J. Source and passion

Open source appears suddenly, frightens some — opensource.org and the Free Software Foundation are distinguished — Sean's words noted as the experience of one 'hacker' — hacker authenticity considered — the relentless myth of scientific method is identified and dismissed as ideology — Sean's experience a counter-proposal to the scientific method myth — the excitement of learning and sharing identified as An Important Thing — Heidegger referenced.

1. Sean gave me a book to read, published in early 1999, called "Open Sources: Voices from the open source revolution" [Dibona99]. The book, published by O'Reilly & Associates, was a very strategic publication, aimed at capitalizing on the media interest that was being generated around the "open source software development model." In particular, the Microsoft anti-trust trial, the announcement by Netscape that the source code for Netscape 5.0 would be open, the existing and growing success of the Linux operating system, the Perl programming langauge and the Apache web-server, and the 1998 "Halloween Documents" [1]— revelations about Microsoft's concerns about Linux and Open Source Software development, and including some sinister implications for the internet. The book served Sean as a kind of validation of his software development ideals, and a spur to thinking about the business models implied by the free availability of source code. It puzzled me by virtue of the sudden 'discovery' it named itself a part of.

2. The book is filled with short articles by software developers who represent themselves as a community devoted to the free availability of source code (if not precisely as the representatives of the community). Several of the articles are about the potential business models and strategies that are possible when source code is not proprietary. Several are reflections by developers responsible for important infrastructural software (oft-cited is BIND [Berkely Internet Name Daemon], led by Paul Vixie, a popular, most say nearly ubiquitous implementation of the domain name server (DNS) that binds numerical addresses to their hostnames). Some, like Richard Stallman's and Eric Raymond's are recollections, with clear intentions of "setting the record straight" (differently straight in these two cases, included together for diversity's sake). Still others are wacko quasi-philosophocal meditations, like the selection from Larry Wall, originator of the programming language Perl. The spectrum of positions on the availability and the control of source code is in fact quite diverse, owing more to a minimum of institutional specificity (.com, .edu, .org) that would formlize certain positions, than to any fully articulated positions.

3. The book's appearance coincided with an sudden (that is, once the air waves were freed from the national tragi-comedy of the impeachment hearings) discovery by the media at large (CNN, New York Times, and myriad online outlets like Red Herring and Salon.com, along with tipsheets like Esther Dysons Release 1.0) of both the Linux operating system, and the notion of 'open source' as an organizing name for serveral different internet technologies (as opposed to freeware or shareware, which has long been a familiar and related aspect of the history of the internet). This quite separate and new 'discovery' should have been a part of the long-standing, Wired-inspired techno-yuppie adulation of the neo-libertarian hacker-geek keyboard jockey and the technologies he so arrogantly represents (that is, the technologies that it is his duty to hide from the investor, in order to maintain control over cyberspace). But, as we know, this particular spectacle of web journalism and techno-manifest destiny was less than concerned with the daily material problems of operating systems and network protocols (not to mention those of sweatshops, clean-rooms and home-work that still remain invisible in America and on the internet) and more concerned with creating a consensus on the inevitability of "cyberspace" and its best uses for the creation of wealth[2].

4. But something happened which made this discovery new. The closed circle of media reporting, the strategic press release, and the rhetoric of revolution— these are all commonplace media manipulations. Interested history will inevitably proclaim that the "open source" development model had been successfully used for over a decade (maybe two) before the media and the commercial world at large finally stumbled on it, or finally woke up to it (much like the stories of the world's ignorance of the internet before 1993). But this will inevitably miss the somewhat miraculous retrospective creation of history accomplished by this 'community'.

5. The term, "Open Source(tm)" was invented on February 3rd, 1998 to lexically segment one 'community' of open sourcerers from another. The first group became opensource.org, the officially trademarked headquarters of open source associate prinicpally with Eric Raymond. The other group, identified with Richard Stallman, is called "The Free Software Foundation" {q.v. below}, and has existed since the early 1980's. This differentiation, the organization and the book that followed represent a significant event in the history of the commercialization of the internet, as well as a kind of end-point for the chaos of invisible sub-cultures that went by the various names: hacker, cracker, pirate, geek, phreak, nerd, gnurd, etc. Of these varieties of life there are histories, myths, assesments aplenty [3]— enough, in any case to ensure the continued celebration or investigation of its complexity and diversity (such diversity as exists within 18-40 year-old white males). Yet it is the remarkable retrospective precipitation of the event by the media is most clearly visible in this case, the remarkable clarifying effect of drawing borders, defining authenticity and deciding on exclusions that may come intially from an individual (Eric Raymond, for instance) but can quickly become history. The relationship between media and event, the retrospective, amnesiac delerium of speculations about the nature and history of 'open source', 'free software' and 'hacker culture', create this nature and its history. No one will confuse the media with reality, but neither should we confuse history with it; media and event meet in the desire of individuals to contribute to a past that only now exists— a past that lives in hackers and hackers-manqué who both observe and participate, and most importantly, whose autodidactic ways authorize the historian, the anthropologist, the lawyer, the businessman, and the hacker in each of them to speak with the authenticity of experience, not credentials, about this history. When the media begins to recognize certain of these figures with some regularity, begins to cite the same people citing themselves citing the same people, only then do software, organizations, foundations, names, and careers start to look official, long-standing, intentional. Open closes.

6. Up to the publication of Open Sources (February of 1999), I had been busy tracing opens of all kinds: open systems, open standards, open networks, open formats, open societies, open doors, open markets and on down the open line. "Open" appears relentlessly as a kind of universal modifier that lends a quasi-academic feel to a project, and so lends itself to abuses of all kinds. The trick, of course was to figure out whether any of the promised opens were indeed actually, really, materially, politically, philosophically, economically, world-historically open. Of course, in the end, open is just the opposite of closed, no more, no less, but research doesn't allow you to give that answer up front.

7. In an interview with Sean in September 1998, the term 'open source' never appeared (though the "Free Software Foundation" did), even though we discussed the details of open standards and the necessity for having both a standard and an implementation (working source code). Netscape had made a commitment to what it was calling "open standards" and had announced its plans to make the source code for Netscape 5.0 freely available, but we didn't really talk about this either [4]. Sean and I talked about his earlier history at the federal reserve board using the internet to teach himself UNIX and C programming, learning techniques and building large scale, high quality applications. We talked about how that sense of community has since disappeared, that communities are fragile and need guardians. Sean often repeats the phrase "giving back," as in, "it would be nice to give something back, since I've gotten so much."

8. Later in March of 1999, while watching "the history of open source" be constructed around a swirl of experience that knew no such label, and a set of technologies that each had its own openness criteria, I asked Sean if he felt a part of the Hacker community that Raymond and the media now narrated so cleanly. Sean demurred:

C: I've been reading Open Sources... and one of the things I wanted to ask you about was a more historical question, was how close you feel to this particular history, being an MIT graduate, how close you feel to MIT hacker culture. I mean it's a story the that the open source people like to tell repeatedly, especially through Eric Raymond and his history of hacker culture.
S: well I'm afraid I'm really going to disappoint you because you see, when I was MIT I really didn't do any hacking at all. I was in the economics department and I worked a little bit on Troll [an econometric modelling language that Sean helped create]. Which was sort of this thing at Sloan school.
C: But you weren't part of that while you were there. That part I think I knew...
S: Well I worked with Troll the senior year and the year after I graduated and then I left to go down to Washington [To the Federal Reserve board] and that stuff was just running on IBM mainframes. And I sort of knew a lot about the hacker culture, but was a little bit distant from, because it, it seemed a little bit too self referential. There just wasn't a lot of interest in the arts or politics or stuff like that. It was very insular. Maybe it was just the people that I met there but it seemed a little bit exclusionary for someone like me who wasn't in computer science, who was really more interested in social things you know social justice that sort of thing that I seem to have long... that I'm not working on anymore. It was really, when I was at the Fed in Washington and they switched over the research division to a Unix network based on Sun workstations. Then all of a sudden they needed a lot of software written and I was writing a lot of statistical software things and found software more interesting, but the way I learned was through different usenet groups and different mailing groups.

9. Sean's modest honesty about the insular nature of the hacker "culture" that has so alluringly narrated itself as the hidden history of computing is a crucial corrective to the relentless self-aggrandizing focus on openness which serves as the moral background to this narration (on both sides of its self-produced splits). On the one hand, a disingenuous disavowal, because compared to someone like Tim O'Neil at Partners Telemedicine, Sean is infinitely closer to the internet, the usenet groups he learned from, the ethics of hacking elegant code, and a feeling for freeing information; even if Tim was presented with similar problems to solve (networking doctors together, developing ways to allow them to look at images and collaborate using them), his approach, given a very different background and formal training, would never touch the internet, or anything not backed by a respectable corporation with real people in it. On the other hand, an interested distancing, since Sean's frustration seems to be political and ethical with respect to the kinds of inclusions and exclusions that the "community" of hackers represents. Even though the hacker ethic intends to resolve the gap between authenticity and community by filling it with software that doesn't suck, political differences, inevitably represented by a the choice of words [5], still produce exclusions based on authenticity (in this case, 'free software vs. open source'). Perhaps another troubled aspect of this history that Sean pinpoints is the academic disciplinary isolation. From his position in the Economics department, he was probably likely to be excluded, though the ethic would clearly have to accept him if his code were good. And yet, Sean's reason for going into economics, he later explained to me, was to learn the language of economics that so often served to mask the real political discussions of the time in the costume of general equilibrium equations.

10. Sean's rediscovery of hacking communities from within the Federal Reserve Board (a first irony, perhaps) after their introduction of Unix machines suggests that hacking self-selects most obviously by platform (a second an irony hopefully not lost on those preaching gospels of platform independence). For "the hacker," this fact will never appear unusual, because it will register a tautology that would make selection by platform the self-fulfilling prophecy of the openness (and subsequently the quality) of that platform: from PDP1 and PDP10 (DEC's machines close to the heart of MIT hacker lore) to Multics, UNIX, and Linux— these platforms are open (better) because hackers use them because they are open (better) because hackers use them. This is not (yet) a question of proprietary vs. free software. The co-existence of proprietary machines (all machines are proprietary— all chips are owned, things remain things in a legal regime that is happy to guarantee such rights) and proprietary software (owned primarily by universities and academic research labs like Bell labs) in an environment and a time when sharing was the norm rather than the exception (to hear the hacker tell it) was not yet a problem, even though the world was quite clearly filled with un-free, non-open software.

11. In fact, opensource.org would have the history of 'hackers' on nearly every other platform consigned to a kind of ideological misrecognition, even if the systems were more 'open' than ever before— especially those hacking on proprietary systems, such as the world's most commonplace system from roughly 1968 to 1980, the IBM/360 families[6], or today, the saddest of all misrecognitions, the Windows NT hacker (this could no doubt also be extended to a certain question of internationalism, in which the hacker borders are porous and multinational— due to the influence of the internet— but doubly exclusionary of either homegrown proprietary computer systems or 'localized' American proprietary systems). This quasi-marxist hacker's version of alienation is significant. It concerns first the relation between the hacker and the software project manager. However, since the 'hacker community' has no managers (or disavows them) it also concerns the relation between hackers of differing authenticities. Consider Ellen Ullman's insistence, from the persepctive of a career software engineer:

"I learned to program a computer in 1971; my first programming job came in 1978. Since then I have taught myself six higher-level programming languages, three assemblers, two data-retrieval languages, eight job processing languages, seventeen scripting languages, ten types of macros, two object-definition languages, sixty-eight programming-library interfaces, five varieties of networks, and eight operating environments— fifteen if you cross-multiply the distinct combinations of operating systems and networks. Given the rate of change in computing, anyone who's been around for a while could probably make a list like this. The process of remembering technologies is a little like trying to remember all your lovers: you have to root around in the past and wonder, Let's see. Have I missed anybody? ... Loyalty to one system is career-death. Is it any wonder that programmers make such good social libertarians?" (101-2)

12. On the one hand, the libertarianism she speaks of would include open source, triumphing freedom and the pleasures of being an auto-didact in a space with no government, only the multiple joys of pure free-market innovation. But the important difference is that Ullman's proud promiscuity is a promiscuity of survival, not of principle, and so a kind of moralism— indeed, a particular version of puritanism— can develop against it, in which too many Microsoft, IBM, or Sun languages, like too many lovers, can tip the balance and expel one from the 'community.' Loyalty is refigured as rebellion from persectution by the tyrranous proprietary software and its undead corporate managers. Openness is always most open for those already inside.

13. But is openness really the issue at stake here, or are we caught in the gale-force of a "bold new word"? Wherefore this revolving reference to openness? Open Sources (along with just about every media retelling of the story), introduces the history of science—i.e. the scientific method— as an allegory of the triumph of "open source." The editors free associate from Linus Torvalds to Linus Pauling to Max Delbruck who, at a crucial moment near the end of the The Double Helix, you will remember, spills the hydrogen-bonded base pairs to Linus P. Watson writes about how Delbruck hated secrecy and would not respect his request to keep Pauling in the dark. The story is a familiar one in the history of science, but certainly not as a model of openness and sharing in the scientific community. Rather the example works against this forced allegory since it illustrates that even this idealized community has no immunity to puerility; that the opinionated, self-serving, closed laboratory research of biology was just as vicious, and just as powerful, as any corporate R&D department. The example also subverts since The Double Helix illustrates how scientists learn to recreate their past, to pave over events with narratives of inevitablity or disingenous remembrances. Furthermore, in this double allegory of scientific competition and retrospective delineation it should be the hidden lesson of Rosalind Franklin that haunts the story, and the allegories become more warning than justification. Perpetually forgotten, Franklin's research contributions were further humiliated by Watson's fantasies of her in the Double Helix [7], and the story has become a pointed reference of injury and insult for women in science.

14. But whether the allegory of scientific openicity is appropriate or not, it works. Tim O'Reilly (in Release 1.0) takes it an inevitable step further, calling open source the "New Scientific Renaissance" and retelling a narrative of scientific methods, information sharing, printing presses and acadmeic freedoms so familiar as to qualify by all criteria, as myth[8]. Myth or not, there may very well be something specific to it, even if its form as propaganda (i.e. O'Reilly's stake both as publisher and the stakes in the creation of what amounts to a new industry) and the slipshod speed of publication forces the introduction into all kinds of simplifications, errors of judgement and fabrications of history that will come back to haunt it, there is something to this allegory, especially since it shows up in nearly every explanation of what 'open source' is. This something is the nature of scientific experience, if not the nature of science. Not the experience of experiment, or the self-discipline of mathematics, but the process of reproducing knowledge, the cycle of learning, discovery, sharing, and teaching. Here is Sean's experience as a guide:

there's this feeling that I have: I learned how to program off the internet when I worked in Washington at the Federal Reserve Board. They had a very fast internet feed there— well, at the time it was fast, I have no idea how I'd experience it now— and they switched over to Unix from IBM mainframes. I learned about C programming, I would go out and buy some textbooks, download all of the source code from the Free Software Foundation and just sort of see how you build a high-quality, low-cost application. There were newsgroups that you could join and ask questions on, you know back in those days, when there really wasn't spam, and people that, like, created the compiler, or wrote these different environments would be on the news list, on the newsgroup themselves, you could learn a lot just by listening to conversations or asking questions that someone would answer. You'd ask a sort of elementary question, or something that seemed elementary week before, and now you knew you could answer it, and there was this real excitement about sharing and that we were all in this together, right. Sure it was a very small corner of human knowledge, but if I think about it like an economist, there was no utility in me helping maintain the ignorance of this person who had asked a question, it was just good for everyone. At times it would get taxing, because they were times when I would say how something works and then I would get like 50 questions the next day. About related things sometimes you can answer and it sometimes it's just too overwhelming. But there was this notion that here was this very valuable, it turns out to a been quite fragile, mode of sharing of knowledge and information.

15. First, some things to note: Sean is a science dilletante, enamoured of the growth of scientific knowledge and the diversity of interesting facts and theories that populate it. It is his passion. Sean is also a Feyerabend fan, an irreverent dilletante, one who mocks the self-important and the uninspired, as a spur to keep science passionate and honest. Also, during this time, the internet and usenet groups were small and filled primarily with researchers (whether in labs like Bell, or University funded research groups, research groups deep within corporations, and commonly, individual autodidacts, amateurs, hobbyists, in short, all manner of dilletantes). Sean's story takes place inside the government, at one of its most academic headquarters, The Federal Reserve Bank. All of these things should specify this world that will have come to be known as "open source" or "free software" development. The connection with the scientific "culture" is not based first on a shared model of knowledge sharing, a scientific method, or any centuries long history of enlightenment, it is based foremostly on a particular and historical connection with people, institutions, modes of governance, and to return us to the over-arching problem: customs and standards, implicit and explicit, that have, in fact, developed over centuries [9]. The material and historical specificity of this place, and places like it, communicated the value of shared information. Even if there is no thing that can be referenced as the scientific method, there is a history of institutions that can be referenced as the source of the myth of the scientifc method, and, more importantly, along with it, various sets of implicit customs— not yet standards— that valued openness, sharing, listening, asking questions and excitement.

16. These values rarely reference the myth of scientific method, but in fact the opposite— a pragmatism of question and answer inevitably derived from a specific problem, whether it be how to build a compiler, or how to solve a set of partial differential equations. This difficulty, and the asking, listening and sharing that come with it, are fabulous motivations for people like Sean; teaching and learning have the greatest value, the greatest intimacy and the greatest reward. Pleasure in science is not hard-won, only too often disavowed.

17. But fragility beckons disaster. Passion in science, like art, meets frustration when ends do not. The vulgar problems of time, income, and duty interfere:

But these are very fragile communities and you need guardians, it's really up to people that have some passion for it to volunteer, and that's becoming rarer and rarer. Like I don't know how many hours I work a week but it would be very hard for me to moderate a list right now.

18. The fragility of these communities is passion's dissipation by fatigue or boredom or frustration or disruption. Neither 'open source', nor 'free software' recognize this problem as Sean does (and to be clear, he is not just talking about "hacker communities" here, especially not the hacker community, but about all those groups that he shares interests with: paleo-herpetology, mathematics, entymology, history of science and technology, and any number of softwares, protocols or technologies). Passion must be shared, constantly and arduously; it is only obsession which survives in individuals, outpaces passion and sometimes impersonates it. Difficult problems demand solutions not for their own sake, but because passion's reward is sharing. Eric Raymond's economic and anthropological wanderings (more, below) identify reputation and 'ego-satisfaction' as the motivation for this kind of sharing— in Sean's words, "giving back." Raymond's identification of something like a gift exchange is appropriate but both inaccurate and disingenuous. The question of sharing, and what is shared, is more properly a question of value and its vissicitudes, before and outside any notion of an economy [10]. The origin and substance of value are an intimate part of passion and sharing, and though 'community' is too fraught a word for this philosophical node, it is the only referent for what is felt most strongly to have disappeared. Scale references this disappearance, in the uncertainty it signals about the boundaries of sharing, the boundaries of co-mmunication, in states, in nations, in the world. Convention references this disappearence precisely at the point where openness, both political openness and the openness of protocols, standards, codes, threaten tradition, or open it to examination.

19. Out of this sense of passion, Sean has experienced his fair share of frustration in navigating between open and closed sources, and in trying to understand how to reconcile the value of the passion for solving problems with the rational and vulgar obsessions of economic value:

Right now, I'm trying to play around with wavelets, and understand them better, and you know I don't have time to take a course in that, but you can buy Wavepack 4, or something, for MATLab, and I forget what the cost is, but for me to buy it as an individual would be something like twelve hundred dollars. And, so what do I do? I'm gonna build it myself. And that takes a lot longer and I'll probably end up understanding things a lot better, but there's this real feeling I have: why should this stuff cost so much, you know? There's this Free Software Foundation dictum, you know, that knowledge should be free, and I don't agree with that completely, I think that copyright and ownership have some real value, but I get defensive when I hear that people are patenting, like XOR (?) when they're drawing on the screen, or some of these things that might be foundational patents for one field, but that everyone uses and shares, but just kind of drop out of the math, for how things work.

20. For Sean, this issue of patenting and copyrighting, this notion of closed, or proprietary things, is much more problematic than simply the question of whether software's source code is available. Patenting algorithms, processes, or formulas, especially in a form that would not be specific to any language or any platform save that of mathematics, but which would affect them all, is a much more serious problem, and yet, there is ambiguity (both with Sean and the law) about whether or not it can be owned, and what that means. If a mathematical technique can no longer be improved, if it is, by some criteria that no one quite understands, 'perfect', or perhaps, that is, if it works, can it then be owned? What are the standards that keep this question open?

21. The inevitable comparisons, and in some cases derivations, from the scientifc method, romanticized into its most familiar narratives, do not do justice to this particular problem of the relationship between knowing and owning— between science and production. The successful identification of open source.org — not necessarily the practice of collectively creating software, the sharing that it represents— with the "scientific method," (however idealized) means that the measure of certainty, both in the story of open source and in the story of science is that it works. And to the estent that "it works" is the ultimate standard, the standard that trumps all others, it limits the very openness it promises to liberate.

22. Perhaps it doesn't take Heidegger to recognize the confusion of what is today called science and research with the much more difficult essence of thinking and understanding. Perhaps it doesn't require a philosophical idiom with a limited vocabulary to feel the gravity of this problem in the everyday affairs of programming. The relationship between the essence of research— the configuration of desire, knowledge, and sharing that I keep calling passion— and what Heidegger identifies as 'putting in reserve' as the history of western metaphysics as a history of production and work[11], concerns the status of persons and things. The process of agreeing that in its implicit form we call custom, and its explicit form standard, to the process of owning folds in on itself here. All forms of owning, all thingness becomes less a problem of the relation of persons to things, as that of two persons in relation to a third thing, which can be either person or thing. The passion of sharing, then, is fragile precisely to the extent that its guarantee does not tend towards the guarantee of ownership and propriety, but towards openness— an openness without reserve— the future, the promise, the gift, the movement from implicit to explicit. This identification of openness as a nearly ultimate value is often disingenuous, as in the case of Eric Raymond and opensource.org. When it isn't— and the only way to approach such claims are with open eyes and open arms, in trust— it is the very figure of a pragmatic justice that sutures the gap between decision and justification by circulating it with such promiscuity that exclusion can only be self-imposed.

23. But then again, to have derived this problematic relationship of productionist metaphysics to the passion of sharing knowledge from the experience of one dilletante on the internet might be far less convincing than the rich idiom of philosophy. Nonetheless, I let it stand as an indication that these idioms—these researches— are not removed from one another, that the research of philosophy cannot proceed without the demands of sharing and communicating it, as difficult as that is, with absolute openness.

Last Modified 11-Sep-99 9:01 PM ckelty@mit.edu

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