M. Anthropologist seeks navel

Eric Raymond, libertarian anthropologist assessed — Stallman attacked, again — Raymond's various writings discussed and critiqued — several crucial insights about property and legitimacy in open source gleaned — the gift appears, and is examined for its contents — reputation identified as the source of value — questions remain.

Eric S. Raymond is an Internet developer and writer living in Malvern, PA.

Eric S. Raymond is a wandering anthropologist and troublemaking philosopher who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and has been wondering whether he should regret it ever since.

Eric S. Raymond is an observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. His research has helped explain the decentralized open-source model of software development that has proven so effective in the evolution of the Internet. His own software projects include one of the Internet's most widely-used email transport programs. Mr. Raymond is also a science fiction fan, a musician, and a martial artist with a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do. His home page is at >URL:http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr<.

1. An april 1998 interview with Eric Raymond in salonmagazine.com is teased with the tag: "Let my Software Go." Though Raymond is quick to disavow spokesmanship for "the movement" or as Raymond puts it, "my culture and my people," there is no denying that the game plays with liberation rules. And though Raymond's meanly artful self-presentation fools few close to him (supporting or detracting), it has worked magic on the press. As the unofficial official spokesman for the unpolitical revolution in software development that now goes by the name 'Open Source', Raymond mixes claims on authenticity with affected hard-nosed business realism with pseudo-academic softwre economics and 'hacker' anthropology. Raymond is an aggressive nerd. An autodidact with attitude and a libertarian with a gun, or more. Raymond is, as far as perceptions go, no one's hero, but everyone's leader. He is the perfect symbol for what Jessica Litman suggests we call "the age of disingenuousness" [Litman98]. All of Raymond's talk about 'my people' about 'community' about being 'in the right place at the right time,' about 'hacker culture' says one thing while clearly attempting to accomplish another. Recognition manufactures authenticity, and authenticity attracts the media.

2. Recognition has come slowly to Raymond, but certainly not accidentally. Modesty (false and true), candor, frankness, self-interest, and especially, reputation, are central problems of value for Raymond's description of hackers, as we shall see in his various writings. In the early 1990's, Raymond published the "New Hacker's Dictionary," which updated, incorporated and publicized the once collective (if not quite anonymous) effort called the "Jargon File." The publication of this book affected his status both on and off line, and must have given him a deep sense of how reputation can be converted into value and vice versa. In 1997, Raymond posted an article called "The Cathedral and The Bazaar" which has quickly become one of the most widely read documents dealing with the "open source development model" (the version change history very prominently displays the change from 'free software to open source' on February 8th, 1998). This is the article that developers at Netscape read and handed to Jim Barksdale that prompted Netscape to release the code for Communicator (renaming it Mozilla). From there it has come to be referenced almost as much as the 'open source revolution' itself.

3. Raymond then wrote the fascinating "Homesteading the Noosphere," which is a self-described ethnographic study of the "gift culture" of hackerdom. Here, Raymond tries his hand at formalizing many of the peculiar aspects of hackerdom that he has observed. Despite his denials of leadership or spokespenship, he shows great alacrity in narrating the history of hackerdom towards the founding of opensource.org.

4. As we have already seen, the creation of opensource.org as the end point of internet hacker culture has depended to a large extent on the exclusion of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation— repeatedly silenced via a peculiar combination of adulation and ridicule, From the same Salon article:

"I love Richard dearly, and we've been friends since the '70s and he's done valuable service to our community, but in the battle we are fighting now, ideology is just a handicap. We need to be making arguments based on economics and development processes and expected return. We do not need to behave like Communards pumping our fists on the barricades. This is a losing strategy."[1]

5. The denunciation of FSF is only the obverse of an argument about economics. Raymond has convinced himself and others that 'open source' software development is an organic, evolutionary effect of a particular kind of 'culture'. Stakes are high for Raymond, who sees the necessity of declaring the economic legitimacy of this phenomemon as essential to its continued success. Throughout his articles, his notions of culture, evolution and economics are atavistic, confused and opportunistically pieced together to match the much more believable observations and experiences. This mismatch of experience and justification suggests again a disingenuousness— a disingenuousness that masks an honest desire to join in the largest creation of wealth in history. A conversion to a market-based corporate ideal of value that hides its political responsibility behind an equation of open source with (a particular myth of) science and the scientific method.

6. It is his honesty, and not the failure of Raymond's analysis that I want to focus on. Raymond's efforts, carried out in journalistic form, parallel the economic and technological dilemmas of Amicas and the legal ones of Lessig: they are honest efforts to identify the source and nature of value in a changed world in order to identify a way in which to participate in it. The desire to participate is most important. No one here [Amicas, Lessig, Raymond, Stallman] sees a vocation in science as ascesis, nor even a protestant ethic that sees work as ascesis. The desire to participate is the desire to improve self, nation, and society— even in some cases to realize, or actualize one of these three. This desire is no where explicit, but everywhere tangible. Since no one understands all the details of the changes that the internet implies (and everything leading up to it, making it possible). Since no one seems to know just how to affect them in specifc political contexts, or since no one (in the case of Amicas),understands how the changes in healthcare infrastructure relate to the changes in internet technology— then the only thing left to do is to do.

7. Raymond's doing consists first in open sourcing, and second in the making up that goes with this making real[2]. It is in these writings that Raymond forces an understanding of the origin of value in software development. I exploit him here both as informant and as opponent, since there is much to learn from and much more to disagree with.

8. The primary goal of The Cathedral and the Bazaar [Raymond97] was to announce the success of Linux as a model of software development and to enumerate, Fred Brooks style [3], a technique for reproducing it. If any confusions circulate consistently through this and the following paper, they concern reputation, motivation, property and value— subjects that easily confuse. The metaphors of cathedral and bazaar, like all of Raymond's figures, are haphazardly chosen, and indiscriminately applied. One should not make too much of them, or risk mistaking the substance of the argument. Cathedral is the perjorative used to refer to hierarchical top-down management of large-scale software projects [4]. Bazaar, though analogy would not oppose it to the Cathedral, is the opposite, a pseudo-hierarchical, unplanned, 'evolutionary' model. These architectural figures degenerate, because they are chose to represent proprietary corporate software (read Microsoft) as religious ideologues, and the 'open source' as the promising new economic model of a truly free free market. Bazaars do not represent Islam, even secular Turkey, except via unreconstructed orientalism that associates the simplest of images with the word. But Raymond's writing is not really the issue.

9. Raymond stresses one particular aspect of the difference, which he labels "Linus' Law":

Here, I think, is the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are not perfect.
In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow phenomena — or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quick when exposed to a thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.

10. This law is the selling point for opensource.org. Whereas FSF would sell freedom if they could, opensource.org sells a better mousetrap, or perhaps 'bug-trap' is the better metaphor. Some have objected (including Tim O'Reilly) that this shouldn't be the primary selling point, but rather the quality of the software itself. However quality, in Raymond's account, only emerges when a programmer "scratches a personal itch." By building the first or second version of a program to solve a specific need, there is then an implementation that can be bootstrapped into a powerful application. This, as Raymond recognizes, is especially true for small tools and pieces of infrastructural support that require little user input. Indeed, most of the internet is built on these kinds of technologies. But the question of the necessity and role of the "architect" remains for larger projects.

11. In "The Cathedral and the Bazaar', Raymond relies on Brooks and Gerald Weinberg [5] as experts on the nature of programming and software architecture. Brooks is partially dismissed, less because his lessons are twenty years old than because the force of experience with which Brooks formed his arguments conflicts with that which formed Raymond's arguments. Weinberg offers a compatible story, in the form of "egoless programming" (though Raymond objects to the term): "Weinberg observed that in shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere." The source of value in Raymond's open source world is not source code per se, nor is it labor invested in company time or self-improvement, but has something mysterious to do with the nature of collaboration and reputation. Raymond struggles:

The "utility function" Linux hackers are maximizing is not classically economic, but is the intangible of their own ego satisfaction and reputation among other hackers. (One may call their motivation "altruistic", but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist). Voluntary cultures that work this way are not actually uncommon.

12. Constipated insight, when simplified economics and psychology are incompletely digested to argue for the creation of value in a form not recognizable by either. Raymond suggests that this value will continue to be created outside of any corporate "cathedral" by "the effective construction of voluntary communities of interest." The cynic scoffs, but the fact of this movement and its support, and the popularity of this article attest the opposite. Even if the precise understanding of either the mechanism or the stakes of opensource.org, or its attempted exclusion of FSF on the grounds of rational, unpolitical, economic reasoning is incomplete, the fact of its existence is announced here.

13. More than that, Raymond's struggle to understand the nature of these "customs" and the source of value lead him write a second article, under anthropology's mantle, called "Homesteading the Noosphere" [Raymond98]. Property customs, reputation seeking and 'gift cultures' are the most interesting foci of this article, expecially since they should be generalizable questions concerning the nature of value and property in the internet economy, and conceivably useful explanations for understanding Amicas, for example. However, Raymond's theorizing is typical of the hacker autodidact whose references more often serve to justify than to explain. In particular, a certain imaginary scientific, philosophical and historical consensus makes repeated appearances, as supplement to an argument based less on thought than on the attempt to justify the authenticity of opensource.org and the hacker community. Property is a central concern, of course, and as opensource.org depends on differentiating itself from those communistic anti-property FSF folks, Raymond identifies hacker property customs with the "theory of common law land tenure" which "like hacker customs, evolved organically in a context where central authority was weak or nonexistent." The role of this justification is less important than the fact that Raymond identifies an "implicit theory of ownership" in a community that prides itself on not owning software.

14. The "owner" in this setting, according to Raymond, is the person with the "right to re-distribute modified versions." This custom conflicts with the reality of the free-software licenses that have been developed which legally guarantee anyone the right to re-distribute modified versions. Hence, certain learned customs are observed: forking of projects is avoided and discouraged, distributing changes with the cooperation of others is dicouraged, and removing a name from the list of contributors is taboo. The free software licence, if invoked would invalidate any of these customs, and so they continue only by virtue of an informal network of customs that somehow propagate reliably enough to prevent an evolutionary process from becoming a war of all against all. Because this conflicts with a certain economic consensus on the utility maximizing behavior of individuals (above), the only rational explanation is to rely on something called variously 'reputation', 'status', or 'ego-satisfaction' (but subsequently distinguished with vigor and flame from 'fame').

15. In order to save the properly functioning free market in labor and goods from experiencing such irrational behavior, Raymond divides the world into "command hierarchy", "exchange economy", and "gift culture." Raymond, of course is not the first nor last social scientist to view the world in such a way, but note particularly the asymmetry of the terms. Only exchange constitutes an economy, while gift-giving remains culture, and command (shall we continue to read "communism" here, a word Raymond can barely even say?) is denied either culture or economy, left only with hierarchy, left to signify the very essence of injustice presumably. Reputation, status, ego-satisfaction are irrational behaviors maximizing no utility, not because they can't be converted into real captial (they can, and Raymond is intimately familiar with this process, in the form of consulting, speaking tours, book writing, etc.), but because the hacker culture is a culture of abundance— just like the Northwest Coast Kwakiutl. Abundance begets super-economic games of reputation and status and therefore, a 'culture', specifically, a gift culture.

16. Raymond's territorialism produces bizarre effects, not the least of which is that in order to identify what kind of propert exactly is being homesteaded according to the "common law theory of land tenure," Raymond dubs the "space of all possible thoughts" the noosphere[6]. Whatever Raymond imagines the noosphere might be, or wherever it is [7], because it must be somewhere, it means that two people can't be in the same place without violating some law of Raymond's own private physics. Ownership therefore conflicts with the "cultural" practice of reputation seeking and status-making that is somehow (thankfully, Raymond does not speculate) perpetuated through the giving of gifts (i.e. the expenditure of surplus, especially in the form of time and computing power) on the internet. We are back to a problematic of knowing and owning, of having an idea, sharing an idea and owning an idea.

17. To digress a bit, Sean Doyle's sense that he wants to "give something back" because he has gotten so much from the internet {q.v. above} strikes me as an experience that does not deserve the criticism that Raymond's article does. But why? Perhaps it is because Sean's gift is to teach, not to outdo. There is in any theory of the gift (at least those that are not romantic or naive), a fundamentally violent and agonistic relationship. Sahlins identifies this in a comparison of Hobbes and Mauss [8]. The agonism may be that of the game, or it may be that of war, but in both cases, there is a sense of indivisible individuals (department of redundancy department) strategizing according to some set of rules. It is precisely the existence of these rules that is difficult to understand, the process of achieving even the most basic agreement on a single rule precipitates an aporia of origin and end. What then does it mean to teach? To share the passion of discovering how to do something, how to think about something, or simply communicating something? In Mauss, the gift is riddled with obligation, question and answer create responsibility: one must give, one must receive, and one must reciprocate. Charity, then, under this structural tyrrany is strictly violent, it denies one the responsibility for oneself, the possibility of answering, even if that answer ruins. What then is an obligation without this force? Or more precisely, is it strictly possible to expect nothing in return? In many versions (Godbout, e.g.) this is the experience of freedom, the freely given gift. However, no one ever occupies this position of spontaneously giving, one is always, in Sean's words "giving back." The given, even the given of language, is always already given, expectation is impossible without memory [9].

18. Of course, Raymond's point is simpler. Gift culture is a manner of formalizing the reputation game. The founding of opensource.org, the branding of free software and the leveraging of a system of ownership of names is a manner of turning the reputation game into a part of the market economy of the internet. Brands represent services, brands are values— and even though this was already apparent in the case of commodity culture, even though [10] there is a familiar tendency to think about an economy of signs, as well as an economy of goods, this notion of "branding" represents a departure by turning the brand into a service into a source of value: there are no goods, there are only relationships, and these relationships are guaranteed only by the existence of reputation. And if you can name reputation (brand) you are halfway to measuring it and standardizing it so that it can be risked on an open market. Contracts and licenses are the means to secure this relationship, and decisions made with respect to the standardization of certain important technologies will constitute constitution. This is a question of property, one that will only be partially answered by reference to the legal regime of rights and the edifice of legitimacy described with respect to healthcare and the history of the administrative state in the section to follow.

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

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