabotage to humanity? And how do we proceed towards global
collaboration and the creation of global common wealth in the
spheres of life which do not posses the magical attribute of
software, science and arts, which makes the latter electronically
storable and reproducible form, in Western terms, low cost?
Many, including myself, have tried to study this question by
investigating what is specific to the production of Free Software in
the context in which it takes place and whether Free Software
principles can be applied to material production. But, so far, the
more I looked, the more research has lead me to think that these
questions cannot be investigated in isolation. Before we can think
about them, other issues have to be studied first. The large scale
on which society has lost the track of ideas of equality,
cooperative production and shared wealth - the scale of the loss of
belief in the possibility of such ideas and political projects - has
to be dealt with in parallel to the phenomenon of Free Software. It
is not possible to invent new politico-economic practices without
inventing an ideology that will provide a framework to support them.
Without such a framework of thought, any action will remain embedded
in the currently ruling (neo)liberal capitalist framework. To give a
small example: there is plenty of talk about the openness of
software source code in England, yet, the land registry, strangely
enough, remains closed. And apart from fringe activist groups, no
one seem to be concerned with it. In the city where this text is
written, one man, known under the title Duke of Westminster, among
his other vast assets, owns large parts (120 hectares) of the land
in one of the most expensive locations in the world, central London.
His ownership is the outcome of the forced enclosure of common land,
which was the start of privatization of common resources in UK, yet
there have been only two surveys of land ownership in British
history: the first was in 1086, and the second was in 1872. To this
day, there is no mandatory record of land ownership in England. How
convenient and easy it is to forget that, while a large part of the
software source code that assists life on this land might be
available to inspect, change and share, information on the ownership
of the land, the most basic resource on which all human life
depends, is not. Yet there is hardly any challenge to this glaring
paradox. If we examine the concepts on which Free Software thrives -
such as access to source code, open collaboration, sharing, placing
ethics before law, reliance on axiomatic principles - in the wider
social context, in the context of the creation and concentration/
distribution of wealth throughout history, we find vast paradoxes,
in every sphere of life I considered. In other words, we face the
question of how to challenge and reinvent ideas and beliefs first;
practice follows second. If this was not the case, if the importance
of ideas and beliefs was not central, the rift between Open Source
and Free Software would not have been such a great issue. Although
Stallman understands the importance of ideas well, the core of his
explanation of this rift misses the most important point about
ideology, a point which Zizek so forcefully brings back to our
attention again and again: it is not enough to say that we're just
doing something, but that we don't believe in it, or that we don't
have a set of beliefs as such. This is how ideology functions: it
requires us to do things, and belief arrives as a result of doing
it, not the other way around. And what better proof do we need than
successful spread of the rule of neo-liberalism through their claims
of ``just doing it'' for the sake of the economy, without any
ideological beliefs? As if any economy, or any act, was possible
without decisions determined by a set of ideas and beliefs. This is
why Nike's slogan ``just do it'' is the best summary of capitalist
ideology ever. And this is why ``Open source is a development
methodology; free software is a social movement''(Stallman,_2007a),
misses the crucial point. We need to recognise this point in order
to be able to engage in the analysis of ideas about Free Software,
but more importantly, in the analysis of ideas in their historical
context, which carries all the traces of the paradoxes which the
existence of Free Software makes manifest. It is crucial to
understand, and always keep in mind when thinking about Free
Software, that Open Source is not just a development methodology,
but a social movement too, a social movement of a different kind,
with different, capitalist, goals. A proof of the strength and
effect of its ideology is in our inability to see it as a social
movement with defined goals, or at least in our failure to insist on
analyzing it consistently and thoroughly as such. For example,
Stallman, like most other Free Software writers, clearly points out
the business orientation of Open Source, even quoting its founding
members, whose main goal was to make Free Software business-
friendly. No one disputes this well-documented history. The problem
lies in claims that Open Source separates ethics from the technical
side of Free Software(Stallman,_2007a), thus making it acceptable to
corporations. Like the above claim that Open Source is just a
development methodology, this kind of thinking implies two wrong
statements about Open Source: first, that it has no ethics of its
own, and second, that there are purely technical solutions which can
be used without any ethical, political, or ideological commitments.
The result of these mistakes is the widespread comparison of Free
Software and Open Source on the wrong terms: one operating under the
weight and demand of its ethics, and the other getting away without
being examined at all, basking in the purity of its technical
attributes and various business-friendly tags. This is how the
ethics, ideology and, indeed, politics of Open Source slip through
unexamined and unchallenged, like capitalist ideologies whose
crucial strategy has historically been to accuse any political
opponents of ethical commitments, while insisting on their own
``pragmatism'' and on the purely technical aspect of ``just getting
things done''.
Revolutionary justice
One of the important ideals of hackers was not just getting the job
done, it was getting it done in the best possible way. To do so,
access to the most useful information, at all times, was essential -
another reason for dedication to openness of information as a non-
negotiable principle. Other important ideals were to have access to
the best possible computer and to always striving to excellence and
elegance (Williams, 2002: 47). In computer programming, elegance is
linked with simplicity, readability, re-usability and non wasteful
use of resources[19]. Dennis_M._Ritchie_(1984), one of designers of
the Unix operating system considered the principle of non-
hierarchical control of the flow, achieved by the invention of
mechanism called a pipe, as ``one of the most widely admired
contributions of Unix to the culture of operating systems and
command language''. Since changing the world through software was
what hackers spoke openly about, it shouldn't come as surprise that
what they saw as worst obstacles were poor software (non
excellence), academic bureaucracy (opaqueness and fixed structure)
and selfish behaviour (Williams, 2002: 48).
For Levy (1984: 41) the openness that hackers believe in, free flow
of information, is not just fundamental to pursue of improvement and
knowledge, but also to the functioning of computer code where it is
up to programmer to devise how information gets moved, processed,
and which components of the system (hardware, network) take part in
it. According to him, one of the biggest enemies of hackers is
bureaucracy of any kind (corporate, government, university), because
it can not incorporate impulses of hackers to explore and because it
hides behind arbitrary rules invoked to keep the power while
perceiving hackers' desire to construct new as a threat. At the
heart of this dislike was hackers' preference for work and life
organized in a de-centralized, meritocratic way where ``hackers
should be judged by the way they judged by their hacking, not bogus
criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position'' (1984: 43). This
brings us to another aspect of open access in Free Software,
equality.
In Richard Stallman's words, signing a non disclosure agreement
meant promising to refuse to cooperate with the entire planet
(Williams, 2002: 21). In Unix, operating system that inspired the
creation of Linux, design goals are to allow multiple users to
access the computer at the same time and share resources
(Lucent_Technologies,_2002). Although to this day the most widely
used operating system, Microsoft Windows, is designed around the
concept of a single computer for a single user, the vast majority of
the world's communication systems, including the Internet, runs on
various computer systems derived from Unix design philosophy of
simultaneous multiuser sharing. Paradoxically, at a time when an
ideology of the dominant West thrived, through the victories of the
neo-liberal project based on declared individualism and reckless
consumerism, it was the invention of computing components (Unix/GNU/
Linux) and principles (Free Software) for cooperation and sharing
that enabled the West to make rapid scientific and military
progress. Today, when it seems that even Europe has imploded into
it, the neo-liberal ideological project[20] and an evolved form of
this technology for cooperation and sharing (Linux/Free Software),
coexist in parallel.
Coleman_and_Hill_(2004) show how two organizations that are
generally considered to be diametrically opposed to each other in
political terms, Indymedia[21] and IBM both use Free Software
successfully, and both promote it enthusiastically as desirable and
beneficial, simultaneously in line with the ideological frameworks
of the global capitalist group, IBM, and the similarly global alter-
globalization group Indymedia. In one of the most interesting
researches on the subject, for Coleman_(Summer_2004), main political
characteristic of Free Software, according to claims made by the
people involved in its production, is agnosticism. Programmers
consider politics to be dysfunctional, not reliable and getting in
their way of getting things done. Instead, as expressed in the main
documents of the movement, their ``commitment is to prevent limiting
the freedom of others'' while allowing for unbound circulation of
thought, expression, and action for software development. Although
it is clear that Free Software has been highly beneficial to various
political actors, it is unconvincing to say that it is politically
agnostic because official political sphere doesn't interest Free
Software producers, or, as Coleman develops it, because it functions
as internal criticism of liberalism by liberalism, criticizing the
concept of intellectual property using the concept of free speech
(Coleman,_2005). As she correctly observes, its roots are drawn from
the liberal value of free speech, which, if we would call it
politically agnostic - regardless of what its producers claim -
would privilege position of liberalism as one outside of ideology.
We know that such position doesn't exist (Zizek, 1994: 1-32). Quite
the contrary, liberal ideological postulates are the basis for
today's attempts of the West to impose a new, more sophisticated,
form of imperialism (Mattei,_2003). Coleman claims that ``Free and
open source hackers have been effective in coding FLOSS as
politically removed neutrality made material and socially effective
through licenses.'' (p.513), but as we saw from the Open Source
movement starting goals, and consistently through their acts, they
worked hard to convince capitalist elite, specifically targeting
Forbes 500 companies, that one shouldn't be put off by the
radicalism of Free Software. Ian Murdoch's claims about natural laws
of the markets are textbook neo-liberal political propaganda. Hence,
when Coleman writes about software participants and how ``It is felt
that if FLOSS was directed towards a political end, it would sully
the purity of the technical decision-making process.'' (p.512), does
that exclude people like Ian Murdoch, or indeed entire ideological
leadership of Open Source movement? Does it mean that their
persistent sales pitch to capitalist elites spoiled technical
decision making process? If that's not the case, should we not
conclude that, in order to justify Free Software producers' own
theses on political agnosticism, we should treat capitalism as
politically neutral, hence the Open Source sales pitch didn't
compromise on directing Free Software towards a political end,
because capitalism itself is politically neutral? In Coleman's own
analysis, in several places, she points out political aspects: how
Free and Open Source Software practices challenge neo-liberal
expansion of intellectual property rights through copyleft, or how
it served as a template for other social groups too (Coleman,_2005,
15-16). How are we to reconcile this with notions of neutrality, or
political agnosticism? These seemingly un-reconcilable sides: anti-
capitalist activism and criticism of neo-liberalism versus
capitalism and neo-liberal propaganda, are both part of social
phenomena which is, and I agree completely with Coleman here, both
intriguing and frustrating to a researcher. What to me seems to be
the source of further complications of this problem, in Coleman's
work, is mixing of Free Software and Open Source into one term (F/
OSS, or FLOSS). Stallman explained the importance of differences
between the two on many occasions: Free Software is a social
movement; its freedoms promote social solidarity, sharing and
cooperation; Open Source is a development methodology considered by
some as a pragmatic campaign for free software, while some reject
any ethical and social values of free software and focus only on
technical aspects (Stallman,_2007a).
This strange path of logic of technical decision-making process and
its purity is uncannily close to the neo-liberal use of the general
concept of technical decision-making in governance, a political
ideological concept where opinion of specialized workers is
presented as apolitical, thus allowing the rule of "experts",
regardless of the formally existing political power structure. Is it
coincidence that these apolitical specialists, those
``administrators of local consequences of global historical
necessity'', as Ranciere (2006: 81) calls them, are always
proponents of the same known principles that neo-liberalism thrives
on? How come there are no anarchist, communist, or even social-
democrat specialists whose apolitical purity will drive policies of
entire states regardless of what type of government actually rules?
The answer is unsurprisingly simple, because those specialists
aren't neutral, aren't apolitical.
For Stallman, Free Software is an ethical imperative. I would add
that, as analysis shows, Free Software is also a politics act. At
the time when rich dominant Western entities (states, corporations,
lobbying organizations), through patents[22] and copyrights, work on
imposing the regime of their rule over more of the world's knowledge
and productive information, at the time of this latest wave of
enforced commodification, privatization and centralization of
wealth, Free Software is a movement that acts in the opposite
direction, direction of de-commodification, enlargement of public
sphere, and decentralization of wealth through shared software. Open
Source is an explicit, clearly stated, attempt to re-direct, re-
package, Free Software towards neo-liberal political actors and
their goals. Although Coleman is technically right when she writes
that for hackers ``ideal and idealized form is a transparent
meritocracy.'' - Free Software community is indeed proud for its
openness to participation - it is worth remembering that Stallman's
starting principles are anything but meritocratic. He didn't say
that those who contribute more to society will get more and better
software, or that those who can afford more will get more. Free
Software freedoms are for all users, without any reference, or
implied link, to their merit or wealth. This is the radical
egalitarian and political message. Useful example of Free Software's
political potential comes from Peru, where Free Software became a
way to adjust political economic relations in favour of less
powerful state, a political question in the most classical meaning
of the word. After long lobbying, government decided to turn
completely to Free Software because it is the only way to guarantee
its citizens that the constitution will be upheld (Chan,_2004).
In his recent book, Badiou_(2006) sets up four main principles for
the revolutionary justice: voluntary participation, economic justice
(wealth redistribution), terror (punishment for sabotage and contra-
revolution), trust in all people. Free Software maps well onto three
of these, while missing the terror. However, idea of punishment,
base for terror, for sabotage is not unknown to Richard Stallman:
"Those who do not share their creativity with society deserve to be
punished" (Williams, 2002: 105). During the ``Symbolics war'', fight
with one of the first companies that denied access to source code to
Stallman as early as 1982, he was thinking of wrapping himself in
dynamite and blowing whole building out (2002: 97).
Hacking the regime of equal rights
Let's recall main premises of Marx's Critique of equal right in his
Critique of Gotha programme:
``equal right is an unequal right for unequal labour ...
Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the
application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals
are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they
are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from
one definite side only ... one worker is married, another
is not; one has more children than another, and so on and
so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labour, and
hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in
fact receive more than another, one will be richer than
another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right,
instead of being equal, would have to be unequal.'' (Marx,
1993).
These are the limits of egalitarian potential of Free Software, or
any other system of right proclaiming principles. Yet, there is an
element of Free Software which fits in Marx's vision of communist
society. One of the most important principles Marx envisioned for
communism was "From each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs!". To get to that point what had to happen is that "all
the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly" and only
then can bourgeois right be overcome. It has been said on many
occasions that Stallman's biggest hack is reuse of regime of
copyright to ensure sharing in public sphere i.e. to ensure opposite
of what was intended with the creation of copyright. Could we not
say that, in a similar fashion, Stallman's use of concept of rights
- which, as Marx so vividly explains, maintain the economic
differences and ensure that structure (names of capitalists can
change) of economic inequalities in society persists - was also a
hack? Core principle in the normal functioning of the regime of
rights on which capitalism thrives is right on property. Stallman
re-conceptualized the idea of rights to encourage volunteer, co-
operative and decommodified society with the notion of shared
wealth. Can we read openness to participation of Free Software as a
step towards society where one contributes according to one's
abilities (from each according to his ability)? Equally, can we read
the availability of software in public sphere that Free Software
ensures as a step towards society where one will be able to take
what one needs (to each according to his needs)? Since software is a
form of wealth, is not sharing of software built in cooperation an
act which ensures that "springs of co-operative wealth flow more
abundantly"? In short, is not reuse of concept of rights another
hack of anti-egalitarian, anti-democratic liberal-capitalism by
Richard Stallman, a hack in the spirit of communism as imagined by
Marx?
Free Software and academia
What are the possible consequences/uses of Free Software for
academia? Let's read academia through Free Software, for a change.
To start with, why should the artifacts of academia not be available
for sharing? They are also a product of creative work, indeed, and
thus fall under Stallman's category of the most valuable
contribution to society. How does a digital copy of text, or sound,
or video differ from code? In terms of engagement with the material,
code gets edited, parts get reused, parts rejected. The product of
academic production, other than education for students, is vast
amounts of written and audio materials (it is common for student to
record a lecture in digital audio). Yet, not only that all that gets
locked up within universities, but it is rare that it is shared
amongst students. One could argue that utility of such material is
an entirely different kind, since not every lecture is necessarily
considered good enough by the lecturer for wider distribution.
However, given the number of students doing audio recordings those
days, distribution of material is no longer in the hands of
academics. It could well prove to be that all it lacks is someone as
determined as Richard Stallman, or indeed, any other axiomatic
revolutionary, who will position his/her truth in terms of fidelity
to the event, in the sense of Badiou's reading of Paul.
Why is the Open University the only university with an intense focus
on audio and video material and online educational tools? Why are
their materials available only to those who can commit to pay for
it? Once materials have been produced, given the existing level of
ownership of personal computers throughout Western society, the
price of their digital reproduction is close to zero. Also, if the
Open University can do it, so could others, especially given that
others can learn from Open University's experiences in the
production, management and use of digital learning materials. Yet,
despite the existing pioneer model of the Open University, and the
largely state-financed production of educational materials, access
to them remains closed in internal campus networks and online
journals. Those journals have been one of the most frustrating
issues I have faced during the past three years of my undergraduate
education.
Each university subscribes to online journals. Students get access
only to those journals to which their university has subscribed too.
In practice, given the amount of academic publishing, students get
access to tiny fraction of what is relevant. If the student has
multidisciplinary interests, the result is even worse, since
universities only subscribe to a selection of journals that match
their departments. How is this relevant to Free Software? Most
authors publishing in academic journals do not get paid for what
they publish. Many of them also edit the same journals without pay
too. In other words, most of them are volunteers. What they get
instead is increased potential for future employment and future
earnings as writers. The same applies to Free Software programmers;
with every job they do as volunteers, future earnings in the form of
employment opportunities, get increased. With the exception of
publicly funded projects, programmers do this work in their own
spare time. In the case of academia, roughly speaking, it is a
combination of the two: some writing and journal editing is done as
part of academic employment while the rest is one during private
time. One significant difference is that Free Software creates a
body of public software that is today widely used worldwide,
reducing the cost of computing. With academia, most of the volunteer
work, some of which it is already funded by the public and by
current students, is enclosed in on-line databases of journals. The
cost of individual articles is rarely less than the cost of an
entire expensive new book, which means that buying any of these is
out of the question. No one buys them. The cost is there to prevent
individual access and enforce institutional subscriptions only. How
did this come about? Volunteerism and publicly paid work of
academics benefit large corporate publishing companies, while
students and citizens of states who to a large extent pay for it are
denied access to the vast majority of it. Academics are not in a
much better position though, since they share the destiny of their
students, with equally poor access, and must settle for any benefits
that this might bring to their career. Given that it is difficult to
find a job in academia without publishing in such journals, the
choice that academics have isn't really a choice, if they want to
work in academia. Volunteer contribution to corporate publishers
resembles a mandatory welfare program for private wealth that
everyone has to take part in. Closed access journals are a form of
privatization by proxy, where the level of corruption of public
funds depends on set of economic parameters: the level of public
funding and the amount of journals published by the university,
which do bring some funds back (Taylor_and_Ruiz_III,_2007). Although
there are some initiatives for publicly funded knowledge to be
accessible to the public (for_Taxpayer_Access,_2007), for open
access to knowledge in general (iCommons_summit,_2006), even for
open access to publicly funded data (Guardian newspaper initiative
from 2006), the most interesting development is in the practice of
peer reviewed open access journals (of_Open_Access_Journals",_2007),
an attempt to maintain the filtering that academia provides with the
benefit of easy online publishing provided by the new generation of
on-line publishing tools. An initiative that came out of meeting in
Budapest in 2001 stated that they were inspired by the Free Software
movement's practices and the availability of the software tools it
provides (Initiative,_2007).
In parallel with the rise of Free Software, on the fringes of
academia, substantial criticism of the regime of intellectual
property has arisen. Liang_(2004) has elaborated many points on how
the existing legal framework of knowledge and culture only came into
existence with the rise of global capitalism, primarily in twentieth
century. One of his claims is that, contrary to its original purpose
of striking a balance between the public interest and an incentive
for authors to create, today's regime has arisen in order to
prevent, not promote, creativity and invention. These are not
radical claims any more, and certainly not on the fringes of
academia only. Recently, some of the more mainstream parts of
academia have been asking why the situation of culture, knowledge
and the sciences developed into such a strict legal regime. For
Sackville (2007: 34), it is because the economic well-being of some
groups in society depends on the privatization of resources. In this
case, he claims, it is intellectual resources that have been under
the attack of groups who are well resourced, organized and have
powerful lobbying mechanisms, direct access to both national
governments and the formation of international treaties. This echoes
the findings of a long anthropological and historical research study
by Drahos_(2006) who sought to understand the reasons why
governments in many states worldwide were adopting copyright and
patent laws, when there was no understanding of the advantage[23]
thoselaws will bring to their economies. The field work for this study
took place over a period of several years in many cities in Europe,
USA and Asia, but four cities, Washington, New York, Brussels and
Geneva, emerged as the centres of decision-making and policy-making.
According to Drahos, it was a highly centralized, well planned
assault on wealth that was until that time not considered to be
private. Imperialism of knowledge met with little or no resistance.
Networks of corporate lobbyists have linked the intellectual
property regime with the trade regime. Recommendations to
governments by private commissioned consulting bodies often get
translated into marching orders. He concludes with the obvious:
``Knowledge capitalism cares more about its mode of production and
monopoly profits than it does about producing low cost medicines for
the poor in developing countries.''. Drahos' research shows the
negative influence on the world that Western assault of imposition
of patents and copyright is having. How can then Free Software, a
movement battling for the opposite, for sharing of intellectual
wealth, a movement which inspired and enabled other movements with
similar goals (open access in academia), not be political,
regardless of what free software programmers might claim?
Conclusions
In our neo-liberal times, Free Software is a rare secular return of
thinking beyond the accountants' spreadsheets. It is a return to an
affirmative, axiomatic, belief in thinking about society as one. It
divides - as in its sharply defined and defended division between
free and non-free software - in order to unite in a volunteer, co-
operative society. Free Software is a hack of not just the regime of
copyright, but of the concept of equal rights as well. Some of its
goals are the goals that Marx has set in his vision of communist
society. Yet, the Open Source Initiative was formed by a part of the
hacker community to re-package and sell the idea of Free Software
stripped of its radicalism to the richest corporations in the world.
The sociology of hackers and Free Software has been predominantly
unashamedly liberal, which isn't a problem. The problem starts when
such ideological positions are interwoven with theory without
reflection on how those political commitments, affect the theory
itself, its coordinates, its possible and ``impossible'' outcomes.
Part of this unspoken political commitment is that work of Max Weber
has been used extensively in various analyses of hackers and Free
Software, yet, it is not insights found across his work that have
been used, but his most known final conclusion alone. From a
communist, egalitarian, anarchist, anti-capitalist and anti-
meritocratic stance, Free Software has hardly been theorized at all.
It has been idealized, and for such idealizations criticised
(Rossiter,_2006). The work of Alain Badiou offers a way to read Free
Software as an egalitarian revolutionary act. The book published in
1999 by O'Reilly, in which creators of Open Source coalition wrote
about their work, was named "Open Sources: Voices from the
Revolution". For them, revolution was in making the world largest
corporations invest in and buy into the concept of Free Software
stripped of its radicalism. The correct name for such a book should
have been Voices from the Coup. This is where the line of division
lies. Social theory, so far, has seemed to be able to avoid
reflection on this division. Yet, it is only by insisting on this
division that radical egalitarian potential of Free Software can be
rendered visible.
Most of the books and texts written by academics have already been
paid for, with their salaries, at least in Europe, coming from the
state budget. Why is this material in vast majority of cases
confined to closed university networks for current students only?
How come academics, whilst being paid by the state, work for free
for publishers, publishers who in many cases (especially when it
comes to journals) hardly do any work, yet who collect the money
from books and subscriptions to journals? Although the raging EU
battle for mandatory Open Access for all government funded research
has been well documented (Poynder,_2007), given that a large part of
all academic books is also written on the time paid for by public
education funds, we should extend the demand for open access to such
works too. These are some of outstanding issues related to academia
that theory and practice of Free Software raises. It is to be hoped
that these questions will be addressed in the near future. However,
it seems to me that it is only an act as axiomatic, egalitarian and
divisive as that of Richard Stallman, and fidelity to the event that
gives birth to such an act, in Badiou's sense, that can antagonise
these issues to the extent that they can no longer be ignored.
If we are to agree that democratic process is a process of subjects
who ``reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private'',
who challenge the privatization based on birth, wealth and
'competence', privatization guarded by the police and the State
(Ranciere, 2006: 61-2); if we are to agree that this process can not
be identified with juridico-political forms, because such forms
always refer to the people, to incompetents (p.54) - Ranciere
reminds us that capitalist parliamentary regimes couldn't justify
themselves if they didn't refer to the people who vote and thus
'choose' those who rule and legislate on their behalf - it follows
that peer-to-peer networks could be seen as such, democratic,
processes. Here's how a definition of Free Drugs, another possible
process of reconfiguration of the public and the private, could be
inherited from Free Software:
* The freedom to use the drug, for any purpose (freedom 0).
* The freedom to study how the drug works, and adapt it to your
needs (freedom 1). Access to the drug recipe (blueprint) and
acceptance through regulated clinical trials are preconditions for
this.
* The freedom to redistribute copies of the drug and its recipe
(blueprint) so you can help your neighbour (freedom 2).
* The freedom to improve the drug, and release your improvements to
the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3).
Access to the drug recipe (blueprint) and acceptance through
regulated clinical trials are preconditions for this.
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Footnotes
... Software2
Up to date statistics on some aspects of this are at http://
news.netcraft.com
... today3
A group of influential social actors in UK have been using
Free Software as an example of how production and innovation
can be increased with a model that differs from the
predominant one focused on conceptualization of new types of
property, private ownership of that new property and its
protection by widening and strengthening the law that applies
to it (copyright and patents). See Adelphi charter website
that shows some of the tensions between the multiplicity of
actors/demands for the change in this predominant increase in
property and law and actual workings of the national (UK) and
supra-national (EU) institutional frameworks of governance
... Hacker4
Hacker's manifesto (Wark,_2004) deserves inclusion in this
research, but because of its complexity and vast amount of
attention it needs, it is too large for this occasion.
... better5
German Chaos Computer Club, one of the most known and active
network of hacker's clubs in the world, added to those points
in 1980's two more: g) don't litter other people's data; h)
make public data available, protect private data (Club,_2007)
... years6
Notable exception to this that comes to mind quickly is London
based small publisher Mute whose imprint Mute vol 2 has been
last few years consistently publishing essays on Free Software
related subjects while resisting opportunistic short cuts.
... areas7
Although not directly related to hackers and computing, Celia
Lury's work (1993: chap.2) offers some riskier and more useful
insights into the some of the core issues for the world of
hackers, namely lack of pattern, predictability in production
of art and the difficulty of fully commodifying art under
capitalism, and the reproducibility of art through technology.
... case8
Throughout the book, Weber showed how diverse protestant
branches, sects, are, and how careful one has to be when
linking Protestantism with capitalism. Yet, he nevertheless
does it, shielding himself, in the beginning of the conclusive
chapter of the book, called Asceticism and the spirit of
capitalism, with the remark: ``For the purposes of this
chapter, though by no means for all purposes, we can treat
ascetic Protestantism as a single whole.'' (Weber, 1965: 36)
... today9
Several issues central to debates on intriguing aspects of
hackers and Free Software, especially those related to
organization of human groups engaged in production, are
central points of Weber's work (Weber,_1964).
... Oekonux10
See http://www.oekonux.org/
... Source11
In The Revenge of the Hackers, Eric Raymond talks about Open
Source goals: "Our success after Netscape would depend on
replacing the negative FSF stereotypes with positive
stereotypes of our own-pragmatic tales, sweet to managers' and
investors' ears, of higher reliability and lower cost and
better features. In conventional marketing terms, our job was
to re-brand the product, and build its reputation into one the
corporate world would hasten to buy." (DiBona_et_al.,_1999)
... work12
Recent Demos report has six references to the Open Source, and
zero to the Free Software. (Gallagher_Niamh,_2007)
... Source13
Lack of understanding of the difference between Open Source
and Free Software is best seen when in one of the masterpieces
of recent social theory term "open-source" is referenced with
the "Free as in Freedom" book on Stallman (Negri_and_Hardt,
2004: 300)
... O'Reilly14
Their conferences, books, lobbying were, are, at the heart of
the Open Source movement. Their attempts to explain the logic
behind their activism are still without serious theoretical
reflection. For example, in Open Source and the
Commoditization of Software, we can learn from Ian Murdoch,
founder of Debian, one of the most important and popular
distributions of Linux, that "standardization, and thus
commodification, are both natural market forces as well as key
events in human history" (DiBona_et_al.,_2005)!
... code15
The source code is blueprint written in a computer programming
language, from which computer applications are assembled.
... right''16
See file called CodingStyle in the Linux kernel v1.3.53 from
the 1995, also available at http://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/
... wars17
One about which text editor is better to use, Vi or Emacs, is
one of the best known religious wars amongst hackers.
... society''18
Quote is available at http://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-
society.htm
... resources19
See http://claire3.free.fr as an example of striving for
elegance in programming language design.
... project20
The most consistent reporting on this has been by french
monthly newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. For example, Halimi_
(2002) provides a short history of neo-liberal victory to
become a world dominant ideology, while Cassen_(2005) explains
why voting ``NO'' in the past French referendum for the new EU
constitution would not be a bad thing.
... Indymedia21
Indymedia is a network of alter-globalization collectives and
websites based on the principle of open publishing.
... patents22
Steep rise in the number of patents granted and submitted in
USA since 1980 is visible from the official state statistics
(USA_Patent_and_Trademark_Office,_2006).
... advantage23
Goldstein_(1994) provides a good overview of history of
copyright in USA and UK, and makes clear who its original
beneficiaries were. See the chapter History of an idea.
--------------------------------------------------------------------