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August 01, 2004
Chapter Ten: Linux and Utopia
On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ stock index, which tracked many of the companies riding the dot-com boom, stood at an all-time high of 5133. By April 14, the NASDAQ had falen to 3321, a loss of more than 35%. The dot-com boom was over.[1]
In the aftermath of the crash, many of the promises of the cybertopians have begun to ring hollow. A new wave of public skepticism toward the official rhetoric of cyberlibertarianism and technological determinism has emerged. Relying on Moore’s Law, the unhampered free market, and the logic of the stock exchanges hadn’t turned out to be a guarantee of the “twenty-five years of prosperity, freedom and a better environment for the whole world” predicted in “The Long Boom,” an infamous Wired cover story of 1997.[2] The rise of the internet hadn’t repealed the business cycle after all.
[Insert Figure 10.1. No caption – cover of Wired, July 1997]
Having passed through the hothouse environment of the late 1990s, in which any new internet-based business model could quickly command ludicrous levels of financing and hype, we are in a position to take stock of what computers have come to mean to us, and to evaluate the promise they still hold. The danger of this moment is that it may easily turn to pessimism; many of the hopes for new technology died in the spring of 2000. But the failure of overhyped attempts to exploit irrational investment does not discredit those plans and projects which were more than get-rich-quick schemes. Out of the ashes of the dot-com boom are emerging new cybercultural visions, new models for economic life in the twenty-first century.
Of these visions, one of the most compelling and influential is the open source movement, an attempt to develop cheap, freely distributed, easily adaptable alternatives to the Microsoft Windows operating system. The open source alternative to Windows is known as Linux. Linux had its moment in the dot-com sun, when developers Red Hat Systems went public and produced many instant open source millionaires. But now that the hype has passed, we’re in a position to more clearly see the promises – and limitations – of open source as an alternate model for software development, intellectual property, and perhaps more general distribution of wealth in an information society.
What Is Linux?
Linux is a computer operating system, like Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Macintosh OS. An operating system is more than just another program. It’s the software beneath the software – the underlying code which turns a piece of hardware into a functioning computer.
What makes Linux different from other operating systems is that it’s “open source.” This means that it can’t be “copyrighted” in the traditional sense – rather, it is distributed under a General Public License, which “allows free use, modification and distribution of the software and any changes to it, restricted only by the stipulation that those who received the software pass it with identical freedoms to obtain sources code, modify it, and redistribute it.”[3] Rather than a copyright, the GPL is often referred to as a “copyleft,” and open source software is sometimes called “freeware.” Linux software is developed collaboratively, among a large group of volunteer hackers around the world, communicating via the internet. Several for-profit companies, such as Red Hat and Caldera, sell packaged versions of Linux along with documentation and product support, but the same software is also available for free online.
What interests me about Linux, and open source in general, isn’t the technical specifics, but how it’s emerged as a space in which to experiment with economic and social relations outside the bounds of what we normally think of as capitalism. The development of open source software, of course, is specialized work, which has emerged in the context of a specific, distinct community. But what has captured the imaginations of so many developers and users of Linux is its broader utopian promise – the way it seems to point to a future organized around a very different set of social relations than those of late capitalism. I don’t assume that open source development, as a distinct practice, could necessarily serve as a template for a broad range of economic relations. Not every product needs to be debugged; not every worker has the skills of a Linux programmer. But I do think that the open source vision of unalienated, uncommodified labor can serve as a model for what we might want work to look like in the twenty-first century.
Of course, as Fredric Jameson tells us, the flip side of Utopia is reification.[4] Capitalism omnivorously absorbs dissent through the process of commodification. Radical ideas are appropriated, packaged, and sold through the very system they sought to criticize. As we have seen, early radical visions of the PC as a tool for the democratization of technology were successfully packaged and sold, first by Apple, then by Microsoft. The PC certainly did change the world – hegemony is always a process of negotiation – and certainly many more people have access to the power of computing technology than ever before. But the mass proliferation of the PC failed to fundamentally alter structures of power. This is a familiar story – think of the dilemma of independent rock bands wary of “selling out” to major labels. To reach the public sphere, you need to get your product out into the marketplace. But once you do, you’re a part of the system you’re trying to oppose.
Tiziana Terranova makes a version of this argument in “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.”[5] Terranova argues that rather than being a resistant alternative to capitalist production, the free labor donated by open source programmers, amateur web designers, chat room moderators, and the other unpaid volunteers who populate cyberspace is best understood as an integral part of capitalism in a digital economy. These intellectual workers provide much of the “content” which makes the web so lucrative for AOL, Microsoft, and the other organizations that have no compunctions about making money off volunteers’ work.
Similarly, Andrew Ross in “The Mental Labor Problem”[6] describes the submission of so many software developers to exploitative conditions (80-hour work weeks, temporary contracts, lack of health benefits) – and even the glamorization of those conditions (e.g., the cult of the caffeine-fueled “all-nighter”) – as an example of the spread of the “cultural discount” to an ever-increasing portion of the postmodern workforce. The “cultural discount” describes the phenomenon of creative professionals who are willing to accept wages lower than they could receive in other professions, in return for the opportunity to perform more personally satisfying labor. Ross’s point is that this system – rooted in the bohemian’s Romantic rejection of the market – is now a structural component of the capitalist knowledge economy, allowing, for example, universities to get away with paying miniscule wages to teaching assistants and adjuncts, overproduced by the graduate system and desperate to retain a foothold in the life of the mind.
Linux developers might be seen as the quintessential victims of the creative discount, donating the intellectual capital that enriches corporations like Red Hat and IBM. But what’s so distinctive about open source is how it structurally short-circuits the process of appropriation and commodification. Linux developers donate their labor, but with a particularly resilient set of strings attached in the form of the GPL. What the strings require, ironically, is that no other strings be attached – that the developers’ work must remain freely available and modifiable. Thus, while the cultural discount often entails ceding control of one’s work in exchange for access to an audience – think of all the musicians forced to cede ownership rights of their master recordings to their record labels – Linux developers forego remuneration in return for ongoing assurance of creative control.
Corporations such as Microsoft recognize the fundamental threat this system offers to their current regime of intellectual property. Microsoft has even begun red-baiting the open source community. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has described Linux as “communism”,[7] and told one reporter, “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”[8] Windows chief Jim Allchin likewise stated, “I’m an American. I believe in the American Way. I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policy makers to understand the threat.”[9]
The Microsoft monopoly has stifled innovation, squashed competition, and raised the cost of computing beyond the reach of many. While the cost for most computer hardware has dropped significantly in the last decade, the cost of Microsoft Windows hasn’t. Today, a substantial part of the purchase price of almost every computer sold goes to the “Microsoft tax,” since it’s automatically installed on your computer whether you ask for or not, and the licensing fees are figured into the price of the computer.
Increasingly, individual users, organizations, and governments around the world are rejecting the Microsoft tax, turning to Linux as a cheap, flexible alternative. Many Third World countries have discovered that installing Linux operating systems on bare-bones computers can create huge savings, making it practical to bring computers to schools, libraries, and government agencies.
The Politics of Open Source
So, if Linux offers a utopian alternative to capitalist relations as we know them today, what does this model consist of? What are the politics of open source development?
That’s not an easy question to answer, because the meanings of Linux – the narratives which attempt to explain and draw lessons from this inspiring project – are themselves a subject of conflict. Scouring the net for different perspectives on Linux, I’ve encountered an astounding range of competing explanations. I’ve seen open source described as communism, socialism, anarchism, a form of academic research, a gift economy, an e-lance economy, and the triumph of the free market. Granted, not all the descriptions are incompatible. But, as we’ll see, I think some concurrently-held ideas are more incompatible than their holders admit.
There’s a struggle going on right now to define the significance of Linux, this startling, inspiring success story. In the rest of this chapter, I’d like to look at the two most influential conceptions of Linux: the visions put forward by Eric Raymond and Richard Stallman. Raymond and Stallman have much in common: both are computer programmers whose work has been critical for the development of Linux. Stallman developed the GNU operating system, which was the antecedent for Linux; Raymond has helped put together many critical pieces of open source software, including the program fetchmail. Both have become advocates for and theorists of Linux, winning converts with influential essays– Stallman’s “GNU Manifesto,” Raymond’s “Cathedral and the Bazaar.” Both are what we could call, using Antonio Gramsci’s term, “organic intellectuals” – not academics studying a community from outside that community, but intellectuals who have emerged from within the community they write about, who are attempting to help their own community define itself, both internally and for the world outside.
While Raymond and Stallman speak from within the same community of Linux programmers, they represent almost diametrically opposed views about the politics and ultimate significance of their projects. Raymond celebrates open source as the triumph of the free market, and is most interested in open source as an efficient tool for software development. Stallman anchors his vision for free software in a broader critique of the system of intellectual property. Raymond’s and Stallman’s visions are often labeled “libertarian” and “communist,” respectively. But I don’t think that’s quite right. Both Raymond and Stallman start from the libertarian values so endemic in hacker culture – they just end up in different places. Raymond is better characterized as a corporate libertarian, and Stallman as a left-libertarian.
I’m firmly in the Stallman camp. In the rest of this chapter, I want to look at what I see as the limitations of Raymond’s approach, and the virtues of Stallman’s.
Eric Raymond: Open Source as Corporate Libertarianism
First, a little background on Raymond. Eric Raymond is a software developer who’s been very active for almost twenty years in the development of open source software tools. He’s also become a kind of hacker linguist and anthropologist, compiling the New Hacker’s Dictionary[10] and writing a widely-read “Brief History of Hackerdom.”[11] In the last few years, Raymond has become perhaps the most influential ideologue of open source. Raymond’s self-appointed role has been to explain open source to skeptical businesspeople, as part of the attempt to widen the influence of Linux and win the war against Microsoft. His essay, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” helped convince Netscape to make Navigator, its flagship internet browser program, open source. And his exposure and analysis of leaked internal memoranda from Microsoft, dubbed the “Halloween Documents,” inspired hackers with the news that the Behemoth itself is taking Linux very seriously indeed. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” is now included in a collection of essays of the same name, published by open source publisher O’Reilly & Associates.[12]
Raymond’s politics are a familiar form of hacker libertarianism – what Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have described as “the Californian Ideology,”[13] and Paula Barsook[14] labels “cyberselfishness.” Hacker libertarianism values the free flow of information above all else, and typically celebrates the unfettered capitalist marketplace as the great maximizer of liberty. Libertarianism is of course skeptical of all concentrations of power, but tends to worry much more about the government than about corporate power – other than perhaps, Microsoft, which as a monopoly impedes the free market. As we saw in Chapter Eight, hacker libertarianism has turned out to fit comfortably into the net economy, providing an ideological justification for the vast amounts of wealth accumulated by a fortunate few.
But what’s particularly striking is how much work Raymond has to do to fit the open source development process into the comfortable framework of the free market. Raymond’s organizing metaphor contrasts the hierarchal command structure of cathedral-building with the decentralized competitive world of a bazaar. But merchants at a bazaar are trying to sell their products for a profit. Open source developers, on the other hand, are volunteers contributing their time.
To get around this seeming contradiction, Raymond develops an account of open source development as a “gift economy.” Now, the notion of open source development as a gift economy is an intriguing one, developed most fully in Richard Barbrook’s essay “The High-Tech Gift Economy”:
Within the developed world, most politicians and corporate leaders believe that the future of capitalism lies in the commodification of information . . . Yet, at the “cutting edge” of the emerging information society, money-commodity relations play a secondary role to those created by a really existing form of anarcho-communism. For most of its users, the Net is somewhere to work, play, love, learn and discuss with other people. Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without direct mediation of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without thought of payment. In the absence of state or markets to mediate social bonds, network communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and ideas.[15]
The problem with Raymond’s account of the open source community as gift economy is that it shunts aside the very aspects of the gift economy which distinguish it from commodified relations. Raymond sees the gift economy as the free market extended by other means. In what he calls a “post-scarcity” environment, hackers no longer feel the need to compete for money, so instead compete for prestige – or “egoboo,” as he calls it (short for “ego boost”), borrowing a term from science fiction fandom. Drawing on the assumptions of evolutionary psychology, he writes, “One may call [hackers’] motivation ‘altruistic,’ but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist.” But this line of argument is tautological; if one defines in advance every choice a person makes as inevitably a maximization of personal utility, then even seemingly selfless behavior can be explained in selfish terms – thus, the old freshman philosophy saw that even Mother Teresa really acted with the goal of maximizing her own self-interest, rather than helping others for the sake of it.
To get outside this tautology, you need to ask under what circumstances altruism reigns over other forms of perceived self-interest. To Raymond, the answer is a “post-scarcity” economy, in which money no longer matters, and so other markers of status take its place. It’s here that Raymond reveals the solipsism and ahistoricism endemic to corporate libertarianism. By “post-scarcity,” Raymond claims to mean something very specific: “disk space, network bandwidth, computing power.” But what this list takes for granted is the much vaster social infrastructure open source research rests on: its long-term subsidization by state-sponsored research universities, and of course the development of the internet by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
What’s even more breathtaking is Raymond’s casual, broad reference, in the introduction to The Cathedral and the Bazaar, to “the information rich post-scarcity economies of the 21st Century and beyond.” Raymond doesn’t pause to consider the vast portions of the United States, to say nothing of the rest of the world, in which not only is computing power scarce, but so are the necessary conditions of survival – and which aren’t moving any closer to post-scarcity under the present regime of capital.
Richard Stallman: Open Source as Left-Libertarianism
While Raymond obliviously takes a post-scarcity economy for granted, Richard Stallman sees post-scarcity as a goal that must be struggled for, and which demands structural economic changes if it’s to be achieved.
Stallman was one of the great programmers of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab immortalized in Steven Levy’s Hackers.[16] In the early 1980s, Stallman left MIT, upset by the privatization of software that Stallman had always viewed as community property. Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation, and began the project of developing an open source version of the UNIX operating system, which he dubbed GNU, for “GNU’s Not Unix.” (In a typical example of hacker humor, the name is a “recursive acronym” that defines itself only by itself in an endless loop.) GNU, in turn, became much of the basis for the subsequent development of Linux. Stallman developed the concept of “copyleft” as an alternative to copyright – a way to ensure that the free software he developed could not subsequently be appropriated and privatized.
[Insert Figure 10.2. Caption: Richard Stallman]
As noted above, Stallman starts out with the same libertarian framework as Raymond. The difference is that Stallman pushes it further. His investment in the free flow of ideas leads him to a more fundamental interrogation of the right to own information. While Raymond anchors his analysis in the essay “Homesteading on the Noosphere”[17] in a kind of para-Lockean theory of property rights, Stallman rejects intellectual property altogether. As Stallman told Byte magazine, “I’m trying to change the way people approach knowledge and information in general. I think that to try to own knowledge, to try to control whether people are allowed to use it, or to try to stop other people from sharing it, is sabotage. It is an activity that benefits the person that does it at the cost of impoverishing all of society.”[18]
Stallman contrasts a piece of software to a loaf of bread. If somebody takes my loaf of bread, I don’t have it anymore; it’s a limited resource. But software is like an infinitely replicable loaf of bread. To not share your loaf with me, when you’d still have your loaf, is what Stallman calls “software hoarding.”
What I find inspiring about Stallman’s line of reasoning is how it embraces the best parts of the hacker ethic – its respect for the free flow of information, and its idealistic desire to change the world – and, by pushing it to its logical conclusions, reaches a more egalitarian, communitarian vision that begins to question the capitalist sanctity of private property. As such, it offers a way out of cyberselfishness, an alternate cybertopian vision. In fact, it’s this vision which is largely responsible for the sense of mission among so many open source developers and users.
It’s not surprising that Eric Raymond’s version of free software is more popular with the new Linux entrepreneurs like Red Hat’s Bob Young. It fits much more comfortably into conventional capitalism, even if it takes some getting used to and perhaps offers lower profit margins. But thanks to the genius of the copyleft system, Stallman’s ideas can’t fade away so easily; even in its capital-friendly form, open source software still challenges the regime of intellectual property, and offers a compelling utopian alternative. The power of that alternative can be seen in the explosion of interest in similar challenges, such as Napster.
In his GNU manifesto, Stallman offers his own image of the future, a familiar vision of technological utopianism that draws on the tradition of Edward Bellamy, Buckminster Fuller, and Isaac Asimov. Utopian projections can be ideological fantasies, blinding us from life as it is actually being lived. But at their best, they point us to a set of future goals – and suggest some tools for getting there. Bellamy’s Looking Backward may not have come true, but it nonetheless inflected progressive reform in the early twentieth century; likewise, Fuller helped inspire the New Left of the 1960s. Similarly, I take heart from Stallman’s vision of the future: “In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair, and asteroid prospecting.”[19]
[1]. On the dot-com crash, see Cassidy, Dot.con; Kaplan, F’d Companies.
[2]. Schwartz and Leyden, “The Long Boom: A History of the Future, 1980-2020.”
[3]. Rosenberg, open source.
[4]. Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture.”
[5]. Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy.”
[6]. Ross, “The Mental Labor Problem.”
[7]. Greene. “Ballmer: Linux is a Cancer.”
[8]. Lea, “MS’s Ballmer: Linux is Communism.”
[9]. Bloomberg News, “Microsoft Executive Says Linux Threatens Innovation.”
[10]. Raymond, ed., The New Hacker’s Dictionary.
[11]. Originally published online, the essay was reprinted in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
[12]. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
[13]. Barbrook and Cameron, “The Californian Ideology.”
[14]. See Borsook, Cyberselfish.
[15]. Barbrook, “The High-Tech Gift Economy.”
[16]. Levy, Hackers.
[17]. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
[18]. Stallman, “Byte Interview with Richard Stallman.”
[19]. Stallman, “The GNU Manifesto.”
Posted by Ted at August 1, 2004 04:42 AM