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Lehigh Preserve Institutional Repository Lehigh Preserve Institutional Repository Binary Freedom: Free Software, the Internet, and Activism in the Digital Age Campbell, Christopher Bryan 2016 Find more at https://preserve.lib.lehigh.edu/ This document is brought to you for free and open access by Lehigh Preserve. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator of Lehigh Preserve. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Binary Freedom: Free Software, the Internet, and Activism in the Digital Age By Christopher Bryan Campbell A Thesis Presented to the Graduate and Research Committee of Lehigh University in Candidacy for the Degree of Master of Arts in History Lehigh University May 23, 2016 © 2016 Copyright Christopher Bryan Campbell ii Thesis is accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in History. Binary Freedom: Free Software, the Internet, and Activism in the Digital Age Christopher Bryan Campbell ______________________________ Date Approved ______________________________ Dr. John K. Smith Thesis Director ______________________________ Dr. Stephen Cutcliffe Co-Director ______________________________ Dr. John K. Smith Department Chair iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 1 Introduction 2 The Closing of the Source Code 7 GNU, the Free Software Movement and the Hacker Ethic 13 Free Software and the Internet 22 Open Source & the Commercialization of the Free Software Movement 28 The Fracturing of the Movement 35 Free Software Consumers 40 The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Rise of Internet Activism 45 Conclusion 53 Bibliography: 55 Vita 62 iv TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1. Web Server Market Share by Year 26 v ABSTRACT In the 1970s, software emerged as a distinct industry as it became unbundled from computer hardware. Corporate interests such as Microsoft commoditized software by restricting access to source code and introducing licensing agreements to limit the rights of software consumers. The Free Software Movement reacted to this by collaboratively creating software free from the restrictions of commercial license agreements. As free software, such as Linux, gained popularity, programmer Eric Raymond re-articulated the movement as Open Source, a programmer-centric software development model. This re-casting sought to supplant the movement’s consumer freedom focused ideology with a model that favored corporate approval. A schism emerged within the movement, and free software ideologues gravitated toward individual rights based activism. As the Free Software Movement splintered, its distributed collaboration model was transposed to other cultural works and its ideology informed later activist groups, such as WikiLeaks. 1 Introduction On December 9, 1999, VA Linux, a Virginia-based company that sold free / open source based computer systems, had their initial public offering. Opening at $30 a share, the stock posted a monumental 698 percent gain on its first day of trading. It was the largest NASDAQ IPO at the time.1 Taken as emblematic of the Free / Open Source Software movement, open source2 was a capitalist juggernaut. Yet, six months later, Microsoft co-founder Steve Ballmer publically dismissed the Free Software Movement as communism.3 Derided by some as communism, while popular in the corporate sphere, free and open source software defied definition. The emergence in the 1970s of software as a distinct industry from hardware and computer systems led to a struggle over control over the shape of the industry. Involved were three major sets of players: Corporate interests such as IBM and Microsoft, consumer-orientated proponents of free software, and later, the developer- orientated supporters of corporate-focused open source software. Companies such as IBM and Microsoft desired to commoditize the nascent computer software market, and later, the Internet. To achieve their goal, they changed the open culture of code development and sharing that was the norm, replacing it with a schema where software was a licensed commodity and source code was no longer available. The user-orientated proponents of free software reacted against these changes by forming the Free Software Movement, which sought to preserve consumer freedom by 1 Mark Gimein, “Dissecting the VA Linux IPO,” Salon, December 10, 1999, accessed March 14, 2015, http://www.salon.com/1999/12/10/va_linux/. 2 In this paper, free and open source will be lower case except when referring to their respective movements. The combined movement will be referred to as the Free \ Open Source Software Movement. 3 Graham Lea, “MS' Ballmer: Linux Is Communism,” the Register, July 31, 2000, accessed March 23, 2015, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2000/07/31/ms_ballmer_linux_is_communism/. 2 providing software that was free from the restrictions of commercial software license agreements. Finally, the open source software adherents recast free software as a development model and encouraged corporate adoption as a way to give the programmers direct control of their work. This paper explores free and open source software ideologies. Since the Free Software Movement and the Open Source Movement use the same schema,4 the differences between the groups and their intellectual legacies are visible ideologically.5 To explain the origin and evolution of these ideologies, this paper will look at many facets of this complex narrative. It will discuss open culture of the early hardware- focused computing industry and will explore the code-sharing schema used in projects such as the UNIX operating system. Companies such as Microsoft changed the culture by introducing a new schema that restricted access to source code and introduced software licensing agreements as a way to circumvent consumer rights. MIT programmer Richard Stallman opposed these changes and started the Free Software Movement, which provided ideological justification for the preservation of the existing, open schema. The Free Software Movement embraced notions of freedom transposed from academic research where software developers worked with the existing body of knowledge (source code) and made incremental contributions to it. Their efforts were shared with the community and peer reviewed. This open availability enabled software to evolve and mature quickly, based on the efforts of many contributors. Open source’s 4 The schema construct applied here comes from William H. Sewell’s Logics of History, where he defines schemas as generalizable procedures applied in the enactment of beliefs. Put another way, schemas are the operational models defining the approach to practices, such as to software development. 5 For the purposes of this paper, ideologies are the set of ideas, both conscious and unconscious, which inform the motivations, and objectives of a group. 3 re-articulation of free software created a schism within the movement. Open source founder Eric Raymond sought to supplant free software’s consumer freedom focused ideology with a revision focused more on corporate approval. At the same time that the open source adherents professionalized the movement by establishing standards and fostering commercial adoption, the free software ideologues gravitated toward activism in order to protect individual rights. While the distributed collaboration aspects of the Free Software Movement’s open schema was adopted by projects such as Wikipedia, this activist exposure resulted in the transposition of free software ideologies into the ethical basis for Internet-based activist groups, such as WikiLeaks. Academic historiography on free software is sparse, and what research does exist privileges the eventual corporate acceptance of open source at the expense of free software’s foundational principles. Ignoring the ideological aspect of the movement blurs the distinction between free software and open source software. As a result, the relationships between the free software ideology and later Internet-based activists have also remained unexamined by scholars. In political scientist Steven Weber’s 2005 text, The Success of Open Source, Weber provides a history of UNIX and free software, with a focus on the commercially appealing open source reinterpretation. He perceives open source as a method of organizing production, and he specifically avoids community ethnography and ideological discussions.6 For Weber, open source’s success is in its efficacy as a process and the abilities of businesses to leverage the open source model. Consistent with this 6 Steve Weber, The Success of Open Source (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 224-225. 4 business-centric focus, the author ignores the role of ideology. When discussing individual motivations, Weber downplays data that does not fit his thesis. The author states that motivations for “many open source developers” were doing battle with a “joint enemy,” which he suggests was Microsoft.7 To support this, he references a Boston Consulting Group Survey that cites 11.3 percent of the respondents as suggesting this opposition as a primary motivation for their free software development work. However, in the same survey, 34.2 percent of respondents reported their motivation as ideological, in that “code should be open.”8 The author acknowledges that this reflects an ideological commitment, but he dismisses this as inconsistent with the “observed practices of most open source users.”9 In this glib dismissal, he also fails to differentiate between free software developers and users. He suggests that rather than representative of ideological beliefs, “code
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