One of my fondest Debconf conferences was Debconf4 held in Porto Alegre. While the temperature was cool, the atmosphere was vibrant.

One of my favorite parts was meeting the various women involved in Debian and free software more generally (aparently known there as TINC) and one in general was especially vivacious, Pia Waugh. She was recently featured in an interview in computerworld magazine. Either Australians inherently have a lot of energy or they put something in the water “down” yonder, because she sure has her hands in a lot of interesting projects.

So check out the interview to get a sense of one of the leading ladies of open source.

Mozilla/Firefox in a lot of ways was/is the poster child of free software… I mean do you know how many times I was talking to a certain non-technologically-inclined-person who claimed to not know a thing about open source, and then after I asked what browser they were using and when they said Mozilla, I would let them in on the dirty little secret that they were, in fact, in its very bosom, cradled in and by the rhythm of freedom. And they would gleefully respond with some excited variation of “I had NO idea and I love it… those tabs, those plug ins, that speed….blah blah.” I just loved inducing that reaction.

But for me my love affair with Firefox is officially over. For many years it was a happy, fulfilling relationship but lately, the little red fox has let me down, acting way too erratic, crashing during those inopportune moments, like when opening a pdf, which would cause the whole apparatus to come crashing down, and all those lovely open tabs, with all that information, would be gone in an instant.

For the last 4 months, every time this disdainful event occurred, I would just bemoan and bitch a lot, especially on IRC. Part of me was a loyalist but a bigger part of me was just very very very lazy. With all my bookmarks, with my tool bar, with all my passwords configured JUST RIGHT, I felt enduring the crashes and loss of data was worth it. But no more (admittedly my IRC compatriots were sick of hearing me complain and pretty much demanded that I change).

So now I am going to “rediscover the web” but with Galeon. It is up and running and I have transfered a good chunk of my settings over and over the course of the next few weeks I will make the transition. So far so good though there is work to be done, to be sure, to make Galeon into my new love(ly), web browser.

Hannah Wallach is not only amazing because she introduced me to the trippiest game ever, Rez (and is an amazing player herself), but has worked diligently over the last few years to get more women involved in free software. Not only is she one of the ladies that help ignite Debian Women, she has helped spearhead an initiative to get more women in Gnome via Google Summer of Code. So a double thanks to Hannah and read on below for some more info on the initiative.

BOSTON, Mass – June 13, 2006 – The GNOME Foundation is offering USD$9000 to female students in order to promote the participation of women in GNOME-related development.

The money originates from GNOME’s participation in the Google “Summer of Code” program (code.google.com/soc/), for which GNOME developers will mentor 20 students working throughout the northern summer on GNOME-related projects. This year GNOME received 181 applications to Google’s program, yet none were from women. The GNOME Foundation has therefore chosen to reinvest Google’s contribution into a new program designed to increase the participation of women in GNOME. The program has no official relationship with Google.

“Free software prides itself on being open to anyone with a good idea, yet less than 2% of free software developers are female. We, as a community, need to be actively working to change this statistic, and programs like this one are a much needed step in the right direction.” said Hanna Wallach, a GNOME developer who is involved in several projects that encourage women to participate in free software development.

The Women’s Summer Outreach Program is currently accepting applications from female students. Accepted students will receive a stipend of USD$3000 over a two month period. A pool of project ideas is provided at www.gnome.org/projects/wsop/, though original proposals are also encouraged. Projects may either be related to GNOME directly, or indirectly via projects such as Gstreamer and Abiword. Each student will be assigned a mentor to provide guidance throughout the program.

The University of Washington Law School website hosts a bibliography for literature on free and open source software as a companion to an interesting set of pieces that cover the following subjects:

* License Type Overview
* Contracts or Licenses: Does it Matter?
* Enforceability of Open Source Licenses
* Copyright Primer
* Derivative Works
* Copyright v. Patent
* Patent Risks
* Trademark and OSS
* Moral Rights and OSS

I try to go to at least once hacker/developer conference per year and when they are in Latin America, it is just impossible to resist. So this year I am going to Debconf6 being held just outside of Mexico City in mid-May. Along with presenting a paper, I may do a little filming too of the event.

Today someone pointed me to this uber-geeky set of graphs that offers all the essential stats:

* Participant’s accomodation requirements.
* Confirmed Participants
* Participant’s countries.
* Participant’s food requirements.
* Participant’s laptops details.
* Participants by gender and type
* Proposals by track, status and type
* Participant’s shirt requirements.
* Participants who request sponsorship.
* Sponsorship for participants travels.

Now most of these stats are essential for the organizers and they are attacking a conference’s unwieldy ways with the help of technology. They are also great for a researcher like me as they have done a good chunk of really interesting and important statistical data. And while technology is usually never an easy panacea to social ills or hurdles, if used tactically and well, like these organizers use it (and know how to use it), it can help quite a bit, at least judging from the last Debconf I went to, which was simply wonderful.

So it seems like in the world of free and open source law and politics at least every 8-10 weeks there is a fresh controversy to hit the press. And the current one is over Lessig’s endorsement of DRM:

“In a world where DRM has become ubiquitous, we need to ensure that the ecology for creativity is bolstered, not stifled, by technology. We applaud Sun’s efforts to rally the community around the development of open-source, royalty-free DRM standards that support “fair use” and that don’t block the development of Creative Commons ideals.”

Already on Lessig’s blog there are a few attacks and others are starting to manifest.

For now I will just display the controversy. I see this as possibly an interesting turning point for the acceptance of Lessig’s politics in the wider world of free (note not open source) politics. In my work, I characterize Lessig as the Pasteur of the open source movement, at least as described in the work of Bruno Latour . He took what was a pretty esoteric and geeky world, and initiated a series of events, projects, and translations, that helped bring free software to a wider world and audience.

Now that this domain has been unleashed, there are now responses back and as part of these, we see stronger pockets of resistance and opposition to a Lessig-like politics. I imagine they will cohere even more strongly in the coming years, reshifting, yet again, the poltics of free and open source software.

Alchemical Musings has mused some very interesting thoughts on the implications of “free” (as in beer not in speech”) webservices:

Considering Google’s stated ambitions to “house all user files, including: emails, web history, pitcures, bookmakres, etc” the freedom movement better wake up to the fact that there is more to freedom than free software, and we are being outflanked.

Free software is only one corner peice of this puzzle – to complete the jigsaw we need the corners of free data, in a free format. Anything else?

So I have to say that David’s and Scott’s responses have really been engaging, and of course, have sparked a tremendous amount of ideas and responses. On the whole I tend to agree with the responses. When it comes to Raymond’s politics, Scott says it quite cogently. Raymond’s formulations, he writes, “serve similarly as an ideological guidepost for the corporate opensource folks; I’m not certain that places him at the opposite end of the liberal spectrum, but he certainly does put language to work distancing himself from Stallman and his unruly band of ideological tub-thumpers.” Can’t agree with this more. Raymond opened up a space by which a series of important translations and network extensions (in the Latourian sense) could unfold, ones that placed certain aspects of open source closer and within neoliberal territory.

That said, because of the work of Lessig as well as others like David Bollier and Siva Vaidhyanathan (other prominent spokespersons, again in the Latourian sense of the word, that translated the meaning of open source and brought it to new audiences) have brought the discourse of open source away from neoliberal territory. Using the very language of open source, they use the example of this mode of social, legal and technical production to argue against neoliberalism, to argue that the market should not determine the logic and meaning of all forms of production and sociality. So to grapple with the meaning of open source discourse is also to take stock of the the various, sometimes contradictory ways it has been deployed.

And Scott’s point about retaining an idea of the difference between the positions of spokespersons and those of developers on the ground is an important one. And I don’t think the disjuncture is one inherent to spokespersons/discourse vs. practice but should be framed as a historical question. My feeling is that at one point in history (between 1998-2000), Raymond monopolized the discourse of open source and garnered a lot of respect from many developers. As the open source genie has been let loose and has been taken on by other interested parties, the story is now more textured and complex. There is less of an alignment between his position and those of many developers. After about 2003, I met many developers who got sick of Raymond “speaking for them” and there were different discourse, such as that offered up by that of Lessig by which to draw from and understand the significance of open source. And many now use the language of Lessig to conceptualize the political significance of their technical labor. And this has already started to shift. Now that Creative Commons has existed for a number of years, we are starting to see more critiques of Creative Commons from some free software advocates. So again whether or when the viewpoints of dominant discourses match with or don’t with the views of developers, I think, is less of a question of the inherent nature of discourse vs practice but how we the power of discourse shifts within the tides of historical change.

It seems like a hanging question still remains from the comments and it is a call for clarification over what I mean by the relationship between neoliberalism, IP, and trade treaties. In his comment, David writes:

“I would have thought that trade treaties that regulate an international global system of IPR law as totally contrary to the spirit of neoliberalism. In effect it is the granting of special monopoly rights to a distinct corporate group of private actors. Hardly the shrinking of the state! In fact it causes parts of the state to be co-opted by private interests… but thats another line of research…”

He hit the hammer on the nail on this one. However, the assumption here is that neoliberalism is free from a series of deep contradictions. And this is what is nice about David Harvey’s recent account on Neoliberalism. His aim is not just to show the varied convergences behind the ascendancy of neoliberalism but to take seriously the contradictions that are part and parcel to neoliberalisms’ practical articulation. And now I am just about to self-plagiarize from the paper I just presented in Indiana to explain what I mean:

“Neoliberalism is in the first instance” writes Harvey “a theory of political economic practices that proposes human well-being can be best advanced by liberating entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2005: 2). As Pierre Bourdieu previously theorized, this renders neoliberalism a “utopia of a pure and perfect market” (1998) that denies the political and social conditions of its making. What Harvey brings to light is that when we unravel the conditions of its making, there are a collection of contradictions that lie between neoliberal theory and its practice. While neoliberalism champions the rights of individuals, attacks most forms of monopolies, and relishes in building a world free of government regulation so goods, and especially capital, can cross national boundaries with little or no friction, in practice, active state intervention and regulation, are everywhere needed to realize certain forms of free trade.

And the global regulation of IP law, I think, is one of the best examples of the contradictory underpinnings of neoliberal practice (which Harvey causally mentions but does not fully address. It is unpacked within a neoliberal framework in Susan Sell’s Private Power, Public Law). So once we acknowledge these contradictions, I think, the “harmonization of IP” is one of the most salient, tangible products of the contradictory terrain of neoliberalism.

Also I agree that to collapse anarchism and Marxism is to overlook crucial differences, and as you mention “the state” is that entity that gets in the way if we try to merge them. I see, however, Anarchism and Marxism in serious conversation with each other though (not only because some seminal Anarchist writers like Bakunin were pretty well versed in Marxist theory and influenced by it) but because both make the ideals of mutual aid, human liberation, egalitarianism as central and both seek to build a world free from labor alienation, exploitation, and private property. Marxism values the role of that the state can play in this historical development, while anarchism sees the state as part of the problem. But despite some serious differences, there are many productive theoretical affinities between the two.

Added to that because of these commitments, of course, I would never map liberalism on the same axis with Marxism or Anarchism. If I were to visually map them, it would be as cross cutting axis that run in serious opposition to each other, and end up in very different places, but there is one point in the middle where they meet and it concerns some version of freedom and humanism.

And I got thinking in this way after reading Negri and Hardt’s Empire. While I have a lot of trouble with the book, the part that most strongly resonated with me was the section where they talked about the birth of immanence, humanism, and freedom during the pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment period, a birth that conceptualized humans actors as endowed with capacity, to some degree, to control their worldly destines (a point also explored in the works of Foucault and many others of course). As they explain, “Humans declared themselves masters of their own lives, producers of cities and history and inventors of heaven. …the affirmation of the powers of this world, the discovery of the plane of immanence.” (p. 70, 71). To the extent that Anarchism, Liberalism and Marxism can be compared, I think, it is in relation to the birth of a certain version of Humanism and Freedom. How to realize freedom and the content of the meaning of freedom certainly do differ so that you can’t collapse them, you can’t even conceptualize them in the same camp, but you certainly can see how there may be some affinities due to their connection to Enlightenment reconfigurations more generally. And because hackers use both liberal and anarchist discourses of freedom, I am forced to bring these together, even if, they sit in tension with each other.

Scott Dexter over at Decoding Liberation wrote a good response to my post below on neoliberalism and hacking. Between David Berry’s response and this one, I am due to give another one. The two comments have really made me rethink some stuff so hopefully I will have another reply soon.

I just finished reading an article written and recommended by David Berry that he mentioned on my blog: The Contestation of Code: A preliminary investigation into the discourse of the free/libre and open source movements. The piece does a marvelous job at running a fine comb over the terms that dominate the discourses of open source vs. free software and in so doing, brings into stark relief the differences between the two philosophies. For example, while free software promulgates a host of terms like code, freedom, power, progress, community, and rights—knotting them together into an ethical package that includes community, public good, ethics, and Enlightenment ideals of progress—open source uses a different set of meanings to animate some of these same categories and places them into a different package, one that includes the language of choice, markets, rational choice, individualism, and efficiency. And as Berry argues persuasively, Eric Raymond hitches these within an evolutionary framework that “seeks to give deterministic causes” (p. 79).

I tend, however, not to treat these as two movements, “that differ radically in their underlying philosophies” (p. 67), but more as movement that exhibits two positions that maps to a continuum rather than a stark dichotomy; and these reflect the differences and points of tension that are always part and parecel of any shared movement or tradition.

Elsewhere I have written about hackers, in general, and free and open source software, in specific, as a means to examine the heterogeneity of the liberal tradition, all too often treated in unitary terms. While free software draws on the communitarian end of the liberal spectrum, OSS sits at the other pole. According to Raymond, OSS’s virtues follwo from the fact that the enjoyment of programming and the reputation programmers derive from doing it well–these are simply better incentives to produce good software than a salary. While Stallman envisions a community maintained through shared norms and values (and sits more closely with folks like Jefferson and Mill and also perhaps has anarchistic influences), OSS hearkens back to thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Mandeville.

That said, the reason I don’t see these as radically distinct, however, has less to do with these two positions, which really do, as Berry shows so well, diverge into different ethical territory, but because at the level of ordinary social life, most developers I met and interviewed, even those from the Debian project (the most ethically committed to free software), expressed and dabbled in hybrid discourses that included language from both camps. For many of these developers, free software development was the more efficient thing for their technical art, and also held moral overtones. For many, free software/open source could guarantee a more open market. For many developers who chose open source, they chose copyleft licenses because they were personally motivated and compelled by deep seated ethical beliefs, but were eminently uncomfortable with passing on such moral to others. Others really disliked any whiff of moralism. Many developers were very uncomfortable mapping this realm to any politics outside that of software freedom and when they did, they inhabited a “recursive” political reflexicity as described by Chris Kelty. But many free and open source advocates did move comfortably between these two poles, sometimes choosing one label over an other one to make a point or to emphasize one facet of what one label could only thinly capture.

Berry also claims that “Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, is the exemplar of the vision of Raymond and the OSM,” (p. 81) which I think can be thought of in a slightly different way, perhaps as a third way. First, his rise to prominence as the leader of the first large scale free software project came well before the birth of open source discourse. Certainly, while Stallman was a political crusader salvaging culture, Torvalds was a technical pragmatist who worked from home and was receptive to feedback from peers through newsgroups. But by following his hobby and using a free software legal scheme, Torvalds accidentally inaugurated a unique global volunteer project of “collective invention” whereby programmers could contribute bug fixes and improvements that, if deemed worthwhile by Torvalds would be incorporated into new versions of the Linux kernel. In the process of rewriting the kernel, Linus became a leader, coordinating the contributions of all those who were willing to volunteer their time. His innovation was as much social as it was technological. And to be more specific, he inaugurated a strain of populism, that was later carried into and accentuated into other projects such as the Debian project. Over time, Linux as a project did move more toward the open source camp, but still retains a healthy doses of its early populism that defined a new era in UNIX hacking from its predecessors (such as with the Berkeley Software Distribution camp) whom operated along a more elitist logic. Below is one older Debian developer who is describing contributing to BSD before the Linux era:

There was a process by which you wrote some code and submitted in the ‘I am not worthy, but ‘I-hope-that-this-will-be-of-use-to-you supplication-mode’ to Berkeley and if they kinda looked at it and thought, oh this is cool, then it would make it in and if they said, interesting idea, but there is a better way to do that they might write a different implementation of it.

While the Berkeley Unix gurus accepted contributions from those who were not already participating on the project, it was difficult to pierce the inner circle of authority and become an actual member of the team. When Linus Torvalds and Ian Murdock developed their own projects (the Linux kernel and Debian respectively), they did things differently than the earlier cadre of Unix hackers by fostering a more egalitarian environment of openness and transparency.

I think the most interesting claim brought on by Berry is that open source discourse is a neoliberal one. On the one hand neoliberal language and open source language do share many similarities, that of choice and free markets most notably, but I think open source, especially as it is carried out in the vicissitudes of social practice, falls short of neoliberal ideology (but, to be sure, can be easily changed into those terms and thus I think of them more as holding affinities).

Because while a neoliberal worldview unabashedly promotes the privatization of every last thing, even open source states there must be limits. And just this claim, alongside a healthy and somewhat contagious (in that good sort of way) social practice of collaborative development, undermine neoliberal ideology and especially neoliberal trends in IP law. As Siva Vaidhyanathan has written elsewhere “the brilliant success of overtly labeled Open Source experiments, coupled with the horror stories of attempts to protects the proprietary model have added common sense” toadvocates fighting for reform and change. The way open source has functioned, at least it seems to be, is more than less, as a break, a limit point to neoliberal trends. I am still open to thinking more about open source as part and parcel a neoliberal creed, but I would like to see more of those discursive and sociological links and if we are to call that neoliberal, what do we call the massive transformation of IP law that have been intimately linked these modes of regulation to trade treaties and the like? I guess I am not ready to tag open source as neoliberal as that term helps to explain other trends in IP law.

If you can’t notice from the post, I am in the thick of major dissertation revisions for a book manuscript so am gladly reading more about free and open source to get me through some of my hitches.