FOSS culture and analysis

Non-profit organizations and foundations such as the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been working to promote the understanding and protection of the FOSS movement and defend the rights of programmers and computer users against what they see as government and industry attempts to privatize or control the flow of information on the internet. What begins to emerge when one reads the writing of the FOSS proponents and historians is that these programmers and hackers view of their world as a culture. They write of “gift economies,” establish vocabulary, ethical systems and advocate particular models of behavior in the software development process. Programmers, hackers and lawyers have been writing manifestos, anthropological analysis and precise explanations of the FOSS world since its inception. In this regard we have the unique opportunity to hear the “emic” perspective of the FOSS world from those most intimately involved (Kelty, 2004). I will not attempt to rephrase what has already been eloquently provided by FOSS advocates over the years:

“How far can free software go? There are no limits, except when laws such as the patent system prohibit free software entirely. The ultimate goal is to provide free software to do all of the jobs computer users want to do–and thus make proprietary software obsolete.” (Stallman, 2002)

- Richard Stallman, Founder of the Free Software Foundation

“Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise in populations that do not have significant material-scarcity problems with survival goods. We can observe gift cultures in action among aboriginal cultures living in ecozones with mild climates and abundant food. We can also observe them in certain strata of our own society, especially in show business and among the very wealthy.

Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status is determined not by what you control but by what you give away.

Thus the Kwakiutl chieftain’s potlach party. Thus the multi-millionaire’s elaborate and usually public acts of philanthropy. And thus the hacker’s long hours of effort to produce high-quality open-source code.

For examined in this way, it is quite clear that the society of open-source hackers is in fact a gift culture. Within it, there is no serious shortage of the ’survival necessities’—disk space, network bandwidth, computing power. Software is freely shared. This abundance creates a situation in which the only available measure of competitive success is reputation among one’s peers.” (Raymond, 1999)

- Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar

“Humans have not inhabited cyberspace long enough or in sufficient diversity to have developed a Social Contract which conforms to the strange new conditions of that world. Laws developed prior to consensus usually favor the already established few who can get them passed and not society as a whole … To assume that systems of law based in the physical world will serve in an environment as fundamentally different as cyberspace is a folly for which everyone doing business in the future will pay … For example, if we continue to assume that value is based on scarcity, as it is with regard to physical objects, we will create laws that are precisely contrary to the nature of information, which may, in many cases, increase in value with distribution.” (Barlow, 1994)

- John Perry Barlow, Founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation

Since FOSS projects are nearly always collaborative and free of cost to users, much of the cultural identity of FOSS hackers has been built around how best to assure due credit for work done. Because of the absence of financial motivation, much of the anthropological analysis of the FOSS world has been based around Marcel Mauss’ “gift culture” concept. What can been seen in the FOSS community is a side-lining of capitalist organization in favor of a collaborative system of technical creation. Programmers are deeply committed to creating software for free, while seeing this process as an important ethical struggle against commercialization of technology and learning. And it’s working. In June 2004 the open source server application Apache4 was being used to run more than 67% of the active websites on the Internet, with three times the popularity of Microsoft’s web server (Wheeler, 2004). While Apache’s popularity is based partially on it’s being free of cost, the freedom that system administrators gain by being able the alter the very code that runs their servers has made for a double incentive that has virtually cemented the software as industry standard in the web server world. Another example of rapid growth to overtake commercial software use is the hyptertext processor PHP. Recently surpassing Microsoft’s ASP, PHP has shown continuous growth and popularity due to the same reasons that brought Apache its remarkable success (Wheeler, 2004). It must also be emphasized that as these projects become increasingly important in the world of Internet communication, online media and global business, the participation in their development rises exponentially. With literally thousands of programmers working to improve software, finding and fixing bugs and assuring security, the momentum inherent in their in growth is compounded. This is surely noticed in the business world as well, as free software offers a large competitive advantage due to its lack of cost. “The verdict of history seems to be that free-market capitalism is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency; perhaps, in a similar way, the reputation-game gift culture is the globally optimal way to cooperate for generating (and checking!) high-quality creative work” (Raymond, 1999).