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.
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.
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.
1
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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/.
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.
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]).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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/.
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.”
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).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 th