Free Software

Toni Prug, toni@irational.org

August 13, 2007

Contents

1 Introduction 2

2 Hackers and the Protestant ethics 22.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52.2 Against memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

3 Free Software, politics and ideology 83.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

4 Revolutionary justice 14

5 Hacking the regime of equal rights 17

6 Free Software and academia 18

7 Conclusions 20

1

2. Hackers and the Protestant ethics 2

1 Introduction

“Civilization has reached every partof the world and the North hasrealised it cannot conquer by re-stricting access to factors of produc-tion through waging war; the bestmethod to maintain the status quois by denying the South access to themost important factor which with-out it all others are derailed; thisfactor is information. Thus theyhave introduced the concept of In-ternational Copyright Law.” WorldSocial Forum, Nairobi, Wakasa andGitau (2007)

As a young hacker, computer programmerat MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, RichardStallman fixed annoying problems with thedonated printer. When he requested sourcecode for the printer, which was a commonpractice at the time, his request was refused(Williams, 2002: 4-12). What was until thencommon, and what hackers believed servedprogress in the quality of science and en-gineering – sharing of software code – wasclosed down, enclosed by the company thatdeveloped it. Free Software (Stallman, 2002:41) was born out of refusal of a single manto submit to the logic of enclosure of wealthin the intellectual sphere. The set of princi-ples Richard Stallman stood for ended up em-bodied in the General Public Licence (p.195).The body of intellectual wealth released un-der such licence has been in expansion since.Vast majority of all the existing websites onthe Internet are operated using Free Soft-ware1. What is the importance of all thisfor sociology? Why is Free Software socialphenomena worth studying?

To start with, the mode of production ofFree Software differs from the modes usedin all modern economies and states, whethercapitalist or socialist. The main differencesare voluntary participation, organization of

work, and relation to property – softwareshould not have owners (p.45). Productionthat occurs without any form of coercion israre in modern industrial society. Voluntaryproduction whose final product ends up run-ning large parts of today’s entire communi-cation and electronic computing has to be aunique phenomenon in modern history. Pro-duction of Free Software was not profit drivenat first, nor directly financed. Yet, it spreadworldwide and influenced the way world is to-day2. Key theoretical problems this researchwill investigate are related to hacker ethics,Free Software and allocation/distribution ofwealth in society. I will show how the use ofMax Weber’s work to theorize Free Softwarecan lead us to conclude that, contrary to whatmany other authors claimed, spirit of hackershas a lot more similarities with the Protes-tantism, than the capitalism itself. Throughthe work of Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek,I will argue for a reading of Free Softwareas a political act, act whose consequencescan be far reaching if we applied it – espe-cially its axiomatic approach to decommodi-fication (Stallman, 2007b) – to any other sci-ence and arts that can be stored and shareddigitally. Reading Ranciere, I will argue thatacts of peer-to-peer networks, sharing of mil-lions of people worldwide can be read as are-conceptualization of democracy. Finally, Iwill ask why are we, the rich North countries,especially Europe where most of the drugsresearch comes from public funds, not usingthe example of Free Software to act ethicallywhen it comes to deadly epidemics of malariaand AIDS in parts of the world.

2 Hackers and the Protes-

tant ethics

For Himanen (2001), it is the hacker ethicsthat drives the development of Free Software.Hacker3 not meaning just a computer spe-

2. Hackers and the Protestant ethics 3

cialist of certain type, but any person whopractices some of the hacker ethics. It wasLevy (1984) who first formulated main pointof hackers ethics as: a) access to computers(and anything which might teach you some-thing about the way the world works) shouldbe unlimited and a total, hands-on approachis imperative; b) all information should befree; c) mistrust authority and promote de-centralization; d) hackers should be judged bytheir hacking, not bogus criteria such as de-grees, age, race or position; e) you can createart and beauty on a computer; f) computerscan change your life for the better4.

Hackers are inclined to become obsessedwith their work. They pursue it relentlessly,often at the expense of other aspects of life.Because of this, they have been portrayed asanti-social, weird in ways which “normal” hu-man beings cannot understand. Yet, theirwork differs significantly from what we con-sider today to be a dominant paradigm ofcapitalist society, the Protestant work ethic.According to Himanen, it is social motiva-tions that separate those two ethics: in theProtestant ethic work has invaded leisure andaspects of private life, like finding a spouseand having friends, are frequently carried outwork. Those social activities at work servein the Protestant ethic to distract attentionfrom the idea that pursuing one’s passionshould happen at work too (Himanen, 2001:51). Although for hackers what they do (butnot necessary the employment) is passion,why would people in such large numbers workin their leisure time too just to give the resultof their work away in the public domain, forfree? The linking of a contribution to soci-ety with passion is what for Himanen char-acterises the hacker ethic a powerful model.Recent empirical research in which 680 FreeSoftware programmers were interviewed con-cluded that enjoyment is the biggest reasonwhy hackers do what they do (Lakhani andWolf, 2003). A paradox that remains theo-retically unresolved is how can people with

such socialization elements (high priority towork, frequent aspects of strange communi-cation with other people) and values of indi-vidual freedoms have at the same time sucha firm link to the society and what they con-sider good for it. The company Google un-derstands this well and implements aspectsof it in practice by allowing its engineers tospend twenty percent of their time at workworking on their own technical projects, notnecessarily linked with what company does.For a hacker, “making a living” is a depres-sive, unbearable option that he replaces with“it’s my life”, as Himanen (2001, 40) correctlyobserves. The curse of the Protestant ethic ofwork as necessary suffering that one is obligedto withstand, the iron cage built by our ratio-nality, as Max Weber concluded on the char-acter of this modern lockdown of humanity(Weber, 1965: 182), thus, even more para-doxically, gets hacked, reused in unexpected,unintended ways, by the people engaged inone of most rational tasks, computer pro-gramming. Is that not what hackers are doingto the computing tools and global communi-cations networks built to a large extent formilitary and profit making purposes, reusingthem in their own way, redefining some of thecore postulates of our time: why do we workhow we work, what is our relationship withthe product of our work and what do we dowith the results? The answer to the ques-tion ”why” is for hackers clear: because itis pleasure, not suffering. How? In collab-oration, sharing the results and internals ofwhat is produced, with open access for any-one whose material conditions allow them toobserve and engage in what is done. Canhackers have the last laugh, as simultaneousco-creators of the iron-turns-silicon cage andits hackers?

When Max Weber concluded that theProtestant ethic is a driver for he develop-ment of capitalism, his main argument fo-cused on an ethic of dedication to work, and,most importantly, of saving the profits, which

2. Hackers and the Protestant ethics 4

in turn leads to the investment of accumu-lated capital. This was one of the key el-ements how, according to Weber, the capi-talist machine got moving. Castells (1996:200) agrees with Weber and adds that to ex-plain society today, we need to have “somekind of cultural glue” that makes social ac-tors behave in similar fashion on a large scale,and that purely rationalist explanations, forsomething as large as emergence of capital-ism, aren’t enough. There are also recentworks (Mikkonen et al., 2007) in which verysimilar conclusions are drawn, this time fromempirical data collected, through interviewsand questionnaires, from communities of pro-grammers. The findings reaffirm some find-ings of Himanen’s Hacker Ethics, most knownof all writings in this direction, stating thatmotives for participation in open source andfree software production today are mainly forthe material benefit of participants. Yet, Hi-manen’s research left many questions openand posed hacker ethics as a threat to protes-tant ethics, while Mikhonnen’s research con-cludes that some sort of special ethics of hack-ers is a myth. Overall, these researches agreewith Weber’s use of concept of the Protes-tant ethic as the spirit of capitalism and an-alyze hackers in relation to it, starting fromthe hacker ethic as being in opposition to theProtestant ethic, and concluding that realityis lot simpler, since hackers end up joining theforces of capitalism and the Protestant ethicin the end.

None of this was convincing enough for me,starting from Weber’s use of only a few ele-ments of Protestantism, followed by a superfi-cial use of his work in the sociology of hackersduring last ten years5. They agree with We-ber all too quickly, and offer no close readingof Weber’s work, nor of the key concepts (re-ligion, Protestantism, rationality) that madethat work possible. Himanen’s work touchesupon the kind of reading that I believe is nec-essary, but it is still playing it far too safe infar too many areas6.

I’m tempted to start from the opposite po-sition. For the benefit of his conclusions onProtestantism as the spirit of capitalism, We-ber presented Protestantism as a single, uni-fied whole, although he was fully aware thatthat was not the case7. Using Weber’s con-clusion presents us with an all too easy touse, yet deceiving, formula. To use it as la-bel, as a quote that one can just attach toone’s work, as Castells and others do in ex-plaining social phenomena of hackers and ourcomputing age, betrays both the complexityand the richness of Weber’s work and of thesituation in which we find ourselves today8.

Hackers are not a challenge to the Protes-tant ethic, quite the contrary. I’m temptedto claim they are far more protestant thanwhat capitalism can bare, hence their uneasyfit. Open Source is a movement that, withquite some success, attempted to “pacify”Free Software, to bridge the gap between FreeSoftware and capitalism. Project Oekonux9

is a good example of an opposite theoreticalapproach. The move of the Open Source10

initiative to bring Free Software closer to cap-italism shows that: a) there is a gap be-tween the Free Software movement and cap-italism; b) without a significant institutionalintervention and re-interpretation that gapcan not be overcome; c) more than practice(since practice of Open Source doesn’t dif-fer that much), it is the founding documents,principles that Richard Stallman stands byso fiercely that are the bite that capitalismcan not subsume, swallow in its original form.Re-interpretation work11 that Open Source12,and to a large extent publisher O’Reilly13,did, was necessary for inclusion of Free Soft-ware into capitalist economy. The task thatI set for myself is similar to that of the Oek-inux project, with a different path of inves-tigation: to conceptualize, give a theoreticalform to that which resists capitalism in FreeSoftware. An expression of the hacker ethicsneeds to be hacked to enable future, social,hacks.

2.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) 5

2.1 Talk is cheap, show me thecode (sola code)

Let us read briefly some of the core featuresof Protestantism and consider what is it thatmade me wary of accepting Max Weber’s fi-nal conclusions as a useful analytical premiseon its own i.e. stripped of the rest of his re-search. Although these will be formulated asquestions for further research – since answer-ing the doubts I’m raising here comprehen-sively is beyond the scope of this disserta-tion – it is necessary to deal with them, giventhe prominence other authors give to Weber’swork when discussing hackers and Free Soft-ware.

The core arguments on which Weber builthis theses, as Towney summarized so wellin his foreword (Weber, 1965), rely on aspecific branch of Calvinism, on the writingsof English Puritans in late seventeenthcentury, and it is possible (we don’t know,as yet) that quite a different picture mighthave emerged had Weber focused on earlykey Protestants texts, or on any other ofthe large number of interpretations of thosetexts and of the practices of various sectsof Protestantism. For Weber (1965: 36),the most intriguing question of the sixteenthcentury, to which he admitted there is nosimple answer, is this: why did a large ma-jority of the economically most prosperousparts of Europe, the wealthy towns of thetime, convert to Protestantism. The link,he believed, between “emancipation fromeconomic traditionalism” and challenge tothe control of the Church over everydaylife definitely existed in some form. Dutch,English and Americans Puritanism wasopposed to joy of life, Weber tells us, and itwould be a mistake to link this awakeningin any way with the Enlightenment, whichis, given some its prominent characteristics,a temptation (p.45). In contrast to thelife of village, privileged traditionalism wasconfronted with the rational calculations of

capitalism. Protestantism is important forWeber because it formed a stage prior tothe development of rationalist philosophy.However, such philosophy had its own trackof development and to explain it only interms of Protestantism would be wrong(p.75). It was the Pietistic branch, whose“enhanced abilities of mental concentrationand essential feeling of obligation to one’sjob”, combined with self control and eco-nomic thinking which calculated possibles ofhigh earning that was a key element, anda paradox, that linked the two, an elementthat was necessary for the rise of capitalism,and that provided “most favourable foun-dation for the conception of labour as anend in itself, as a calling that is necessaryto capitalism.” (p.63). People filled withthe capitalist spirit are irrational about theirwork, since they exist for their business, andnot the other way around (p.70). Centralto their capitalist life-work was provision ofhumanity with material goods (p.76). Yet, itis not the extreme rationality in the idea ofdevotion to labour that is primary interestfor Weber, but its irrationality from theposition of self-interest based on personalhappiness that sits at the centre of his workon spirit of capitalism (p.78). His goal wasnot to evaluate the ideas of the Reformationin any sense, nor to suggest that capitalismwouldn’t have developed without Protes-tantism, but to investigate to what extentreligious ideas have taken in part in theformation and spread of the capitalist spirit(p.91). The rejection of the Church, and insome cases of all rituals (Puritanism), wasfor Weber the logical conclusion of religion’shistorical tendency to remove magic fromthe world (p.105). Finally, it was methodicalcontrol over one’s emotions, behaviour andtime, rejection of joy, dedication to labour,provided by some protestant branches, thatformed the spirit that capitalism inher-ited. The core principles of Protestantismshould thus read as something that resembles

2.1 Talk is cheap, show me the code (sola code) 6

the spirit of capitalism that we know of today.

The basic theological points of the Ref-ormation are called the Five Solas. The firstone, Solus Christus (Christ alone) refusesPope and church as Christ’s representativesand preaches that Christ, and no one else,mediates between God and man. The secondone, Sola scriptura, refuses the need for aChurch to interpret the Scripture and theChurch’s monopoly on such interpretation.Protestants believe that people should readthe Scripture on their own and make uptheir own minds about it, without externalinterpretation. The third one, Sola fide,asserts that it is on the basis of faith alonethat believers are forgiven. The fourthone, Sola gratia, claims that believers areaccepted without any regard for the meritof their work; God decides on his own. Thefifth and last one, Soli Deo gloria, preachesglory to God alone, and denies that saintsof the Roman Catholic Church, includingpopes, are worthy of the glory assigned tothem.

Not all of this maps to hackers and FreeSoftware. Yet, if we are to speak in termsof spirit like Weber did, in terms of the gen-eral mood of the Five Solas, there are strik-ing similarities. Throughout, like hackersand Free Software, the spirit of Protestantismis in favour of direct engagement of indi-viduals, and the proliferation of interpreta-tions and organizations to support these ifneeded. It arose against the centralization ofthe Roman Catholic Church, privilege in in-terpretation of people chosen by the Church,and against the Church’s extraction of wealthfrom its believers. At that time, those wereanti-institutional, anti-hierarchical and anti-bureaucratic principles. Although the highnumber of branches of Protestantism wascriticized by Calvin, principle was withheld inpractice. This resembles the hacker’s princi-ple of forking a project: if you don’t like whatis someone else doing with some project, you

take a copy of the source code14 and startwork on it in the direction you wish. Theprinciple of scripture alone is similar to thehacker’s dedication to the code, the text thatmakes all software what it is. All doubtsabout interpretations can be resolved by look-ing at the source. For all hackers, to divestraight to the source code is not the lastresort, but rather the first course of action.Interpretation is personal, direct and engage-ment with no proxy is in most cases the onlyright option. Trust in people’s ability todive straight to the code, to make up theirown mind by reading it, to make a criticalevaluation, to decide for themselves, are keyfor hackers. This unmediated contact withthe scripture and trust in people is embod-ied in the Free Software principle of “free-dom to study how software works and adaptit to your needs, access to the source code isprecondition for this” Stallman (2002). Aid-ing capitalism, allowing economic emancipa-tion of individuals was for Weber a side ef-fect of Reformation, not its intended pur-pose, regardless of its insistence on individualmaterial gains, and its dislike of capitalism,demonstrated by Luther, for example. Thisparadox is best seen in the quote of John Wes-ley where it is clear how well Wesley is awareof the paradox (Weber, 1965: 175). Capital-ism didn’t follow main principles of Protes-tantism, it followed some of them, those thatsuited it. If it had followed Protestantism toa large extent, it wouldn’t be so difficult tofit hackers and Free Software into capitalism.The dark mood in which Weber concludes hisbook, the last few pages that are misused asa label so often, state the problem more pre-cisely: “Puritans wanted to work in a calling;we are forced to do so”(p.181). Puritans, notall Protestants.

If there is one important part of the hackerethics that might go against the Protes-tantism, it could be its insistence on doingthe work as enjoyment and improving thetechnology so that it can serve humanity and

2.2 Against memory 7

so that humans can be lazy. Two hackersof the highest standing, Larry Wall (inven-tor of programming language Perl) and Yuki-hiro Matsumoto Matz (inventor of influentialprogramming language Ruby), both stated iton many occasions: for a true hacker, lazi-ness is a virtue, and computers are there toserve humans. Both of them are very reli-gious, and Matz even served as a mission-ary for his church. Linus Torvalds, one ofthe most important hackers today, is knownfor statements that can be seen as funda-mentalist. Consider this from the Linux cod-ing style guide: “Heretic people all over theworld have claimed that this inconsistency is... well .. inconsistent, but all right-thinkingpeople know that a) K&R are right and(b) K&R are right”15 (K&R are Kernighanand Ritchie, inventors of programming lan-guage C). Or, this from one of his interviews:“Which mindset is right? Mine, of course.People who disagree with me are by defini-tion crazy (Until I change my mind, whenthey can suddenly become upstanding citi-zens)” (Barr, 2005). Richard Stallman, be-cause of what some considered inflexibilitywhen discussing core premises of Free Soft-ware, was seen as a fundamentalist. Debatesabout preferences to which software, or whichprogramming tool, to use are frequently re-ferred to as religious wars16. All of this isleft mostly untouched under the framing ofbusiness friendly Open Source. This is nota coincidence. Anything that gets includedinto capitalist economy has to be stripped ofany previous attributes and represented as amere commodity (Zizek, 2006), an entity tobe produced, sold and utilized. There are twosets of complexities that are erased in a sin-gle move of becoming open source: that ofFree Software prior to its inclusion into thecapitalist economy, and that of the commod-ity form itself - base entity of the capitalisteconomy.

2.2 Against memory

For Badiou (2003: 44), memory became aguardian of historical consciousness, allow-ing society to re-evaluate its history on thebasis of new historical facts and discourses.Yet, there comes a moment, when memorycan not settle the issue any more, when adebate, exchange of argument, of proof andcounter-proof, has to stop and a decision hasto be made, a stance has to be taken. Exam-ple Badiou gives us for this is discussion witherudite anti-semites about the holocaust: wewill not enter that discussion, we will pro-claim the matter settled. In the same way,for Badiou’s exemplary revolutionary, SaintPaul, the resurrection of Christ was not some-thing to be debated, it was “a pure event,opening of an epoch, transformation of therelations between the possible and the im-possible” (2003: 45). This is another wayto read Richard Stallman’s encounter withthe closed source code and broken printer: apure event, site of decision-making where, aswe witness today in the social phenomenonof Free Software, the relationship betweenthe possible and the impossible was trans-formed. If this transformation was not thecase, one would have to argue that the phe-nomenon of world-wide volunteer collabora-tion which resulted in of the most powerfulsoftware products in the world today, col-laboration between professionals, hobbyists,students, would have been possible withoutthe commitments and methodologies of FreeSoftware. Badiou’s reading of Paul enablesus to see another paradox in the foundingand development of Free Software, namely,the clash between its founding principles andthose through which it developed. Commu-nal sharing (Williams, 2002: 85) and openparticipation in production and openness tocriticism, to alternative options, are key de-velopment methodologies in Free Software.One of the main reasons for doing it in thefirst place for Stallman was the pleasure of

3. Free Software, politics and ideology 8

learning and the ability to see software im-mediately doing something useful (2002: 79).Yet, although that is what marked the begin-ning of his devotion to the new cause, it wasnot, and still isn’t, open to debate, discussion,knowledge based evaluation. For Stallman, asfor Paul, it was not question of knowledge buta question of the subject, of a subjective path.In Badiou’s words “this is the one and onlyquestion, which no protocol of knowledge canhelp settle” (Badiou, 2003: 49). Is this notan accurate description of Stallman’s eventand decisions? They certainly are not open:not for participation or collaboration, not fordebate or discussion, not for the knowledge.Thus, we can conclude: Stallman’s eventand fidelity to it stand in sharp con-trast, indeed in total opposition, to theattributes of the movement he founded.

3 Free Software, politics

and ideology

A political act, according to Slavoj Zizekand Alan Badiou is not what we’re used toseeing on daily basis in the liberal parlia-mentary arena: debates, compromises, vot-ing on issues, forming partnerships for on-going consultation with communities, and soon. Rather it is quite the opposite: subjec-tively, militantly, unilaterally, deciding whatseems impossible at the time of the decision,acting in follow up to an event, event thatprompts our reaction/decision, and pursuingthe truth of it through fidelity to it, throughfidelity to the event that changes us. ForSlavoj Zizek, that is the definition of actualfreedom, freedom to choose outside of givenoptions and coordinates of the field in whichchoice is meant to be made. This is the dif-ference between Zizek’s concept of freedomand liberal, parliamentary, formal freedom,which consists in participating in the whatis already given, already structured (Zizek,

2001: 115). Could we not say that this isprecisely what Richard Stallman did with hischoice of leaving the job he had at the MITLab to devote all his time to re-create theworld of software, from scratch, with an en-tirely new set of social co-ordinates? One keyelement that he didn’t envisage, the involve-ment of others was the unpredictable withoutwhich his creation wouldn’t have been possi-ble. His act resembles the definition of utopiathat Zizek gave on few occasions, best cap-tured in the electrifying atmosphere of an Ar-gentinian university (Taylor, 2006) where, infront of nearly 2000 attendants, he restatedhow it is desperation, the lack of any otheroptions, the urge to act, to do somethingthat otherwise might seem totally unreason-able, that defines his notion of utopia. Inthat sense, Richard Stallman is one of theprominent utopists of our time. When prag-matism and neo-liberal fundamentalism seemto exclude all other options for developmentof human societies, such utopian acts of des-peration are to be celebrated and supported.

Like the Magna Carta, the PennsylvaniaConstitution of 1776, or the Declaration ofRights of Man and of the Citizen, GeneralPublic License, the key Free Software docu-ment, sets out axiomatic principles: equal-ity for all when it comes to using, modify-ing and sharing one of the most revolution-ary means of production humanity has everinvented: software, the means for automatingmachines to produce what we instruct themto do.

This is Badiou’s revolutionary economicjustice, but in the unexpected sphere of soft-ware: ”all software should be free and theprospect of charging money for software wasa crime against humanity” (2002: 85). Wouldit not make sense to expect this kind of rad-ical stance when it comes basics like shel-ter, food, health treatment, education? Whyare obvious question like these not being dis-cussed, even though Free Software has drawna great deal of attention? Are the free-

3. Free Software, politics and ideology 9

doms that Free Software is based on so spe-cific to software that it makes no sense tothink whether the same can be demandedand achieved for the above-mentioned ba-sic spheres of material and intellectual life?When asked whether programmers deservereward for their creativity, Stallman’s replywas that if anything deserves a reward it isa social contribution. For him, creativity canbe a social contribution only if its results canbe shared (2002: 105). If we applied thesame logic to other spheres of life, the conse-quences for this statement would be far reach-ing. Consider the economy. What would itmean to assert that economic productivitycan be a social contribution only if its resultscan be shared? It is already shared, manywould say: one gets a salary for one’s work.This would hardly satisfy Stallman’s criteria.For Badiou’s Paul, pay can never meet thedemand placed on the society by one’s con-tribution . Pay can only delay the eruptionof that demand, I would add.

Badiou warns us through Passolini’s pub-lished, but never filmed, script on Paul, howPassolini saw Paul as a revolutionary wishingto destroy a model of society based on so-cial inequality, imperialism and slavery. TheChurch, a key institution of oppression fordozens of centuries, which in practice workedagainst Paul’s mission, integrated the milderparts of Paul’s teaching into its own scrip-ture, on the grounds that it was better tohave him on their side in some acceptableform, stripped of his radical elements, than toleave him in heresy, free to unleash his teach-ings in its full radical potential (Badiou, 2003:36). This is how, today, we can define thefreedom of piracy in relation to arts, scienceand Free Software. These are heretical actsof our times, heretical to the neo-liberal neo-conservative mix of seemingly unstoppablepowers that today combine military with theregime of law to occupy a wide range of ma-terial, artistic and scientific aspects of lifethroughout the world. Today, sharing the

wealth of digitally reproducible arts and sci-ences has become the heretical act of makingsuch wealth more common, of creating thespace and culture of more common humanaction, of exposing the false, imposed logic ofscarcity. These acts are fronts which couldredefine future political battles, on national,supra-national and global levels. They raisekey political issues, issues that have inspiredrevolutions that framed the idea of emanci-pated humanity: questions of property andthe division between public and private. Itus up to us to recognize those questions, togive them forms that are inescapably politi-cal, divisive and antagonistic towards the rul-ing capitalist parliamentary ideology, and actthrough the rupture that those forms openup, primarily in the hegemonic discourse ofprivate capital. It is worth recalling howRanciere (2004: 303) posed one of this keyquestions and its connection with politics:

”The Declaration of Rights statesthat all men are born free and equal.Now the question arises: Whatis the sphere of implementation ofthese predicates? If you answer, asArendt does, that it is the sphereof citizenship, the sphere of politi-cal life, separated from the sphereof private life, you sort out the prob-lem in advance. The point is, pre-cisely, where do you draw the lineseparating one life from the other?Politics is about that border. It isthe activity that brings it back intoquestion.”

Transfered to the realm of Free Software, it isthe declaration of software sharing as a right –known as freedoms 2 and 3 (Stallman, 2005) –that challenges both the question of the bor-der between private and public and that ofproperty. In today’s capitalist order, we arefree to use the commodities we acquired, freeto do whatever we want with them, to destroythem, give them away, or put them back into

3. Free Software, politics and ideology 10

circulation as commodities. With electroni-cally storable commodities, like some artisticworks, science and all software, commodityusers are in the position to multiply thosecommodities and offer them to others for useeasily through networked computers. Thisintroduces a rupture with the functioning ofthe capitalist economy which may thus be de-prived of the potential profit that could havebeen realized if the same multiplied commodi-ties were not shared amongst users, but soldby the profit-making actors, and bought in-stead. When commodities are exchanged be-tween users on a large scale, as they are todayon the peer-to-peer networks, capitalism pan-ics and looks for ways to prevent this. Mostof the exchange on peer-to-peer networks isnot free software, but films, music, softwarein general, newspapers and books. Yet, notonly that vast majority of those networks arerun by Free Software, it is Free Software prin-ciples and work practices that set the prece-dent, that made claims that destabilised theflow of those commodities and the structureof the ideology which governs that flow today.

Free Software’s most controversial claim isthat software should be free to obtain, mod-ify and share. Richard Stallman justifies thisprinciple by arguing that encourages coop-eration, helps social cohesion and is bene-ficial for all, and not just for a few, whichis not the case when software is treated likeany other commodity. Free Software is aboutethics, and law should follow ethics, not theother way around. An examples is the cre-ation of copyright and patents, brought intoplace because it was thought that it wasbeneficial for society to protect and encour-age creators of art and science. Today, dis-cussing software, Stallman claims that thisis not the case any more. What if we ap-ply the same model to all commodities whichcan be multiplied and shared electronically,digitally storable arts, science and entertain-ment (Stallman, 2002: 73)? In other words,what if all current peer-to-peer Internet ex-

change proclaimed the same rights that Stall-man proclaimed for software? One obviousdifference is that Stallman is the creator ofsoftware who refused to treat it as a commod-ity in the capitalist economy, and who offereda generic way for doing so, while artists andscientists whose work is being exchanged onthe networks didn’t necessarily do the same.Instead, users made the decision, regardlessof what creators think of it. Why? Becausethey can, because it is relatively easy to doand because the reward is vast, easily ob-tainable amount of entertainment, educationand production (software) material. Isn’t thissimilar to the labourer/capitalist relation?Capitalists do whatever they want with theproduct of workers whose labour they buy. Ihear you saying, but what about the salary?Isn’t that the pay in return? Of course itisn’t! Labour is sold under the conditions en-tirely set by the owners of capital who requirelabour. With the exception of a tiny num-ber of stars, there is no negotiation about theway in which relation between capitalist andworker will be formed. It is an one-sided of-fer to the worker: take it or leave it Today,even for highly skilled workers, that offer con-tains clauses which state that copyright forall work, related to what capitalist enterprisedoes, done by the worker belongs to the cap-italist. Including any work done during thetime off paid work. Again, with rare excep-tions, there is no choice about this clause, itis a widely spread practice. In short, workerhas to comply with the rules set by the capi-talists. He/she has no choice. The capitalisttakes away any participation of the worker inanything to do with the product, other thanthe salary. In vast majority of the cases, inthe West, that salary is enough to live on,participate in the consumption of mass pro-duced commodities, but no more than that.State does prescribes some rules about thosework relationships but those do not enter thesphere with which we’re concerned with here.The worker has no means by which she can

3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy 11

challenge her relationship with the product ofhis/her work. The freedom of choice that cap-italists and their state regimes like to praiseso much is confined to the sphere of commodi-ties and consumption only.

3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugsdemocracy

When digitally storable entertainment, artand science are denied commodity status,we can see this as a rare case of peopleinternationally imposing their will againstall the odds, against capitalists, states andlaws. As reflected in the sales pitch of thelargest network company in the world, itis widely acknowledged that peer-to-peertraffic makes up majority of all broadbandInternet traffic (over seventy percent in thehighest estimates) and that it “consumesnetwork resource without creating additionalrevenue” (Cisco, 2007). What is this if notgigantic decommodification by any meansavailable? Through those networks, part ofwhat capitalists take from people throughsurplus value, through profits, through denialof participation in the results of their labourand through centuries-long undermining ofdevelopment of democracy, is being takenback. Users of peer-to-peer networks see noneed for such goods to be treated as property.

Why not call this democracy? Becauseit shuns the concept of the liberal right toproperty? What if people, vasts number ofpeople, like it is the case with peer-to-peernetworks, do not care about the right toproperty in the case of digitally storableentertainment, art and science? Isn’t democ-racy, in the liberal concept, meant to bethe rule of the majority? On this issue, canit be any clearer what the vast number ofpeople, possibly majority of people, want?And doesn’t this give us a glimpse of howdifferent society could be if neither creation

of laws and policies, nor structuring ofsociety through political acts according tothose laws and policies (education in UKis again a good example of this), is donethrough liberal-capitalist political formsof parliaments, elections, representatives?Thus, corporate and state repressive actsagainst the sharing of digitally storableentertainment, art and science are anti-democratic acts. Instead, rewriting of lawson property to support sharing wheneverpossible, like in these digitally storable cases,would be an act in the spirit of democracy.Such democratic acts are prevented throughthe forms that liberal-capitalist politicstakes. Challenges that peer-to-peer networksacts of sharing create are not just challengesto the liberal ideology of property rightsand to the ways through which laws andpolitical institutions treat digitally storableproperty according to that ideology, but tothe above mentioned political forms throughwhich liberal-capitalist coalition asserts itsanti-democratic ideology and rule.

For Ranciere (2006: 96)

Democracy is neither a form of gov-ernment that enables oligarchies torule in the name of the people, noris it a form of society that gov-erns the power of commodities. Itis the action that constantly wreststhe monopoly of public life from oli-garchic governments, and the om-nipotence over lives from the powerof wealth.

Yet, regardless of his disagreement for the po-tential for a democracy of multitude throughimmaterial forms of capitalist production(Foucault (1980: 27) warned Maoists to re-ject the state for similar reasons), we’re fol-lowing Ranciere’s affirmative description ofdemocracy: egalitarian society as a set ofegalitarian relations traced to singular, pre-carious acts. Free Software is one such act.

3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy 12

As well as Swedish pirate party and its callfor removal of pharmaceutical patents (PirateParty, 2007).

Given today’s drugs, AIDS could be con-tained worldwide in relatively short periodof time, but corporations and governmentsstand in the way of millions dying being pro-tected (Badiou, 2007). Like people who de-cide to share online, they choose to do so,because they can, because nothing, no one,stands in their way. The production of drugscould follow the example of Free Software, becreated in a more collaborative way, publish-ing recipes and allowing it to be freely pro-duced, by anyone, for any purpose. If thiswas the case, controllable and curable dis-eases like malaria and AIDS, who togetherkill tens of millions of people every year, couldbe put under the control in most of the world.Yet this doesn’t happen. Why? We can as-sume it is because their work needs differenttools and material conditions, and that pre-vents them from working in low cost environ-ments, which confines them to academic andcorporate world. If later is the case, we couldconclude that it is the domination of capitalover all other considerations, primacy of pri-vate over public, that prevents decommodi-fication acts of Free Software to be repeat-able in the sphere of free drugs. However,as the Swedish Pirate Party demonstrates, inEurope, the vast majority of drug researchmoney already comes from taxes. Hence, aFree Software model for generic drugs mightnot be such a remote proposal. Instead ofpushing through a neo-liberal constitution,Europe could, and should do the oppositeact, create an institutional Free Drugs scien-tific movement, based on the Free Softwarehackers model, following the logic of copyleft(Stallman, 2002: 89), patented for free pro-duction and reuse of all documentation, as agift of its citizens to the world. One couldargue that after centuries of military domi-nation and exploitation, something like thisis due. When ethics and its laws in the West

allow death on such scale to occur, althoughthe society has the means to prevent it, wehave to ask: what is the difference betweentens of millions dead in two world wars andthe dead of malaria and AIDS today? Theformer were killed while later are allowed todie. Ethics complicit in mass death, an an-nually repeated disaster, not an one off eventlike the world wars, is the ethics of the Westtoday: because our laws allow those deathsto occur.

The Creative Commons and Free Culturemovements (Lessig, 2004) are attempts toprovide other creators – in the fields of artand science, in branches where low-cost pro-duction is not entirely dependent on sub-mission to the dictate of private sphere andof capital – a simple way of releasing theirwork into the existing legal framework un-der rules related to those of Free Software.While neo-liberal ideology divides people intostrictly managed consumers whose interac-tion with society is measured in detail andaccordingly monetarily arranged (recent ex-ample of this in the UK are student feeswhere the main claim is that it is those whostudy and their families that should bear thecost, and not society at large), Free Softwareclaims that it is worth contributing to soci-ety at large, worth sharing and cooperating.Stallman challenged the conservative dogmathat “there is no society”17, showing, throughhis axiomatic, unilateral acts, through his fi-delity to the event (broken printer) and prin-ciples that came out of it, that there is, in-deed, a society, since, there is something thatis socially beneficial i.e. global collaborativeproduction of globally shared wealth, in thesphere of software.

At the same time, corporations like IBMand Oracle, some of the main engines of thisworld order, of our silicon cage, have been in-tegrating Free Software into the core of thatworld order. It is our task, as Badiou andPassolini did for Paul, to make it difficult,hopefully impossible, for them and their ide-

3.1 PeerToPeer and Free Drugs democracy 13

ological partners, to integrate a milder, cap-italist friendly, or even capitalist agnostic,version of Richard Stallman’s revolutionarytruth, his fidelity to the event that changedhim, and to the world we share, truly share,when it comes to software. Our task is to in-sist on the potential of coordinates that hisact has rewritten, on new coordinates of pos-sibilities that his acts opens up, coordinatesof global collaborative, voluntary, productionof common global wealth, of Free Drugs andsimilar ideas. In Stallman’s own words: “con-structive anarchism does not mean advocat-ing a dog-eat-dog jungle. American societyis already a dog-eat-dog jungle and its rulesmaintain it that way. We [hackers] wish toreplace those rules with a concern for con-structive cooperation.” (Levy, 1984: 416).Reasons for Free Software are possibly bestexplained in earliest words of Stallman from1983, when he didn’t believe that softwareshould be owned, because such practice “sab-otages humanity as a whole” (p.419) - this isprecisely what capitalism does in the exampleof life saving drugs given above. Today weknow that he wasn’t alone feeling this way,because the results of his call for collabora-tion are known: it is a success. Given the hos-tility of capitalist economy towards the kindof ideas he stood for, it is a huge success.Yet, what if all obstacles to cooperation andsharing sabotage to humanity? And how dowe proceed towards global collaboration andthe creation of global common wealth in thespheres of life which do not posses the mag-ical attribute of software, science and arts,which makes the latter electronically storableand reproducible form, in Western terms, lowcost?

Many, including myself, have tried to studythis question by investigating what is spe-cific to the production of Free Software in thecontext in which it takes place and whetherFree Software principles can be applied tomaterial production. But, so far, the moreI looked, the more research has lead me to

think that these questions cannot be inves-tigated in isolation. Before we can thinkabout them, other issues have to be stud-ied first. The large scale on which societyhas lost the track of ideas of equality, coop-erative production and shared wealth – thescale of the loss of belief in the possibility ofsuch ideas and political projects – has to bedealt with in parallel to the phenomenon ofFree Software. It is not possible to invent newpolitico-economic practices without inventingan ideology that will provide a framework tosupport them. Without such a frameworkof thought, any action will remain embeddedin the currently ruling (neo)liberal capitalistframework. To give a small example: there isplenty of talk about the openness of softwaresource code in England, yet, the land registry,strangely enough, remains closed. And apartfrom fringe activist groups, no one seem to beconcerned with it. In the city where this textis written, one man, known under the titleDuke of Westminster, among his other vastassets, owns large parts (120 hectares) of theland in one of the most expensive locations inthe world, central London. His ownership isthe outcome of the forced enclosure of com-mon land, which was the start of privatiza-tion of common resources in UK, yet therehave been only two surveys of land ownershipin British history: the first was in 1086, andthe second was in 1872. To this day, thereis no mandatory record of land ownership inEngland. How convenient and easy it is toforget that, while a large part of the softwaresource code that assists life on this land mightbe available to inspect, change and share, in-formation on the ownership of the land, themost basic resource on which all human lifedepends, is not. Yet there is hardly anychallenge to this glaring paradox. If we ex-amine the concepts on which Free Softwarethrives – such as access to source code, opencollaboration, sharing, placing ethics beforelaw, reliance on axiomatic principles – inthe wider social context, in the context of

4. Revolutionary justice 14

the creation and concentration/distributionof wealth throughout history, we find vastparadoxes, in every sphere of life I considered.In other words, we face the question of how tochallenge and reinvent ideas and beliefs first;practice follows second. If this was not thecase, if the importance of ideas and beliefswas not central, the rift between Open Sourceand Free Software would not have been such agreat issue. Although Stallman understandsthe importance of ideas well, the core of hisexplanation of this rift misses the most im-portant point about ideology, a point whichZizek so forcefully brings back to our atten-tion again and again: it is not enough to saythat we’re just doing something, but that wedon’t believe in it, or that we don’t have aset of beliefs as such. This is how ideologyfunctions: it requires us to do things, andbelief arrives as a result of doing it, not theother way around. And what better proof dowe need than successful spread of the rule ofneo-liberalism through their claims of “justdoing it” for the sake of the economy, with-out any ideological beliefs? As if any econ-omy, or any act, was possible without deci-sions determined by a set of ideas and be-liefs. This is why Nike’s slogan “just do it” isthe best summary of capitalist ideology ever.And this is why “Open source is a develop-ment methodology; free software is a socialmovement”(Stallman, 2007a), misses the cru-cial point. We need to recognise this point inorder to be able to engage in the analysis ofideas about Free Software, but more impor-tantly, in the analysis of ideas in their histori-cal context, which carries all the traces of theparadoxes which the existence of Free Soft-ware makes manifest. It is crucial to under-stand, and always keep in mind when think-ing about Free Software, that Open Sourceis not just a development methodology, buta social movement too, a social movementof a different kind, with different, capital-ist, goals. A proof of the strength and ef-fect of its ideology is in our inability to see it

as a social movement with defined goals, orat least in our failure to insist on analyzingit consistently and thoroughly as such. Forexample, Stallman, like most other Free Soft-ware writers, clearly points out the businessorientation of Open Source, even quoting itsfounding members, whose main goal was tomake Free Software business-friendly. No onedisputes this well-documented history. Theproblem lies in claims that Open Source sep-arates ethics from the technical side of FreeSoftware(Stallman, 2007a), thus making itacceptable to corporations. Like the aboveclaim that Open Source is just a developmentmethodology, this kind of thinking impliestwo wrong statements about Open Source:first, that it has no ethics of its own, and sec-ond, that there are purely technical solutionswhich can be used without any ethical, po-litical, or ideological commitments. The re-sult of these mistakes is the widespread com-parison of Free Software and Open Sourceon the wrong terms: one operating underthe weight and demand of its ethics, and theother getting away without being examinedat all, basking in the purity of its techni-cal attributes and various business-friendlytags. This is how the ethics, ideology and,indeed, politics of Open Source slip throughunexamined and unchallenged, like capital-ist ideologies whose crucial strategy has his-torically been to accuse any political oppo-nents of ethical commitments, while insistingon their own “pragmatism” and on the purelytechnical aspect of “just getting things done”.

4 Revolutionary justice

One of the important ideals of hackers wasnot just getting the job done, it was gettingit done in the best possible way. To do so,access to the most useful information, at alltimes, was essential - another reason for ded-ication to openness of information as a non-negotiable principle. Other important ideals

4. Revolutionary justice 15

were to have access to the best possible com-puter and to always striving to excellence andelegance (Williams, 2002: 47). In computerprogramming, elegance is linked with simplic-ity, readability, re-usability and non wastefuluse of resources18. Dennis M. Ritchie (1984),one of designers of the Unix operating systemconsidered the principle of non-hierarchicalcontrol of the flow, achieved by the inventionof mechanism called a pipe, as “one of themost widely admired contributions of Unixto the culture of operating systems and com-mand language”. Since changing the worldthrough software was what hackers spokeopenly about, it shouldn’t come as surprisethat what they saw as worst obstacles werepoor software (non excellence), academic bu-reaucracy (opaqueness and fixed structure)and selfish behaviour (Williams, 2002: 48).

For Levy (1984: 41) the openness thathackers believe in, free flow of information,is not just fundamental to pursue of improve-ment and knowledge, but also to the func-tioning of computer code where it is up toprogrammer to devise how information getsmoved, processed, and which components ofthe system (hardware, network) take part init. According to him, one of the biggest en-emies of hackers is bureaucracy of any kind(corporate, government, university), becauseit can not incorporate impulses of hackers toexplore and because it hides behind arbitraryrules invoked to keep the power while per-ceiving hackers’ desire to construct new as athreat. At the heart of this dislike was hack-ers’ preference for work and life organizedin a de-centralized, meritocratic way where“hackers should be judged by the way theyjudged by their hacking, not bogus criteriasuch as degrees, age, race, or position” (1984:43). This brings us to another aspect of openaccess in Free Software, equality.

In Richard Stallman’s words, signing anon disclosure agreement meant promisingto 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 usersto access the computer at the same timeand share resources (Lucent Technologies,2002). Although to this day the mostwidely used operating system, MicrosoftWindows, is designed around the conceptof a single computer for a single user, thevast majority of the world’s communicationsystems, including the Internet, runs onvarious computer systems derived from Unixdesign philosophy of simultaneous multiusersharing. Paradoxically, at a time whenan ideology of the dominant West thrived,through the victories of the neo-liberalproject based on declared individualism andreckless consumerism, it was the invention ofcomputing components (Unix/GNU/Linux)and principles (Free Software) for coopera-tion and sharing that enabled the West tomake rapid scientific and military progress.Today, when it seems that even Europehas imploded into it, the neo-liberal ide-ological project19 and an evolved form ofthis technology for cooperation and shar-ing (Linux/Free Software), coexist in parallel.

Coleman and Hill (2004) show how twoorganizations that are generally consideredto be diametrically opposed to each otherin political terms, Indymedia20 and IBMboth use Free Software successfully, andboth promote it enthusiastically as desirableand beneficial, simultaneously in line withthe ideological frameworks of the globalcapitalist group, IBM, and the similarlyglobal alter-globalization group Indymedia.In one of the most interesting researcheson the subject, for Coleman (Summer2004), main political characteristic of FreeSoftware, according to claims made bythe people involved in its production, isagnosticism. Programmers consider politicsto be dysfunctional, not reliable and gettingin their way of getting things done. Instead,as expressed in the main documents of

4. Revolutionary justice 16

the movement, their “commitment is toprevent limiting the freedom of others”while allowing for unbound circulation ofthought, expression, and action for softwaredevelopment. Although it is clear thatFree Software has been highly beneficial tovarious political actors, it is unconvincingto say that it is politically agnostic becauseofficial political sphere doesn’t interest FreeSoftware producers, or, as Coleman developsit, because it functions as internal criticismof liberalism by liberalism, criticizing theconcept of intellectual property using theconcept of free speech (Coleman, 2005). Asshe correctly observes, its roots are drawnfrom the liberal value of free speech, which,if we would call it politically agnostic – re-gardless of what its producers claim – wouldprivilege position of liberalism as one outsideof ideology. We know that such positiondoesn’t exist (Zizek, 1994: 1-32). Quite thecontrary, liberal ideological postulates arethe basis for today’s attempts of the Westto impose a new, more sophisticated, formof imperialism (Mattei, 2003). Colemanclaims that “Free and open source hackershave been effective in coding FLOSS aspolitically removed neutrality made materialand socially effective through licenses.”(p.513), but as we saw from the Open Sourcemovement starting goals, and consistentlythrough their acts, they worked hard to con-vince capitalist elite, specifically targetingForbes 500 companies, that one shouldn’t beput off by the radicalism of Free Software.Ian Murdoch’s claims about natural laws ofthe markets are textbook neo-liberal politicalpropaganda. Hence, when Coleman writesabout software participants and how “It isfelt that if FLOSS was directed towards apolitical end, it would sully the purity of thetechnical decision-making process.” (p.512),does that exclude people like Ian Murdoch,or indeed entire ideological leadership ofOpen Source movement? Does it meanthat their persistent sales pitch to capitalist

elites spoiled technical decision makingprocess? If that’s not the case, should wenot conclude that, in order to justify FreeSoftware producers’ own theses on politicalagnosticism, we should treat capitalism aspolitically neutral, hence the Open Sourcesales pitch didn’t compromise on directingFree Software towards a political end, be-cause capitalism itself is politically neutral?In Coleman’s own analysis, in several places,she points out political aspects: how Freeand Open Source Software practices chal-lenge neo-liberal expansion of intellectualproperty rights through copyleft, or how itserved as a template for other social groupstoo (Coleman, 2005, 15-16). How are weto reconcile this with notions of neutrality,or political agnosticism? These seeminglyun-reconcilable sides: anti-capitalist activismand criticism of neo-liberalism versus capi-talism and neo-liberal propaganda, are bothpart of social phenomena which is, and Iagree completely with Coleman here, bothintriguing and frustrating to a researcher.What to me seems to be the source of furthercomplications of this problem, in Coleman’swork, is mixing of Free Software and OpenSource into one term (F/OSS, or FLOSS).Stallman explained the importance of differ-ences between the two on many occasions:Free Software is a social movement; itsfreedoms promote social solidarity, sharingand cooperation; Open Source is a develop-ment methodology considered by some as apragmatic campaign for free software, whilesome reject any ethical and social values offree software and focus only on technicalaspects (Stallman, 2007a).

This strange path of logic of technicaldecision-making process and its purity isuncannily close to the neo-liberal use of thegeneral concept of technical decision-makingin governance, a political ideological conceptwhere opinion of specialized workers is pre-sented as apolitical, thus allowing the rule of”experts”, regardless of the formally existing

5. Hacking the regime of equal rights 17

political power structure. Is it coincidencethat these apolitical specialists, those “ad-ministrators of local consequences of globalhistorical necessity”, as Ranciere (2006: 81)calls them, are always proponents of thesame known principles that neo-liberalismthrives on? How come there are no anar-chist, communist, or even social-democratspecialists whose apolitical purity will drivepolicies of entire states regardless of whattype of government actually rules? The an-swer is unsurprisingly simple, because thosespecialists aren’t neutral, aren’t apolitical.

For Stallman, Free Software is an ethi-cal imperative. I would add that, as analysisshows, Free Software is also a politics act.At the time when rich dominant Westernentities (states, corporations, lobbying orga-nizations), through patents21 and copyrights,work on imposing the regime of their ruleover more of the world’s knowledge andproductive information, at the time ofthis latest wave of enforced commodifica-tion, privatization and centralization ofwealth, Free Software is a movement thatacts in the opposite direction, direction ofde-commodification, enlargement of pub-lic sphere, and decentralization of wealththrough shared software. Open Source is anexplicit, clearly stated, attempt to re-direct,re-package, Free Software towards neo-liberalpolitical actors and their goals. AlthoughColeman is technically right when she writesthat for hackers “ideal and idealized form isa transparent meritocracy.” – Free Softwarecommunity is indeed proud for its opennessto participation – it is worth rememberingthat Stallman’s starting principles are any-thing but meritocratic. He didn’t say thatthose who contribute more to society willget more and better software, or that thosewho can afford more will get more. FreeSoftware freedoms are for all users, withoutany reference, or implied link, to their meritor wealth. This is the radical egalitarian and

political message. Useful example of FreeSoftware’s political potential comes fromPeru, where Free Software became a way toadjust political economic relations in favourof less powerful state, a political questionin the most classical meaning of the word.After long lobbying, government decided toturn completely to Free Software because itis the only way to guarantee its citizens thatthe constitution will be upheld (Chan, 2004).

In his recent book, Badiou (2006) sets upfour main principles for the revolutionary jus-tice: voluntary participation, economic jus-tice (wealth redistribution), terror (punish-ment for sabotage and contra-revolution),trust in all people. Free Software maps wellonto three of these, while missing the terror.However, idea of punishment, base for ter-ror, for sabotage is not unknown to RichardStallman: ”Those who do not share their cre-ativity with society deserve to be punished”(Williams, 2002: 105). During the “Symbol-ics war”, fight with one of the first companiesthat denied access to source code to Stallmanas early as 1982, he was thinking of wrappinghimself in dynamite and blowing whole build-ing out (2002: 97).

5 Hacking the regime of

equal rights

Let’s recall main premises of Marx’s Critiqueof equal right in his Critique of Gotha pro-gramme:

“equal right is an unequal right forunequal labour ... Right, by its verynature, can consist only in the ap-plication of an equal standard; butunequal individuals are measurableonly by an equal standard insofaras they are brought under an equalpoint of view, are taken from onedefinite side only ... one workeris married, another is not; one has

6. Free Software and academia 18

more children than another, and soon and so forth. Thus, with an equalperformance of labour, and hencean equal in the social consumptionfund, one will in fact receive morethan another, one will be richer thananother, and so on. To avoid allthese defects, right, instead of beingequal, would have to be unequal.”(Marx, 1993).

These are the limits of egalitarian potentialof Free Software, or any other system of rightproclaiming principles. Yet, there is an ele-ment of Free Software which fits in Marx’svision of communist society. One of themost important principles Marx envisionedfor communism was ”From each according tohis ability, to each according to his needs!”.To get to that point what had to happen isthat ”all the springs of co-operative wealthflow more abundantly” and only then canbourgeois right be overcome. It has been saidon many occasions that Stallman’s biggesthack is reuse of regime of copyright to ensuresharing in public sphere i.e. to ensure oppo-site of what was intended with the creation ofcopyright. Could we not say that, in a simi-lar fashion, Stallman’s use of concept of rights– which, as Marx so vividly explains, main-tain the economic differences and ensure thatstructure (names of capitalists can change)of economic inequalities in society persists– was also a hack? Core principle in thenormal functioning of the regime of rightson which capitalism thrives is right on prop-erty. Stallman re-conceptualized the idea ofrights to encourage volunteer, co-operativeand decommodified society with the notion ofshared wealth. Can we read openness to par-ticipation of Free Software as a step towardssociety where one contributes according toone’s abilities (from each according to hisability)? Equally, can we read the availabilityof software in public sphere that Free Soft-ware ensures as a step towards society where

one will be able to take what one needs (toeach according to his needs)? Since softwareis a form of wealth, is not sharing of softwarebuilt in cooperation an act which ensures that”springs of co-operative wealth flow moreabundantly”? In short, is not reuse of con-cept of rights another hack of anti-egalitarian,anti-democratic liberal-capitalism by RichardStallman, a hack in the spirit of communismas imagined by Marx?

6 Free Software and

academia

What are the possible consequences/usesof Free Software for academia? Let’s readacademia through Free Software, for achange.

To start with, why should the artifactsof academia not be available for sharing?They are also a product of creative work,indeed, and thus fall under Stallman’scategory of the most valuable contributionto society. How does a digital copy of text,or sound, or video differ from code? In termsof engagement with the material, code getsedited, parts get reused, parts rejected. Theproduct of academic production, other thaneducation for students, is vast amounts ofwritten and audio materials (it is commonfor student to record a lecture in digitalaudio). Yet, not only that all that getslocked up within universities, but it is rarethat it is shared amongst students. Onecould argue that utility of such material is anentirely different kind, since not every lectureis necessarily considered good enough bythe lecturer for wider distribution. However,given the number of students doing audiorecordings those days, distribution of mate-rial is no longer in the hands of academics.It could well prove to be that all it lacks issomeone as determined as Richard Stallman,

6. Free Software and academia 19

or indeed, any other axiomatic revolutionary,who will position his/her truth in terms offidelity to the event, in the sense of Badiou’sreading of Paul.

Why is the Open University the only uni-versity with an intense focus on audio andvideo material and online educational tools?Why are their materials available only tothose who can commit to pay for it? Oncematerials have been produced, given the ex-isting level of ownership of personal comput-ers throughout Western society, the price oftheir digital reproduction is close to zero.Also, if the Open University can do it, socould others, especially given that others canlearn from Open University’s experiences inthe production, management and use of dig-ital learning materials. Yet, despite the ex-isting pioneer model of the Open University,and the largely state-financed production ofeducational materials, access to them remainsclosed in internal campus networks and on-line journals. Those journals have been one ofthe most frustrating issues I have faced dur-ing the past three years of my undergraduateeducation.

Each university subscribes to online jour-nals. Students get access only to those jour-nals to which their university has subscribedtoo. In practice, given the amount of aca-demic publishing, students get access to tinyfraction of what is relevant. If the studenthas multidisciplinary interests, the result iseven worse, since universities only subscribeto a selection of journals that match theirdepartments. How is this relevant to FreeSoftware? Most authors publishing in aca-demic journals do not get paid for what theypublish. Many of them also edit the samejournals without pay too. In other words,most of them are volunteers. What theyget instead is increased potential for futureemployment and future earnings as writers.The same applies to Free Software program-mers; with every job they do as volunteers,future earnings in the form of employment

opportunities, get increased. With the ex-ception of publicly funded projects, program-mers do this work in their own spare time.In the case of academia, roughly speaking,it is a combination of the two: some writingand journal editing is done as part of aca-demic employment while the rest is one dur-ing private time. One significant differenceis that Free Software creates a body of pub-lic software that is today widely used world-wide, reducing the cost of computing. Withacademia, most of the volunteer work, someof which it is already funded by the publicand by current students, is enclosed in on-line databases of journals. The cost of indi-vidual articles is rarely less than the cost ofan entire expensive new book, which meansthat buying any of these is out of the ques-tion. No one buys them. The cost is there toprevent individual access and enforce institu-tional subscriptions only. How did this comeabout? Volunteerism and publicly paid workof academics benefit large corporate publish-ing companies, while students and citizensof states who to a large extent pay for itare denied access to the vast majority of it.Academics are not in a much better positionthough, since they share the destiny of theirstudents, with equally poor access, and mustsettle for any benefits that this might bringto their career. Given that it is difficult tofind a job in academia without publishing insuch journals, the choice that academics haveisn’t really a choice, if they want to work inacademia. Volunteer contribution to corpo-rate publishers resembles a mandatory wel-fare program for private wealth that everyonehas to take part in. Closed access journals area form of privatization by proxy, where thelevel of corruption of public funds dependson set of economic parameters: the level ofpublic funding and the amount of journalspublished by the university, which do bringsome funds back (Taylor and Ruiz III, 2007).Although there are some initiatives for pub-licly funded knowledge to be accessible to the

7. Conclusions 20

public (for Taxpayer Access, 2007), for openaccess to knowledge in general (iCommonssummit, 2006), even for open access to pub-licly funded data (Guardian newspaper initia-tive from 2006), the most interesting develop-ment is in the practice of peer reviewed openaccess journals (of Open Access Journals”,2007), an attempt to maintain the filteringthat academia provides with the benefit ofeasy online publishing provided by the newgeneration of on-line publishing tools. An ini-tiative that came out of meeting in Budapestin 2001 stated that they were inspired by theFree Software movement’s practices and theavailability of the software tools it provides(Initiative, 2007).

In parallel with the rise of Free Software,on the fringes of academia, substantial crit-icism of the regime of intellectual propertyhas arisen. Liang (2004) has elaborated manypoints on how the existing legal framework ofknowledge and culture only came into exis-tence with the rise of global capitalism, pri-marily in twentieth century. One of his claimsis that, contrary to its original purpose ofstriking a balance between the public interestand an incentive for authors to create, today’sregime has arisen in order to prevent, not pro-mote, creativity and invention. These are notradical claims any more, and certainly not onthe fringes of academia only. Recently, someof the more mainstream parts of academiahave been asking why the situation of cul-ture, knowledge and the sciences developedinto such a strict legal regime. For Sackville(2007: 34), it is because the economic well-being of some groups in society depends onthe privatization of resources. In this case,he claims, it is intellectual resources that havebeen under the attack of groups who are wellresourced, organized and have powerful lob-bying mechanisms, direct access to both na-tional governments and the formation of in-ternational treaties. This echoes the findingsof a long anthropological and historical re-search study by Drahos (2006) who sought to

understand the reasons why governments inmany states worldwide were adopting copy-right and patent laws, when there was no un-derstanding of the advantage22 those laws willbring to their economies. The field work forthis study took place over a period of sev-eral years in many cities in Europe, USA andAsia, but four cities, Washington, New York,Brussels and Geneva, emerged as the centresof decision-making and policy-making. Ac-cording to Drahos, it was a highly central-ized, well planned assault on wealth that wasuntil that time not considered to be private.Imperialism of knowledge met with little orno resistance. Networks of corporate lob-byists have linked the intellectual propertyregime with the trade regime. Recommen-dations to governments by private commis-sioned consulting bodies often get translatedinto marching orders. He concludes with theobvious: “Knowledge capitalism cares moreabout its mode of production and monopolyprofits than it does about producing low costmedicines for the poor in developing coun-tries.”. Drahos’ research shows the negativeinfluence on the world that Western assault ofimposition of patents and copyright is having.How can then Free Software, a movement bat-tling for the opposite, for sharing of intellec-tual wealth, a movement which inspired andenabled other movements with similar goals(open access in academia), not be political,regardless of what free software programmersmight claim?

7 Conclusions

In our neo-liberal times, Free Software is arare secular return of thinking beyond theaccountants’ spreadsheets. It is a return toan affirmative, axiomatic, belief in thinkingabout society as one. It divides – as inits sharply defined and defended division be-tween free and non-free software – in orderto unite in a volunteer, co-operative society.

7. Conclusions 21

Free Software is a hack of not just the regimeof copyright, but of the concept of equalrights as well. Some of its goals are the goalsthat Marx has set in his vision of communistsociety. Yet, the Open Source Initiative wasformed by a part of the hacker community tore-package and sell the idea of Free Softwarestripped of its radicalism to the richest corpo-rations in the world. The sociology of hackersand Free Software has been predominantlyunashamedly liberal, which isn’t a problem.The problem starts when such ideological po-sitions are interwoven with theory without re-flection on how those political commitments,affect the theory itself, its coordinates, itspossible and “impossible” outcomes. Part ofthis unspoken political commitment is thatwork of Max Weber has been used exten-sively in various analyses of hackers and FreeSoftware, yet, it is not insights found acrosshis work that have been used, but his mostknown final conclusion alone. From a com-munist, egalitarian, anarchist, anti-capitalistand anti-meritocratic stance, Free Softwarehas hardly been theorized at all. It has beenidealized, and for such idealizations criticised(Rossiter, 2006). The work of Alain Badiouoffers a way to read Free Software as an egali-tarian revolutionary act. The book publishedin 1999 by O’Reilly, in which creators of OpenSource coalition wrote about their work, wasnamed ”Open Sources: Voices from the Rev-olution”. For them, revolution was in mak-ing the world largest corporations invest inand buy into the concept of Free Softwarestripped of its radicalism. The correct namefor such a book should have been Voices fromthe Coup. This is where the line of divisionlies. Social theory, so far, has seemed to beable to avoid reflection on this division. Yet,it is only by insisting on this division thatradical egalitarian potential of Free Softwarecan be rendered visible.

Most of the books and texts written by aca-demics have already been paid for, with theirsalaries, at least in Europe, coming from the

state budget. Why is this material in vastmajority of cases confined to closed univer-sity networks for current students only? Howcome academics, whilst being paid by thestate, work for free for publishers, publisherswho in many cases (especially when it comesto journals) hardly do any work, yet who col-lect the money from books and subscriptionsto journals? Although the raging EU bat-tle for mandatory Open Access for all gov-ernment funded research has been well doc-umented (Poynder, 2007), given that a largepart of all academic books is also written onthe time paid for by public education funds,we should extend the demand for open ac-cess to such works too. These are some ofoutstanding issues related to academia thattheory and practice of Free Software raises. Itis to be hoped that these questions will be ad-dressed in the near future. However, it seemsto me that it is only an act as axiomatic, egal-itarian and divisive as that of Richard Stall-man, and fidelity to the event that gives birthto such an act, in Badiou’s sense, that can an-tagonise these issues to the extent that theycan no longer be ignored.

If we are to agree that democratic pro-cess is a process of subjects who “reconfigurethe distributions of the public and the pri-vate”, who challenge the privatization basedon birth, wealth and ’competence’, privati-zation guarded by the police and the State(Ranciere, 2006: 61-2); if we are to agreethat this process can not be identified withjuridico-political forms, because such formsalways refer to the people, to incompetents(p.54) – Ranciere reminds us that capitalistparliamentary regimes couldn’t justify them-selves if they didn’t refer to the people whovote and thus ’choose’ those who rule and leg-islate on their behalf – it follows that peer-to-peer networks could be seen as such, demo-cratic, processes. Here’s how a definition ofFree Drugs, another possible process of recon-figuration of the public and the private, couldbe inherited from Free Software:

7. Conclusions 22

• The freedom to use the drug, for any pur-pose (freedom 0).

• The freedom to study how the drugworks, and adapt it to your needs (free-dom 1). Access to the drug recipe(blueprint) and acceptance through reg-ulated clinical trials are preconditions forthis.

• The freedom to redistribute copies of thedrug and its recipe (blueprint) so you canhelp your neighbour (freedom 2).

• The freedom to improve the drug, andrelease your improvements to the pub-lic, so that the whole community benefits(freedom 3). Access to the drug recipe(blueprint) and acceptance through reg-ulated clinical trials are preconditions forthis.

NOTES 23

Notes

1Up to date statistics on some aspects ofthis are at http://news.netcraft.com

2A group of influential social actors in UKhave been using Free Software as an exampleof how production and innovation can be in-creased with a model that differs from thepredominant one focused on conceptualiza-tion of new types of property, private own-ership of that new property and its protec-tion by widening and strengthening the lawthat applies to it (copyright and patents).See Adelphi charter website that shows someof the tensions between the multiplicity ofactors/demands for the change in this pre-dominant increase in property and law andactual workings of the national (UK) andsupra-national (EU) institutional frameworksof governance

3Hacker’s manifesto (Wark, 2004) deservesinclusion in this research, but because of itscomplexity and vast amount of attention itneeds, it is too large for this occasion.

4German Chaos Computer Club, one ofthe most known and active network ofhacker’s clubs in the world, added to thosepoints in 1980’s two more: g) don’t litterother people’s data; h) make public dataavailable, protect private data (Club, 2007)

5Notable exception to this that comes tomind quickly is London based small publisherMute whose imprint Mute vol 2 has been lastfew years consistently publishing essays onFree Software related subjects while resistingopportunistic short cuts.

6Although not directly related to hack-ers and computing, Celia Lury’s work (1993:chap.2) offers some riskier and more usefulinsights into the some of the core issues forthe world of hackers, namely lack of pattern,

predictability in production of art and the dif-ficulty of fully commodifying art under capi-talism, and the reproducibility of art throughtechnology.

7Throughout the book, Weber showedhow diverse protestant branches, sects, are,and how careful one has to be when linkingProtestantism with capitalism. Yet, he nev-ertheless does it, shielding himself, in the be-ginning of the conclusive chapter of the book,called Asceticism and the spirit of capitalism,with the remark: “For the purposes of thischapter, though by no means for all purposes,we can treat ascetic Protestantism as a singlewhole.” (Weber, 1965: 36)

8Several issues central to debates on in-triguing aspects of hackers and Free Software,especially those related to organization of hu-man groups engaged in production, are cen-tral points of Weber’s work (Weber, 1964).

9See http://www.oekonux.org/

10In The Revenge of the Hackers, Eric Ray-mond talks about Open Source goals: ”Oursuccess after Netscape would depend on re-placing the negative FSF stereotypes withpositive stereotypes of our own–pragmatictales, sweet to managers’ and investors’ ears,of higher reliability and lower cost and betterfeatures. In conventional marketing terms,our job was to re-brand the product, andbuild its reputation into one the corporateworld would hasten to buy.” (DiBona et al.,1999)

11Recent Demos report has six references tothe Open Source, and zero to the Free Soft-ware. (Gallagher Niamh, 2007)

12Lack of understanding of the differencebetween Open Source and Free Software isbest seen when in one of the masterpieces ofrecent social theory term ”open-source” is ref-erenced with the ”Free as in Freedom” book

NOTES 24

on Stallman (Negri and Hardt, 2004: 300)

13Their conferences, books, lobbying were,are, at the heart of the Open Source move-ment. Their attempts to explain the logicbehind their activism are still without serioustheoretical reflection. For example, in OpenSource and the Commoditization of Software,we can learn from Ian Murdoch, founder ofDebian, one of the most important and pop-ular distributions of Linux, that ”standard-ization, and thus commodification, are bothnatural market forces as well as key events inhuman history” (DiBona et al., 2005)!

14The source code is blueprint written in acomputer programming language, from whichcomputer applications are assembled.

15See file called CodingStyle in the Linuxkernel v1.3.53 from the 1995, also available athttp://www.linuxhq.com/kernel/

16One about which text editor is better touse, Vi or Emacs, is one of the best knownreligious wars amongst hackers.

17Quote is available athttp://briandeer.com/social/thatcher-society.htm

18See http://claire3.free.fr as an exampleof striving for elegance in programming lan-guage design.

19The most consistent reporting on this hasbeen by french monthly newspaper Le MondeDiplomatique. For example, Halimi (2002)provides a short history of neo-liberal victoryto become a world dominant ideology, whileCassen (2005) explains why voting “NO” inthe past French referendum for the new EUconstitution would not be a bad thing.

20Indymedia is a network of alter-globalization collectives and websites basedon the principle of open publishing.

21Steep rise in the number of patentsgranted and submitted in USA since 1980 isvisible from the official state statistics (USAPatent and Trademark Office, 2006).

22Goldstein (1994) provides a goodoverview of history of copyright in USAand UK, and makes clear who its originalbeneficiaries were. See the chapter Historyof an idea.

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