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

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

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

[PAGE xv]

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

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

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

[PAGE xvi]

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

Two Bits

EXPERIMENTAL FUTURES: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices

A series edited by Michael M. J. Fischer and Joseph Dumit
[PAGE ii]


2008

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS ??? DURHAM AND LONDON

[PAGE iii]

THE CULTURAL

SIGNIFICANCE OF

FREE SOFTWARE

Two Bits

CHRISTOPHER M. KELTY

[PAGE iv]

© 2008 Duke University Press

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞

Designed by C. H. Westmoreland

Typeset in Charis (an Open Source font) by Achorn International

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data and republication acknowledgments appear on the last printed pages of this book.

Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, Calif. 94305, U.S.A. “NonCommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), which provided funds to help support the electronic interface of this book.

Two Bits is accessible on the Web at twobits.net.

[PAGE v]

To my parents, Anne and Ted

[PAGE vi: BLANK]
[PAGE vii]

Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

Part I The Internet
1. Geeks and Recursive Publics 27

2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists 64

Part II Free Software

3. The Movement 97

4. Sharing Source Code 118

5. Conceiving Open Systems 143

6. Writing Copyright Licenses 179

7. Coordinating Collaborations 210

Part III Modulations

8. "If We Succeed, We Will Disappear" 243

9. Reuse, Modification, and the Nonexistence of Norms 269

Conclusion: The Cultural Consequences of Free Software 301

Notes 311

Bibliography 349

Index 367

[PAGE viii: BLANK]

Bibliography

Abbate, Janet. Inventing the Internet. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999.

Abbate, Janet, and Brian Kahin, eds. Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.

Abelson, Harold, and Gerald J. Sussman. The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1985.

Akera, Atsushi. “Volunteerism and the Fruits of Collaboration: The IBM User Group SHARE.” Technology and Culture 42.4 (October 2001): 710–736.

Akera, Atsushi, and Frederik Nebeker, eds. From 0 to 1: An Authoritative History of Modern Computing. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983.

Anderson, Jane, and Kathy Bowery. “The Imaginary Politics of Access to Knowledge.” Paper presented at the Contexts of Invention Conference, Cleveland, Ohio, 20–23 April 2006.

Aneesh, A. Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006.

[PAGE 350]

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2d ed. University of Chicago Press, 1958.

Balkin, Jack. Cultural Software: A Theory of Ideology. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998.

Baraniuk, Richard, and W. Joseph King. “Connexions: Sharing Knowledge and Building Communities.” Sloan-C Review: Perspectives in Quality Online Education 4.9 (September 2005): 8. http://www.aln.org/publications/view/v4n9/coverv4n9.htm.

Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. “The California Ideology.” Science as Culture 26 (1996): 44–72.

Bardini, Thierry. Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Co-evolution and the Origins of Personal Computing. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Barlow, John Perry. “The Economy of Ideas.” Wired 2.3 (March 1994).

Barry, Andrew. Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society. London: Athlone Press, 2001.

Battaglia, Deborah. “‘For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future’: Raëlian Clonehood in the Public Sphere.” In E.T. Culture: Anthropology in Outerspaces, ed. Deborah Battaglia, 149–79. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005.

Benkler, Yochai. “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm.” Yale Law Journal 112.3 (2002): 369–446.

———. “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.” Yale Law Journal 114.2 (2004): 273–358.

———. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006.

Bergin, Thomas J., Jr., and Richard G. Gibson Jr., eds. History of Programming Languages 2. New York: Association for Computing Machinery Press, 1996.

Berners-Lee, Tim, with Mark Fischetti. Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Its Inventor. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1999.

Biagioli, Mario. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993.

Boczkowski, Pablo. Digitizing the News: Innovation in Online Newspapers. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

Bollier, David. Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Bornstein, George, and Ralph G. Williams, eds. Palimpsest: Editorial Theory in the Humanities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993.

[PAGE 351]

Borsook, Paulina. Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech. New York: Public Affairs, 2000.

Bowker, Geoffrey. Memory Practices in the Sciences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Bowker, Geoffrey C., and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

Boyle, James. “Conservatives and Intellectual Property.” Engage 1 (April 2000): 83. http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/Federalist.htm.

———. “Mertonianism Unbound? Imagining Free, Decentralized Access to Most Cultural and Scientific Material.” In Understanding Knowledge as a Common: From Theory to Practice, ed. Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, 123–44. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. http://www.james-boyle.com/mertonianism.pdf.

———. “A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?” Duke Law Journal 47.1 (October 1997): 87–116.

———, ed. “The Public Domain.” Special issue, Law and Contemporary Problems 66.1–2 (winter–spring 2003).

———. “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain.” In James Boyle, ed., “The Public Domain,” special issue, Law and Contemporary Problems 66.1–2 (winter–spring 2003): 33–74.

Brock, Gerald. The Second Information Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Brooks, Frederick. The Mythical Man-month: Essays on Software Engineering. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1975.

Brown, Michael. “Heritage as Property.” In Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy, ed. Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, 49–68. Oxford: Berg, 2004.

———. Who Owns Native Culture? Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.

Callon, Michel. The Laws of the Markets. London: Blackwell, 1998.

———. “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St Brieuc Bay.” In Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge, ed. John Law, 196–233. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986.

Callon, Michel, Cécile Méadel, and Vololona Rabeharisoa. “The Economy of Qualities.” Economy and Society 31.2 (May 2002): 194–217.

Campbell-Kelly, Martin. From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

[PAGE 352]

Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray. Computer: A History of the Information Machine. New York: Basic Books, 1996.

Carrington, Paul D., and Erika King. “Law and the Wisconsin Idea.” Journal of Legal Education 47 (1997): 297.

Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business and Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

———. The Rise of the Network Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996.

Castoriadis, Cornelius. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.

Cerf, Vinton G., and Robert Kahn. “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection.” IEEE Transactions on Communications 22.5 (May 1974): 637–48.

Chadwick, Owen. The Early Reformation on the Continent. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Chan, Anita. “Coding Free Software, Coding Free States: Free Software Legislation and the Politics of Code in Peru.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (summer 2004): 531–45.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988.

———. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994.

Chatterjee, Partha. “A Response to Taylor’s ‘Modes of Civil Society.’” Public Culture 3.1 (1990): 120–21.

Christen, Kim. “Gone Digital: Aboriginal Remix and the Cultural Commons.” International Journal of Cultural Property 12 (August 2005): 315–45.

———. “Tracking Properness: Repackaging Culture in a Remote Australian Town.” Cultural Anthropology 21.3 (August 2006): 416–46.

Christensen, Clayton. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997.

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Clark, David. “The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols.” 1988. In Computer Communications: Architectures, Protocols, and Standards, 3d ed., ed. William Stallings, 54–62. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1992.

Cohen, Julie, Lydia Pallas Loren, Ruth Gana Okediji, and Maureen O’Rourke, eds. Copyright in a Global Information Economy. Aspen, Colo.: Aspen Law and Business Publishers, 2001.

[PAGE 353]

Coleman, E. Gabriella. “The Political Agnosticism of Free and Open Source Software and the Inadvertent Politics of Contrast.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (summer 2004): 507–19.

———. “The Social Construction of Freedom: Hackers, Ethics and the Liberal Tradition.” Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 2005.

Comaroff, Jean, and John Comaroff. Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992.

Comer, Douglas E. Internetworking with TCP/IP. 4th ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 2000.

———. Operating System Design. 1st ed. 2 vols. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1984.

Coombe, Rosemary, and Andrew Herman. “Rhetorical Virtues: Property, Speech, and the Commons on the World-Wide Web.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (summer 2004): 559–574.

———. “Your Second Life? Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Property in Online Digital Gaming.” Cultural Studies 20.2–3 (March–May 2006): 184–210.

Crain, Patricia. The Story of A: The Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

Critchley, Terry A., and K. C. Batty. Open Systems: The Reality. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1993.

Cussins, Charis. “Ontological Choreography: Agency through Objectification in Infertility Clinics.” Social Studies of Science 26.3 (1996): 575–610.

Daston, Lorraine, ed. Biographies of Scientific Objects. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

Davis, Martin. Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer. W. W. Norton, 2001.

Dean, Jodi. “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere.” Constellations 10.1 (March 2003): 95.

DeLanda, Manuel. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum Press, 2002.

———. “Open Source: A Movement in Search of a Philosophy.” Paper presented to the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., 2001. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/host/delanda/pages/opensource.htm.

———. A Thousand Years of Non-linear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

Dewey, John. Freedom and Culture. 1939; repr., Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1989.

———. Liberalism and Social Action. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1935.

———. The Public and Its Problems. Chicago: Swallow Press, 1927; repr., Sage Books / Swallow Press, 1954.

[PAGE 354]

Dibbell, Julian. Play Money: Or, How I Quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

———. “A Rape in Cyberspace.” Village Voice 38.51 (December 1993): 21.

Dibona, Chris, et al. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Press, 1999.

DiMaggio, Paul, Esther Hargittai, C. Celeste, and S. Shafer. “From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use: A Literature Review and Agenda for Research on Digital Inequality.” In Social Inequality, ed. Kathryn Neckerman, 355–400. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2004.

Downey, Gary L. The Machine in Me: An Anthropologist Sits among Computer Engineers. London: Routledge, 1998.

Doyle, Richard. Wetwares: Experiments in Postvital Living. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

Drake, William. “The Internet Religious War.” Telecommunications Policy 17 (December 1993): 643–49.

Dreyfus, Hubert. On the Internet. London: Routledge, 2001.

Dumit, Joseph. Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.

Eagleton, Terry. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso Books, 1991.

———. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1990.

Edwards, Paul N. The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in the Cold War. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

———. “Infrastructure and Modernity: Force, Time, and Social Organization in the History of Sociotechnical Systems.” In Modernity and Technology, ed. Thomas Misa, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, 185–225. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.

Faulkner, W. “Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering.” Social Studies of Science 30.5 (2000): 759–92.

Febvre, Lucien, and Henri-Jean Martin. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450–1800. Trans. David Gerard. 1958; repr., London: Verso, 1976.

Feller, Joseph, Brian Fitzgerald, Scott A. Hissam, and Karim R. Lakhani, eds. Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. 3rd ed. 1975. London: Verso Books, 1993.

Fielding, Roy T. “Shared Leadership in the Apache Project.” Communications of the ACM 42.4 (April 1999): 42–43.

[PAGE 355]

Fischer, Franklin M. Folded, Spindled, and Mutilated. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983.

Fischer, Michael M. J. “Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.” Cultural Anthropology 22.1 (Feburary 2007): 1–65.

———. Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

———. “Worlding Cyberspace.” In Critical Anthropology Now, ed. George Marcus, 245–304. Santa Fe, N.M.: School for Advanced Research Press, 1999.

Flichy, Patrice. The Internet Imaginaire. Trans. Liz Carey-Libbrecht. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007.

Fortun, Kim. Advocating Bhopal: Environmentalism, Disaster, New Global Orders. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

———. “Figuring Out Ethnography.” In Fieldwork Isn’t What It Used to Be, ed. George Marcus and James Faubion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming.

Fortun, Kim, and Mike Fortun. “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology.” American Anthropologist 107.1 (2005): 43–54.

Foucault, Michel. La naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979). Paris: Gallimard / Le Seuil, 2004.

———. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, ed. P. Rabinow, 101–20. New York: Pantheon Books, 1984.

———. 1997. “What Is Enlightenment?” In Ethics, ed. Paul Rabinow, 303–17. Vol. 2 of The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984. New York: New Press, 1997.

Freeman, Carla. High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000.

Freeman, Jo, and Victoria Johnson, eds. Waves of Protest: Social Movements since the Sixties. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999.

Galison, Peter. How Experiments End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

———. Image and Logic: The Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Galloway, Alexander. Protocol, or How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

Gancarz, Mike. Linux and the UNIX Philosophy. Boston: Digital Press, 2003.

———. The Unix Philosophy. Boston: Digital Press, 1994.

Gaonkar, Dilip. “Toward New Imaginaries: An Introduction.” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 1–19.

[PAGE 356]

Geertz, Clifford. “Ideology as a Cultural System.” In The Interpretation of Cultures, 193–233. New York: Basic Books, 1973.

Gerlach, Luther P., and Virginia H. Hine. People, Power, Change: Movements of Social Transformation. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970.

Ghosh, Rishab Ayer. “Cooking Pot Markets: An Economic Model for the Trade in Free Goods.” First Monday 3.3 (1998). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/ghosh/.

Gillespie, Tarleton. “Engineering a Principle: ‘End to End’ in the Design of the Internet.” Social Studies of Science 36.3 (2006): 427–57.

Golub, Alex. “Copyright and Taboo.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (2004): 521–30.

Gray, Pamela. Open Systems: A Business Strategy for the 1990s. London: McGraw-Hill, 1991.

Green, Ellen, and Allison Adam. Virtual Gender: Technology, Consumption and Identity. London: Routledge, 2001.

Green, Ian. The Christian’s ABCs: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c1530–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

———. Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Green, Sarah, Penny Harvey, and Hannah Knox. “Scales of Place and Networks: An Ethnography of the Imperative to Connect through Information and Communication Technologies.” Current Anthropology 46.5 (December 2005): 805–26.

Grier, David Alan. When Computers Were Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Grier, David Alan, and Mary Campbell. “A Social History of Bitnet and Listserv 1985–1991.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (April–June 2000): 32–41.

Grint, Keith, and Rosalind Gill. The Gender-Technology Relation: Contemporary Theory and Research. London: Taylor and Francis, 1995.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Trans. Thomas Burger, with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991.

Hafner, Katie. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998.

Hamerly, Jim, and Tom Paquin, with Susan Walton. “Freeing the Source.” In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, by Chris Dibona et al., 197–206. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Press, 1999.

Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (1968): 1,243–48.

[PAGE 357]

Hashagen, Ulf, Reinhard Keil-Slawik, and Arthur Norberg, eds. History of Computing—Software Issues. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2002.

Hauben, Michael, and Rhonda Hauben. Netizens: On the History and Impact of Usenet and the Internet. Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.

Hauser, Marc. Moral Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. New York: Ecco Press, 2006.

Hayden, Cori. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

Hayek, Friedrich A. Law, Legislation and Liberty. Vol. 1, Rules and Order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.

Helmreich, Stefan. Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Herring, Susan C. “Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication.” In Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices, ed. Rob Kling and Charles Dunlop, 476–89. 2d ed. Orlando: Academic Press, 1995.

Hess, Charlotte, and Elinor Ostrom, eds. Understanding Knowledge as a Common: From Theory to Practice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006.

Himanen, Pekka. The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age. New York: Random House, 2001.

Hine, Christine. Virtual Ethnography. London: Sage, 2000.

Holmes, Douglas, and George Marcus. “Cultures of Expertise and the Manage¬ment of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography.” In Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems, ed. Aiwa Ong and Stephen J. Collier, 235–52. Boston: Blackwell, 2005.

Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “The Path of Law.” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 457.

Hopkins, Patrick D., ed. Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender and Technology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Huberman, Bernardo A., ed. The Ecology of Computation. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1988.

Huxley, Julian. New Bottles for New Wine: Essays. New York: Harper, 1957.

Jaszi, Peter, and Martha Woodmansee, eds. The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994.

Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

[PAGE 358]

Jorgensen, Neils. “Incremental and Decentralized Integration in FreeBSD.” In Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software, ed. Feller et al., 227–44. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

———. “Putting It All in the Trunk: Incremental Software Development in the FreeBSD Open Source Project.” Information Systems Journal 11.4 (2001): 321–36.

Kahn, Robert, et al. “The Evolution of the Internet as a Global Information System.” International Information and Libraries Review 29 (1997): 129–51.

Kahn, Robert, and Vint Cerf. “A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication.” IEEE Transactions on Communications Com-22.5 (May 1974): 637–44.

Keating, Peter, and Alberto Cambrosio. Biomedical Platforms: Realigning the Normal and the Pathological in Late-twentieth-century Medicine. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Kelty, Christopher, ed. “Culture’s Open Sources.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (summer 2004): 499–506. http://aq.gwu.edu/archive/table_summer04.htm.

———. “Punt to Culture.” Anthropological Quarterly 77.3 (summer 2004): 547–58.

Kendall, Lori. “‘Oh No! I’m a NERD!’ Hegemonic Masculinity on an Online Forum.” Gender and Society 14.2 (2000): 256–74.

Keves, Brian William. “Open Systems Formal Evaluation Process.” Paper presented at the USENIX Association Proceedings of the Seventh Systems Administration Conference (LISA VII), Monterey, California, 1–5 November 1993.

Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. Boston: Little, Brown, 1981.

Kirkup, Gill, Linda Janes, Kath Woodward, and Fiona Hovenden. The Gendered Cyborg: A Reader. London: Routledge, 2000.

Kittler, Friedrich. Discourse Networks 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer, with Chris Cullens. 1985; repr., Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990.

———. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffry Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. 1986; repr., Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kling, Rob. Computeriza¬tion and Controversy: Value Conflicts and Social Choices. San Diego: Academic Press, 1996.

Knuth, Donald. The Art of Computer Programming. 3d ed. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1997.

Kohler, Robert. Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

[PAGE 359]

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso, 1985.

Landecker, Hannah. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007.

Latour, Bruno. “Drawing Things Together.” In Representation in Scientific Practice, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar, 19–68. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990.

———. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

———. Re-assembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

———. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.

———. “What Rules of Method for the New Socio-scientific Experiments.” In Experimental Cultures: Configurations between Science, Art and Technology 1830–1950, Conference Proceedings, 123. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2001.

Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Law, John. Aircraft Stories: Decentering the Object in Technoscience. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

———. “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering: The Case of Portuguese Expansion.” In The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes, and T. J. Pinch, 111–134. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987.

Law, John, and John Hassard. Actor Network Theory and After. Sociological Review Monograph. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell 1999.

Leach, James, Dawn Nafus, and Berbard Krieger. Gender: Integrated Report of Findings. Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Policy Support (FLOSSPOLS) D 16, 2006. http://www.jamesleach.net/downloads/FLOSSPOLS-D16-Gender_Integrated_Report_of_Findings.pdf.

Lee, J. A. N., R. M. Fano, A. L. Scherr, F. J. Corbato, and V. A. Vyssotsky. “Project MAC.” Annals of the History of Computing 14.2 (1992): 9–42.

Lerner, Josh, and Jean Tirole. “Some Simple Economics of Open Source.” Industrial Economics 50.2 (June 2002): 197–234.

Lessig, Lawrence. Code: Version 2.0. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

———. Code and Other Laws of Cyber Space. New York: Basic Books, 1999.

———. Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity. New York: Penguin, 2003.

———. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random House, 2001.

[PAGE 360]

———. “The New Chicago School.” Legal Studies 27.2 (1998): 661–91.

Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Libes, Don, and Sandy Ressler. Life with UNIX: A Guide for Everyone. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1989.

Light, Jennifer. “When Computers Were Women.” Technology and Culture 40.3 (July 1999): 455–483.

Lions, John. Lions’ Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition with Source Code. 1977; repr., San Jose: Peer to Peer Communications, 1996.

Lippmann, Walter. The Phantom Public. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

Litman, Jessica. Digital Copyright. New York: Prometheus Books, 2001.

Liu, Alan. The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

MacKenzie, Adrian. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. Digital Formations Series. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

MacKenzie, Donald A. Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001.

Mahoney, Michael. “Finding a History for Software Engineering.” Annals of the History of Computing 26.1 (2004): 8–19.

———. “The Histories of Computing(s).” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30.2 (2005): 119–35.

———. “In Our Own Image: Creating the Computer.” In The Changing Image of the Sciences, ed. Ida Stamhuis, Teun Koetsier, and Kees de Pater, 9–28. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002.

———. “The Roots of Software Engineering.” CWI Quarterly 3.4 (1990): 325–34.

———. “The Structures of Computation.” In The First Computers: History and Architectures, ed. Raul Rojas and Ulf Hashagen, 17–32. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Malamud, Carl. Exploring the Internet: A Technical Travelogue. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Mannheim, Karl. Ideology and Utopia: Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1946.

Marcus, George. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Marcus, George, and James Clifford. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

Marcus, George, and Michael M. J. Fischer. Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

[PAGE 361]

Margolis, Jane, and Allen Fisher. Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002.

Martin, James. Viewdata and the Information Society. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1982.

Matheson, Peter. The Imaginative World of the Reformation. Edinburgh, Scotland: T and T Clark, 2000.

McKenna, Regis. Who’s Afraid of Big Blue? How Companies Are Challenging IBM—and Winning. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1989.

McKusick, M. Kirk. “Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix: From AT&T-owned to Freely Redistributable.” In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Chris Dibona et al., 31–46. ACM Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Press, 1999.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966.

———. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 1964; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994.

Merges, Robert, Peter Menell, and Mark Lemley, eds. Intellectual Property in the New Technological Age. 3d ed. New York: Aspen Publishers, 2003.

Merton, Robert. “The Normative Structure of Science.” In The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, 267–80. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. The Internet: An Ethnography. Oxford: Berg, 2000.

Misa, Thomas, Philip Brey, and Andrew Feenberg, eds. Modernity and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003.

Mockus, Audris, Roy T. Fielding, and James Herbsleb. “Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla.” ACM Transactions in Software Engineering and Methodology 11.3 (2002): 309–46.

Mol, Annemarie. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.

Moody, Glyn. Rebel Code: Inside Linux and the Open Source Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus, 2001.

Mooers, Calvin. “Computer Software and Copyright.” Computer Surveys 7.1 (March 1975): 45–72.

Mueller, Milton. Ruling the Root: Internet Governance and the Taming of Cyberspace. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004.

Naughton, John. A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2000.

Noble, David. “Digital Diploma Mills: The Automation of Higher Education.” First Monday 3.1 (5 January 1998). http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_1/.

[PAGE 362]

Norberg, Arthur L., and Judy O’Neill. A History of the Information Techniques Processing Office of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Minneapolis: Charles Babbage Institute, 1992.

———. Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962–1986. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

Ong, Walter. Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason. 1983; repr., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Perens, Bruce. “The Open Source Definition.” In Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, Dibona et al., 171–188. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Press, 1999. http://perens.com/OSD.html and http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/perens.html.

Pfaffenberger, Bryan. “‘A Standing Wave in the Web of our Communications’: USENet and the Socio-technical Construction of Cyberspace Values.” In From Usenet to CoWebs: Interacting with Social Information Spaces, ed. Christopher Lueg and Danyel Fisher, 20–43. London: Springer, 2003.

Rabinow, Paul. Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment. Prince¬ton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

———. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

Ratto, Matt. “Embedded Technical Expression: Code and the Leveraging of Functionality.” Information Society 21.3 (July 2005): 205–13.

———. “The Pressure of Openness: The Hybrid work of Linux Free/Open Source Kernel Developers.” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San Diego, 2003.

Raymond, Eric S. The Art of UNIX Programming. Boston: Addison-Wesley, 2004.

———. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Press, 2001. See esp. “Homesteading the Noosphere,” 79–135.

———, ed. The New Hackers’ Dictionary. 3d ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. Towards a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. 1993; repr., Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

Ricoeur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

[PAGE 363]

Riles, Annelise. “Real Time: Unwinding Technocratic and Anthropological Knowledge.” American Ethnologist 31.3 (August 2004): 392–405.

Ritchie, Dennis. “The UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective.” Bell System Technical Journal 57.6, pt. 2 (July–August 1978). http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/retroindex.html.

Rose, Mark. Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Salus, Peter. Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1995.

———. A Quarter Century of UNIX. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1994.

Schmidt, Susanne K., and Raymund Werle. Coordinating Technology: Studies in the International Standardization of Telecommunications. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.

Segaller, Stephen. Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. New York: TV Books, 1998.

Shaikh, Maha, and Tony Cornford. “Version Management Tools: CVS to BK in the Linux Kernel.” Paper presented at the Twenty-fifth International Conference on Software Engineering—Taking Stock of the Bazaar: The Third Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering, Portland, Oregon, 3–10 May 2003.

Shapin, Steven. The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Shapin, Steven, and Simon Schaffer. Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 1759; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Stallings, William. Data and Computer Communications. London: Macmillan, 1985.

Stallman, Richard. “The GNU Manifesto.” Dr. Dobb’s 10.3 (March 1985): 30–35.

St. Amour, Paul K. The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Star, Susan Leigh, ed. The Cultures of Computing. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1995.

Star, Susan Leigh, and Karen Ruhleder. “Steps towards an Ecology of Infrastructure: Complex Problems in Design and Access for Large-scale Collaborative Systems.” Information Systems Research 7 (1996): 111–33.

Stephenson, Neal. In the Beginning Was the Command Line. New York: Avon / Perennial, 1999.

[PAGE 364]

Sunshine, Carl. Computer Network Architectures and Protocols. 2d ed. New York: Plenum Press, 1989.

Takahashi, Shigeru. “The Rise and Fall of the Plug Compatible Manufacturers.” IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (January–March 2005): 4–16.

Tanenbaum, Andrew. Computer Networks. 1st ed. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1981.

———. Operating Systems: Design and Implementation. 1st ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1987.

———. “The UNIX Marketplace in 1987: Life, the UNIverse and Everything.” In Proceedings of the Summer 1987 USENIX Conference, 419–24. Phoenix, Ariz.: USENIX, 1987.

Taylor, Charles. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.

———. “Modes of Civil Society.” Public Culture 3.1 (1990): 95–132.

———. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

———. Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Thompson, Charis. Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Thompson, Ken, and Dennis Ritchie. “The UNIX Time-Sharing System.” Communications of the ACM 17.7 (July 1974): 365–75.

Tichy, Walter F. “RCS: A System for Version Control.” Software: Practice and Experience 15.7 (July 1985): 637–54.

Torvalds, Linus, with David Diamond. Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Tuomi, Ilkka. Networks of Innovation: Change and Meaning in the Age of the Internet. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Turing, Alan. “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Ent¬scheidungsproblem.” Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 2.1 (1937): 230.

Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.

———. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984.

Turner, Fred. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

———. “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy.” Technology and Culture 46.3 (July 2005): 485–512.

[PAGE 365]

Ullman, Ellen. The Bug: A Novel. New York: Nan A. Talese, 2003.

———. Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997.

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs; The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York: New York University Press, 2001.

Vetter, Greg R. “The Collaborative Integrity of Open-Source Software.” Utah Law Review 2004.2 (2004): 563–700.

———. “‘Infectious Open Source Software: Spreading Incentives or Promoting Resistance?” Rutgers Law Journal 36.1 (fall 2004): 53–162.

Vinge, Vernor. “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era” (1993). http://www.rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html (accessed 18 August 2006).

Von Hippel, Eric. Democratizing Innovation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005.

Wajcman, Judy. Feminism Confronts Technology. Cambridge: Polity, 1991.

———. “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies: In What State Is the Art?” Social Studies of Science 30.3 (2000): 447–64.

Waldrop, Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal. New York: Viking, 2002.

Walsh, John, and Todd Bayma. “Computer Networks and Scientific Work.” Social Studies of Science 26.3 (August 1996): 661–703.

Warner, Michael. The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990.

———. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49–90.

———. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books, 2003.

Wayner, Peter. Free for All: How LINUX and the Free Software Movement Undercut the High-Tech Titans. New York: Harper Business, 2000.

Weber, Max. “Objectivity in the Social Sciences and Social Policy.” In The Methodology of the Social Sciences, trans. and ed. Edward Shils and Henry A. Finch, 50–112. New York: Free Press, 1949.

Weber, Steven. The Success of Open Source. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Wexelblat, Richard L., ed. History of Programming Languages. New York: Academic Press, 1981.

Williams, Sam. Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman’s Crusade for Free Software. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Press, 2002.

[PAGE 366]

Wilson, Fiona. “Can’t Compute, Won’t Compute: Women’s Participation in the Culture of Computing.” New Technology, Work and Employment 18.2 (2003): 127–42.

Wilson, Samuel M., and Leighton C. Peterson. “The Anthropology of Online Communities.” Annual Reviews of Anthropology 31 (2002): 449–67.

Xiang, Biao. “Global Bodyshopping”: An Indian Labor System in the Information Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

Žižek, Slavoj, ed. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso, 1994.

Introduction

Throughout this volume, some messages referenced are cited by their “Message-ID,” which should allow anyone interested to access the original messages through Google Groups (http://groups.google.com).

1 A Note on Terminology: There is still debate about how to refer to Free Software, which is also known as Open Source Software. The scholarly community has adopted either FOSS or FLOSS (or F/LOSS): the former stands for the Anglo-American Free and Open Source Software; the latter stands for the continental Free, Libre and Open Source Software. Two Bits sticks to the simple term Free Software to refer to all of these things, except where it is specifically necessary to differentiate two or more names, or to specify people or events so named. The reason is primarily aesthetic and political, but Free Software is also the older term, as well as the one that includes issues of moral and social order. I explain in chapter 3 why there are two terms.

[PAGE 312]

2 Michael M. J. Fischer, “Culture and Cultural Analysis as Experimental Systems.”

3 So, for instance, when a professional society founded on charters and ideals for membership and qualification speaks as a public, it represents its members, as when the American Medical Association argues for or against changes to Medicare. However, if a new group—say, of nurses—seeks not only to participate in this discussion—which may be possible, even welcomed—but to change the structure of representation in order to give themselves status equal to doctors, this change is impossible, for it goes against the very aims and principles of the society. Indeed, the nurses will be urged to form their own society, not to join that of the doctors, a proposition which gives the lie to the existing structures of power. By contrast, a public is an entity that is less controlled and hence more agonistic, such that nurses might join, speak, and insist on changing the terms of debate, just as patients, scientists, or homeless people might. Their success, however, depends entirely on the force with which their actions transform the focus and terms of the public. Concepts of the public sphere have been roundly critiqued in the last twenty years for presuming that such “equality of access” is sufficient to achieve representation, when in fact other contextual factors (race, class, sex) inherently weight the representative power of different participants. But these are two different and overlapping problems: one cannot solve the problem of pernicious, invisible forms of inequality unless one first solves the problem of ensuring a certain kind of structural publicity. It is precisely the focus on maintaining publicity for a recursive public, over against massive and powerful corporate and governmental attempts to restrict it, that I locate as the central struggle of Free Software. Gender certainly influences who gets heard within Free Software, for example, but it is a mistake to focus on this inequality at the expense of the larger, more threatening form of political failure that Free Software addresses. And I think there are plenty of geeks—man, woman and animal—who share this sentiment.

4 Wikipedia is perhaps the most widely known and generally familiar example of what this book is about. Even though it is not identified as such, it is in fact a Free Software project and a “modulation” of Free Software as I describe it here. The non–technically inclined reader might keep Wikipedia in mind as an example with which to follow the argument of this book. I will return to it explicitly in part 3. However, for better or for worse, there will be no discussion of pornography.

5 Although the term public clearly suggests private as its opposite, Free Software is not anticommercial. A very large amount of money, both real and notional, is involved in the creation of Free Software. The term re[PAGE 313]cursive market could also be used, in order to emphasize the importance (especially during the 1990s) of the economic features of the practice. The point is not to test whether Free Software is a “public” or a “market,” but to construct a concept adequate to the practices that constitute it.

6 See, for example, Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67–74.

7 Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, esp. 27–43.

8 Critiques of the demand for availability and the putatively inherent superiority of transparency include Coombe and Herman, “Rhetorical Virtues” and “Your Second Life?”; Christen, “Gone Digital”; and Anderson and Bowery, “The Imaginary Politics of Access to Knowledge.”

9 This description of Free Software could also be called an “assemblage.” The most recent source for this is Rabinow, Anthropos Today. The language of thresholds and intensities is most clearly developed by Manuel DeLanda in A Thousand Years of Non-linear History and in Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy. The term problematization, from Rabinow (which he channels from Foucault), is a synonym for the phrase “reorientation of knowledge and power” as I use it here.

10 See Kelty, “Culture’s Open Sources.”

11 The genealogy of the term commons has a number of sources. An obvious source is Garrett Hardin’s famous 1968 article “The Tragedy of the Commons.” James Boyle has done more than anyone to specify the term, especially during a 2001 conference on the public domain, which included the inspired guest-list juxtaposition of the appropriation-happy musical collective Negativland and the dame of “commons” studies, Elinor Ostrom, whose book Governing the Commons has served as a certain inspiration for thinking about commons versus public domains. Boyle, for his part, has ceaselessly pushed the “environmental” metaphor of speaking for the public domain as environmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s spoke for the environment (see Boyle, “The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain” and “A Politics of Intellectual Property”). The term commons is useful in this context precisely because it distinguishes the “public domain” as an imagined object of pure public transaction and coordination, as opposed to a “commons,” which can consist of privately owned things/spaces that are managed in such a fashion that they effectively function like a “public domain” is imagined to (see Boyle, “The Public Domain”; Hess and Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons).

12 Marcus and Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique; Marcus and Clifford, Writing Culture; Fischer, Emergent Forms of Life and the Anthropological Voice; Marcus, Ethnography through Thick and Thin; Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason and Anthropos Today.

[PAGE 314]

13 The language of “figuring out” has its immediate source in the work of Kim Fortun, “Figuring Out Ethnography.” Fortun’s work refines two other sources, the work of Bruno Latour in Science in Action and that of Hans-Jorg Rheinberger in Towards History of Epistemic Things. Latour describes the difference between “science made” and “science in the making” and how the careful analysis of new objects can reveal how they come to be. Rheinberger extends this approach through analysis of the detailed practices involved in figuring out a new object or a new process—practices which participants cannot quite name or explain in precise terms until after the fact.

14 Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

15 The literature on “virtual communities,” “online communities,” the culture of hackers and geeks, or the social study of information technology offers important background information, although it is not the subject of this book. A comprehensive review of work in anthropology and related disciplines is Wilson and Peterson, “The Anthropology of Online Communities.” Other touchstones are Miller and Slater, The Internet; Carla Freeman, High Tech and High Heels in the Global Economy; Hine, Virtual Ethnography; Kling, Computerization and Controversy; Star, The Cultures of Computing; Castells, The Rise of the Network Society; Boczkowski, Digitizing the News. Most social-science work in information technology has dealt with questions of inequality and the so-called digital divide, an excellent overview being DiMaggio et al., “From Unequal Access to Differentiated Use.” Beyond works in anthropology and science studies, a number of works from various other disciplines have recently taken up similar themes, especially Adrian MacKenzie, Cutting Code; Galloway, Protocol; Hui Kyong Chun, Control and Freedom; and Liu, Laws of Cool. By contrast, if social-science studies of information technology are set against a background of historical and ethnographic studies of “figuring out” problems of specific information technologies, software, or networks, then the literature is sparse. Examples of anthropology and science studies of figuring out include Barry, Political Machines; Hayden, When Nature Goes Public; and Fortun, Advocating Bhopal. Matt Ratto has also portrayed this activity in Free Software in his dissertation, “The Pressure of Openness.”

16 In addition to Abbate and Salus, see Norberg and O’Neill, Transforming Computer Technology; Naughton, A Brief History of the Future; Hafner, Where Wizards Stay Up Late; Waldrop, The Dream Machine; Segaller, Nerds 2.0.1. For a classic autodocumentation of one aspect of the Internet, see Hauben and Hauben, Netizens.

17 Kelty, “Culture’s Open Sources”; Coleman, “The Social Construction of Freedom”; Ratto, “The Pressure of Openness”; Joseph Feller et al., Per[PAGE 315]spectives on Free and Open Source Software; see also http://freesoftware.mit.edu/, organized by Karim Lakhani, which is a large collection of work on Free Software projects. Early work in this area derived both from the writings of practitioners such as Raymond and from business and management scholars who noticed in Free Software a remarkable, surprising set of seeming contradictions. The best of these works to date is Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source. Weber’s conclusions are similar to those presented here, and he has a kind of cryptoethnographic familiarity (that he does not explicitly avow) with the actors and practices. Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks extends and generalizes some of Weber’s argument.

18 Max Weber, “Objectivity in the Social Sciences and Social Policy,” 68.

19 Despite what might sound like a “shoot first, ask questions later” approach, the design of this project was in fact conducted according to specific methodologies. The most salient is actor-network theory: Latour, Science in Action; Law, “Technology and Heterogeneous Engineering”; Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation”; Latour, Pandora’s Hope; Latour, Re-assembling the Social; Callon, Laws of the Markets; Law and Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After. Ironically, there have been no actor-network studies of networks, which is to say, of particular information and communication technologies such as the Internet. The confusion of the word network (as an analytical and methodological term) with that of network (as a particular configuration of wires, waves, software, and chips, or of people, roads, and buses, or of databases, names, and diseases) means that it is necessary to always distinguish this-network-here from any-network-whatsoever. My approach shares much with the ontological questions raised in works such as Law, Aircraft Stories; Mol, The Body Multiple; Cussins, “Ontological Choreography”; Charis Thompson, Making Parents; and Dumit, Picturing Personhood.

20 I understand a concern with scientific infrastructure to begin with Steve Shapin and Simon Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air Pump, but the genealogy is no doubt more complex. It includes Shapin, The Social History of Truth; Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier; Galison, How Experiments End and Image and Logic; Daston, Biographies of Scientific Objects; Johns, The Nature of the Book. A whole range of works explore the issue of scientific tools and infrastructure: Kohler, Lords of the Fly; Rheinberger, Towards a History of Epistemic Things; Landecker, Culturing Life; Keating and Cambrosio, Biomedical Platforms. Bruno Latour’s “What Rules of Method for the New Socio-scientific Experiments” provides one example of where science studies might go with these questions. Important texts on the subject of technical infrastructures include Walsh and Bayma, “Computer Networks and Scientific Work”; Bowker and Star, Sorting Things Out; Edwards, The [PAGE 316] Closed World; Misa, Brey, and Feenberg, Modernity and Technology; Star and Ruhleder, “Steps Towards an Ecology of Infrastructure.”

21 Dreyfus, On the Internet; Dean, “Why the Net Is Not a Public Sphere.”

22 In addition, see Lippmann, The Phantom Public; Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Latour and Weibel, Making Things Public. The debate about social imaginaries begins alternately with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities or with Cornelius Castoriadis’s The Imaginary Institution of Society; see also Chatterjee, “A Response to Taylor’s ‘Modes of Civil Society’”; Gaonkar, “Toward New Imaginaries”; Charles Taylor, “Modes of Civil Society” and Sources of the Self.

1. Geeks and Recursive Publics

1 For the canonical story, see Levy, Hackers. Hack referred to (and still does) a clever use of technology, usually unintended by the maker, to achieve some task in an elegant manner. The term has been successfully redefined by the mass media to refer to computer users who break into and commit criminal acts on corporate or government or personal computers connected to a network. Many self-identified hackers insist that the criminal element be referred to as crackers (see, in particular, the entries on “Hackers,” “Geeks” and “Crackers” in The Jargon File, http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/, also published as Raymond, The New Hackers’ Dictionary). On the subject of definitions and the cultural and ethical characteristics of hackers, see Coleman, “The Social Construction of Freedom,” chap. 2.

2 One example of the usage of geek is in Star, The Cultures of Computing. Various denunciations (e.g., Barbrook and Cameron, “The California Ideology”; Borsook, Technolibertarianism) tend to focus on journalistic accounts of an ideology that has little to do with what hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs actually make. A more relevant categorical distinction than that between hackers and geeks is that between geeks and technocrats; in the case of technocrats, the “anthropology of technocracy” is proposed as the study of the limits of technical rationality, in particular the forms through which “planning” creates “gaps in the form that serve as ‘targets of intervention’” (Riles, “Real Time,” 393). Riles’s “technocrats” are certainly not the “geeks” I portray here (or at least, if they are, it is only in their frustrating day jobs). Geeks do have libertarian, specifically Hayekian or Feyerabendian leanings, but are more likely to see technical failures not as failures of planning, but as bugs, inefficiencies, or occasionally as the products of human hubris or stupidity that is born of a faith in planning.

[PAGE 317]

3 See The Geek Code, http://www.geekcode.com/.

4 Geeks are also identified often by the playfulness and agility with which they manipulate these labels and characterizations. See Michael M. J. Fischer, “Worlding Cyberspace” for an example.

5 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 86.

6 On the subject of imagined communities and the role of information technologies in imagined networks, see Green, Harvey, and Knox, “Scales of Place and Networks”; and Flichy, The Internet Imaginaire.

7 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 32.

8 Ibid., 33–48. Taylor’s history of the transition from feudal nobility to civil society to the rise of republican democracies (however incomplete) is comparable to Foucault’s history of the birth of biopolitics, in La naissance de la biopolitique, as an attempt to historicize governance with respect to its theories and systems, as well as within the material forms it takes.

9 Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 2.

10 Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System”; Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia. Both, of course, also signal the origin of the scientific use of the term proximately with Karl Marx’s “German Ideology” and more distantly in the Enlightenment writings of Destutt de Tracy.

11 Geertz, “Ideology as a Cultural System,” 195.

12 Ibid., 208–13.

13 The depth and the extent of this issue is obviously huge. Ricoeur’s Lectures on Ideology and Utopia is an excellent analysis to the problem of ideology prior to 1975. Terry Eagleton’s books The Ideology of the Aesthetic and Ideology: An Introduction are Marxist explorations that include discussions of hegemony and resistance in the context of artistic and literary theory in the 1980s. Slavoj Žižek creates a Lacanian-inspired algebraic system of analysis that combines Marxism and psychoanalysis in novel ways (see Žižek, Mapping Ideology). There is even an attempt to replace the concept of ideology with a metaphor of “software” and “memes” (see Balkin, Cultural Software). The core of the issue of ideology as a practice (and the vicissitudes of materialism that trouble it) are also at the heart of works by Pierre Bourdieu and his followers (on the relationship of ideology and hegemony, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy). In anthropology, see Comaroff and Comaroff, Ethnography and the Historical Imagination.

14 Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, 10.

15 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 23.

16 Ibid., 25.

17 Ibid., 26–27.

[PAGE 318]

18 Ibid., 28.

19 The question of gender plagues the topic of computer culture. The gendering of hackers and geeks and the more general exclusion of women in computing have been widely observed by academics. I can do no more here than direct readers to the increasingly large and sophisticated literature on the topic. See especially Light, “When Computers Were Women”; Turkle, The Second Self and Life on the Screen. With respect to Free Software, see Nafus, Krieger, Leach, “Patches Don’t Have Gender.” More generally, see Kirkup et al., The Gendered Cyborg; Downey, The Machine in Me; Faulkner, “Dualisms, Hierarchies and Gender in Engineering”; Grint and Gill, The Gender-Technology Relation; Helmreich, Silicon Second Nature; Herring, “Gender and Democracy in Computer-Mediated Communication”; Kendall, “‘Oh No! I’m a NERD!’”; Margolis and Fisher, Unlocking the Clubhouse; Green and Adam, Virtual Gender; P. Hopkins, Sex/Machine; Wajcman, Feminism Confronts Technology and “Reflections on Gender and Technology Studies”; and Fiona Wilson, “Can’t Compute, Won’t Compute.” Also see the novels and stories of Ellen Ullman, including Close to the Machine and The Bug: A Novel.

20 Originally coined by Steward Brand, the phrase was widely cited after it appeared in Barlow’s 1994 article “The Economy of Ideas.”

21 On the genesis of “virtual communities” and the role of Steward Brand, see Turner, “Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy.”

22 Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,” 51.

23 Ibid., 51–52. See also Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 69.

24 The rest of this message can be found in the Silk-list archives at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2869 (accessed 18 August 2006). The reference to “Fling” is to a project now available at http://fling.sourceforge.net/ (accessed 18 August 2006). The full archives of Silk-list can be found at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/ and the full archives of the FoRK list can be found at http://www.xent.com/mailman/listinfo/fork/.

25 Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.”

26 Moore’s Law—named for Gordon Moore, former head of Intel—states that the speed and capacity of computer central processing units (CPUs) doubles every eighteen months, which it has done since roughly 1970. Metcalfe’s Law—named for Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet—states that the utility of a network equals the square of the number of users, suggesting that the number of things one can do with a network increases exponentially as members are added linearly.

27 This quotation from the 1990s is attributed to Electronic Frontier Foundation’s founder and “cyber-libertarian” John Gilmore. Whether there [PAGE 319] is any truth to this widespread belief expressed in the statement is not clear. On the one hand, the protocol to which this folklore refers—the general system of “message switching” and, later, “packet switching” invented by Paul Baran at RAND Corporation—does seem to lend itself to robustness (on this history, see Abbate, Inventing the Internet). However, it is not clear that nuclear threats were the only reason such robustness was a design goal; simply to ensure communication in a distributed network was necessary in itself. Nonetheless, the story has great currency as a myth of the nature and structure of the Internet. Paul Edwards suggests that both stories are true (“Infrastructure and Modernity,” 216–20, 225n13).

28 Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. See also Gillespie, “Engineering a Principle” on the related history of the “end to end” design principle.

29 This is constantly repeated on the Internet and attributed to David Clark, but no one really knows where or when he stated it. It appears in a 1997 interview of David Clark by Jonathan Zittrain, the transcript of which is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/jzfallsem//trans/clark/ (accessed 18 August 2006).

30 Ashish “Hash” Gulhati, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3125.

31 Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 9 September 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/3127. Python is a programming language. Mojonation was a very promising peer-to-peer application in 2000 that has since ceased to exist.

32 In particular, this project focuses on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the User Datagram Protocol (UDP), and the Domain Name System (DNS). The first two have remained largely stable over the last thirty years, but the DNS system has been highly politicized (see Mueller, Ruling the Root).

33 On Internet standards, see Schmidt and Werle, Coordinating Technology; Abbate and Kahin, Standards Policy for Information Infrastructure.

2. Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists

1 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment,” 319.

2 Stephenson, In the Beginning Was the Command Line.

3 Message-ID: tht55.221960$701.2930569@news4.giganews.com.

4 The Apple-Microsoft conflict was given memorable expression by Umberto Eco in a widely read piece that compared the Apple user interface [PAGE 320] to Catholicism and the PC user interface to Protestantism (“La bustina di Minerva,” Espresso, 30 September 1994, back page).

5 One entry on Wikipedia differentiates religious wars from run-of-the-mill “flame wars” as follows: “Whereas a flame war is usually a particular spate of flaming against a non-flamy background, a holy war is a drawn-out disagreement that may last years or even span careers” (“Flaming [Internet],” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_war [accessed 16 January 2006]).

6 Message-ID: 369tva$8l0@csnews.cs.colorado.edu.

7 Message-ID: c1dz4.145472$mb.2669517@news6.giganews.com. It should be noted, in case the reader is unsure how serious this is, that EGCS stood for Extended GNU Compiler System, not Ecumenical GNU Compiler Society.

8 “Martin Luther, Meet Linus Torvalds,” Salon, 12 November 1998, http://archive.salon.com/21st/feature/1998/11/12feature.html (accessed 5 February 2005).

9 See http://www.stallman.org/saint.html (accessed 5 February 2005) and http://www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/religion/ (accessed 5 February 2005). On EMACS, see chapter 6.

10 Message-ID: 6ms27l$6e1@bgtnsc01.worldnet.att.net. In one very humorous case the comparison is literalized “Microsoft acquires Catholic Church” (Message-ID: gaijin-870804300-dragonwing@sec.lia.net).

11 Paul Fusco, “The Gospel According to Joy,” New York Times, 27 March 1988, Sunday Magazine, 28.

12 See, for example, Matheson, The Imaginative World of the Reformation. There is rigorous debate about the relation of print, religion, and capitalism: one locus classicus is Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, which was inspired by McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy. See also Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England and The Christian’s ABCs; Chadwick, The Early Reformation on the Continent, chaps. 1–3.

13 Crain, The Story of A, 16–17.

14 Ibid., 20–21.

15 At a populist level, this was captured by John Perry Barlow’s “Declaration of Independence of the Internet,” http://homes.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html.

16 Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment,” 309–10.

17 Ibid., 310.

18 Ibid., 310.

19 Adrian Gropper, interview by author, 28 November 1998.

20 Adrian Gropper, interview by author, 28 November 1998.

21 Sean Doyle, interview by author, 30 March 1999.

[PAGE 321]

22 Feyerabend, Against Method, 215–25.

23 One of the ways Adrian discusses innovation is via the argument of the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma. It describes “sustaining vs. disruptive” technologies as less an issue of how technologies work or what they are made of, and more an issue of how their success and performance are measured. See Adrian Gropper, “The Internet as a Disruptive Technology,” Imaging Economics, December 2001, http://www.imagingeconomics.com/library/200112-10.asp (accessed 19 September 2006).

24 On kinds of civic duty, see Fortun and Fortun, “Scientific Imaginaries and Ethical Plateaus in Contemporary U.S. Toxicology.”

25 There is, in fact, a very specific group of people called transhumanists, about whom I will say very little. I invoke the label here because I think certain aspects of transhumanism are present across the spectrum of engineers, scientists, and geeks.

26 See the World Transhumanist Association, http://transhumanism.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003) or the Extropy Institute, http://www.extropy.org/ (accessed 1 December 2003). See also Doyle, Wetwares, and Battaglia, “For Those Who Are Not Afraid of the Future,” for a sidelong glance.

27 Huxley, New Bottles for New Wine, 13–18.

28 The computer scientist Bill Joy wrote a long piece in Wired warning of the outcomes of research conducted without ethical safeguards and the dangers of eugenics in the past, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired 8.4 [April 2000], http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html (accessed 27 June 2005).

29 Vinge, “The Coming Technological Singularity.”

30 Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 16 May 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2410.

31 Eugen Leitl, e-mail to Silk-list mailing list, 7 August 2000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/2932.

32 Friedrich A. Hayek, Law, Legislation and Liberty, 1:20.

3. The Movement

1 For instance, Richard Stallman writes, “The Free Software movement and the Open Source movement are like two political camps within the free software community. Radical groups in the 1960s developed a reputation for factionalism: organizations split because of disagreements on details of strategy, and then treated each other as enemies. Or at least, such is the [PAGE 322] image people have of them, whether or not it was true. The relationship between the Free Software movement and the Open Source movement is just the opposite of that picture. We disagree on the basic principles, but agree more or less on the practical recommendations. So we can and do work together on many specific projects. We don’t think of the Open Source movement as an enemy. The enemy is proprietary software” (“Why ‘Free Software’ Is Better than ‘Open Source,’” GNU’s Not Unix! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-for-freedom.html [accessed 9 July 2006]). By contrast, the Open Source Initiative characterizes the relationship as follows: “How is ‘open source’ related to ‘free software’? The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for free software. It’s a pitch for ‘free software’ because it works, not because it’s the only right thing to do. We’re selling freedom on its merits” (http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/faq.php [accessed 9 July 2006]). There are a large number of definitions of Free Software: canonical definitions include Richard Stallman’s writings on the Free Software Foundation’s Web site, www.fsf.org, including the “Free Software Definition” and “Confusing Words and Phrases that Are Worth Avoiding.” From the Open Source side there is the “Open Source Definition” (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/). Unaffiliated definitions can be found at www.freedomdefined.org.

2 Moody, Rebel Code, 193.

3 Frank Hecker, quoted in Hamerly and Paquin, “Freeing the Source,” 198.

4 See Moody, Rebel Code, chap. 11, for a more detailed version of the story.

5 Bruce Perens, “The Open Source Definition,” 184.

6 Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source.

7 “Netscape Announces Plans to Make Next-Generation Communicator Source Code Available Free on the Net,” Netscape press release, 22 January 1998, http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease558.html (accessed 25 Sept 2007).

8 On the history of software development methodologies, see Mahoney, “The Histories of Computing(s)” and “The Roots of Software Engineering.”

9 Especially good descriptions of what this cycle is like can be found in Ullman, Close to the Machine and The Bug.

10 Jamie Zawinski, “resignation and postmortem,” 31 March 1999, http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

[PAGE 323]

15 “Open Source Pioneers Meet in Historic Summit,” press release, 14 April 1998, O’Reilly Press, http://press.oreilly.com/pub/pr/796.

16 See Hamerly and Paquin, “Freeing the Source.” The story is elegantly related in Moody, Rebel Code, 182–204. Raymond gives Christine Petersen of the Foresight Institute credit for the term open source.

17 From Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The changelog is available online only: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/.

18 Josh McHugh, “For the Love of Hacking,” Forbes, 10 August 1998, 94–100.

19 On social movements—the closest analog, developed long ago—see Gerlach and Hine, People, Power, Change, and Freeman and Johnson, Waves of Protest. However, the Free Software and Open Source Movements do not have “causes” of the kind that conventional movements do, other than the perpetuation of Free and Open Source Software (see Coleman, “Political Agnosticism”; Chan, “Coding Free Software”). Similarly, there is no single development methodology that would cover only Open Source. Advocates of Open Source are all too willing to exclude those individuals or organizations who follow the same “development methodology” but do not use a Free Software license—such as Microsoft’s oft-mocked “shared-source” program. The list of licenses approved by both the Free Software Foundation and the Open Source Initiative is substantially the same. Further, the Debian Free Software Guidelines and the “Open Source Definition” are almost identical (compare http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html with http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ [both accessed 30 June 2006]).

20 It is, in the terms of Actor Network Theory, a process of “enrollment” in which participants find ways to rhetorically align—and to disalign—their interests. It does not constitute the substance of their interest, however. See Latour, Science in Action; Callon, “Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation.”

21 Coleman, “Political Agnosticism.”

22 See, respectively, Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and Williams, Free as in Freedom.

23 For example, Castells, The Internet Galaxy, and Weber, The Success of Open Source both tell versions of the same story of origins and development.

4. Sharing Source Code

1 “Sharing” source code is not the only kind of sharing among geeks (e.g., informal sharing to communicate ideas), and UNIX is not the only [PAGE 324] shared software. Other examples that exhibit this kind of proliferation (e.g., the LISP programming language, the TeX text-formatting system) are as ubiquitous as UNIX today. The inverse of my argument here is that selling produces a different kind of order: many products that existed in much larger numbers than UNIX have since disappeared because they were never ported or forked; they are now part of dead-computer museums and collections, if they have survived at all.

2 The story of UNIX has not been told, and yet it has been told hundreds of thousands of times. Every hacker, programmer, computer scientist, and geek tells a version of UNIX history—a usable past. Thus, the sources for this chapter include these stories, heard and recorded throughout my fieldwork, but also easily accessible in academic work on Free Software, which enthusiastically participates in this potted-history retailing. See, for example, Steven Weber, The Success of Open Source; Castells, The Internet Galaxy; Himanen, The Hacker Ethic; Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. To date there is but one detailed history of UNIX—A Quarter Century of UNIX, by Peter Salus—which I rely on extensively. Matt Ratto’s dissertation, “The Pressure of Openness,” also contains an excellent analytic history of the events told in this chapter.

3 The intersection of UNIX and TCP/IP occurred around 1980 and led to the famous switch from the Network Control Protocol (NCP) to the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol that occurred on 1 January 1983 (see Salus, Casting the Net).

4 Light, “When Computers Were Women”; Grier, When Computers Were Human.

5 There is a large and growing scholarly history of software: Wexelblat, History of Programming Languages and Bergin and Gibson, History of Programming Languages 2 are collected papers by historians and participants. Key works in history include Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog; Akera and Nebeker, From 0 to 1; Hashagen, Keil-Slawik, and Norberg, History of Computing—Software Issues; Donald A. MacKenzie, Mechanizing Proof. Michael Mahoney has written by far the most about the early history of software; his relevant works include “The Roots of Software Engineering,” “The Structures of Computation,” “In Our Own Image,” and “Finding a History for Software Engineering.” On UNIX in particular, there is shockingly little historical work. Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray devote a mere two pages in their general history Computer. As early as 1978, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were reflecting on the “history” of UNIX in “The UNIX Time-Sharing System: A Retrospective.” Ritchie maintains a Web site that contains a valuable collection of early documents and his own reminiscences (http://www[PAGE 325].cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/). Mahoney has also conducted interviews with the main participants in the development of UNIX at Bell Labs. These interviews have not been published anywhere, but are drawn on as background in this chapter (interviews are in Mahoney’s personal files).

6 Turing, “On Computable Numbers.” See also Davis, Engines of Logic, for a basic explanation.

7 Sharing programs makes sense in this period only in terms of user groups such as SHARE (IBM) and USE (DEC). These groups were indeed sharing source code and sharing programs they had written (see Akera, “Volunteerism and the Fruits of Collaboration”), but they were constituted around specific machines and manufacturers; brand loyalty and customization were familiar pursuits, but sharing source code across dissimilar computers was not.

8 See Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 142–47.

9 A large number of editors were created in the 1970s; Richard Stallman’s EMACS and Bill Joy’s vi remain the most well known. Douglas Engelbart is somewhat too handsomely credited with the creation of the interactive computer, but the work of Butler Lampson and Peter Deutsch in Berkeley, as well as that of the Multics team, Ken Thompson, and others on early on-screen editors is surely more substantial in terms of the fundamental ideas and problems of manipulating text files on a screen. This story is largely undocumented, save for in the computer-science literature itself. On Engelbart, see Bardini, Bootstrapping.

10 See Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog.

11 Ibid., 107.

12 Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, 203–5.

13 Ultimately, the Department of Justice case against IBM used bundling as evidence of monopolistic behavior, in addition to claims about the creation of so-called Plug Compatible Machines, devices that were reverse-engineered by meticulously constructing both the mechanical interface and the software that would communicate with IBM mainframes. See Franklin M. Fischer, Folded, Spindled, and Mutilated; Brock, The Second Information Revolution.

14 The story of this project and the lessons Brooks learned are the subject of one of the most famous software-development handbooks, The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick Brooks.

15 The computer industry has always relied heavily on trade secret, much less so on patent and copyright. Trade secret also produces its own form of order, access, and circulation, which was carried over into the early software industry as well. See Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine for a classic account of secrecy and competition in the computer industry.

[PAGE 326]

16 On time sharing, see Lee et al., “Project MAC.” Multics makes an appearance in nearly all histories of computing, the best resource by far being Tom van Vleck’s Web site http://www.multicians.org/.

17 Some widely admired technical innovations (many of which were borrowed from Multics) include: the hierarchical file system, the command shell for interacting with the system; the decision to treat everything, including external devices, as the same kind of entity (a file), the “pipe” operator which allowed the output of one tool to be “piped” as input to another tool, facilitating the easy creation of complex tasks from simple tools.

18 Salus, A Quarter Century of UNIX, 33–37.

19 Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, 143.

20 Ritchie’s Web site contains a copy of a 1974 license (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/licenses.html) and a series of ads that exemplify the uneasy positioning of UNIX as a commercial product (http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/unixad.html). According to Don Libes and Sandy Ressler, “The original licenses were source licenses. . . . [C]ommercial institutions paid fees on the order of $20,000. If you owned more than one machine, you had to buy binary licenses for every additional machine [i.e., you were not allowed to copy the source and install it] you wanted to install UNIX on. They were fairly pricey at $8000, considering you couldn’t resell them. On the other hand, educational institutions could buy source licenses for several hundred dollars—just enough to cover Bell Labs’ administrative overhead and the cost of the tapes” (Life with UNIX, 20–21).

21 According to Salus, this licensing practice was also a direct result of Judge Thomas Meaney’s 1956 antitrust consent decree which required AT&T to reveal and to license its patents for nominal fees (A Quarter Century of UNIX, 56); see also Brock, The Second Information Revolution, 116–20.

22 Even in computer