What the Hack? Tracing the Origins of Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic
What inspires open source programmers, defines their culture and sets the open source world apart from that of proprietary software development? That's an important question for understanding what drives the creation of monumental platforms such as Linux, OpenStack and Hadoop.
What inspires open source programmers, defines their culture and sets the open source world apart from that of proprietary software development? That’s an important question for understanding what drives the creation of monumental platforms such as Linux, OpenStack and Hadoop. It’s also one that can only be answered through a careful look at the history of what open source leaders have called “hacker culture” and the “hacker ethic.”
In most existing tellings, the history of hacker culture is clear-cut, and can be traced cleanly across the various stages in the development of what we know today as free and open source software. Eric S. Raymond’s essay, “A Brief History of Hackerdom,” which probably best encapsulates the prevailing thinking today on the origins of the culture behind open source, traces “the hacker culture as we know it” to a model railroad club at MIT in 1961.
Members of the club, who evinced a passionate commitment to tinkering, exploring and sharing knowledge, went on to staff the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, which was one of the early centers of the computing industry. The lab served to incubate hacker culture further and, when many of its members took jobs at other universities or in industry, they took hacker culture with them, spreading the spirit of discovery and creativity. The lab was also the place where Richard Stallman, who in the early 1980s founded the Free Software Foundation and the GNU operating system, worked in the early 1970s.
Raymond’s narrative of the origins of hacker culture comes mostly from Steven Levy’s 1984 book, “Hackers.” However, Raymond, who was writing in the late 1990s, took the hacker story further by arguing that, as the computing industry became more commercialized during the 1980s, the hacker culture was marginalized, as the passion for tinkering and having fun that had predominated in earlier communities of computer programmers gave way to a focus on efficiency, profit and centralized authority. For Raymond, the rise of Linux, and the fantastic success that it and other decentralized open source projects enjoyed beginning in the late 1990s, signaled the “revenge of the hackers” and the resurgence of the hacker culture at the center of the computing industry.
The narrative that Raymond tells has much to recommend it. But it also has some apparent flaws, and getting to the bottom of them is key to understanding what really drives open source programmers, historically and in the present.
The Real Hacker Culture
One of the most obvious weaknesses in Raymond’s account of hackerdom and open source is the clear disconnect between the principles that governed the community of MIT hackers in the 1960s and 1970s (and, in the 1980s, powered Stallman’s free software movement) and those that became important to Linux developers in the 1990s. People such as Linus Torvalds, who launched Linux as a computer science student in 1991, were much less ideological in the way they thought about computing and programming than the people in the GNU movement were—and, arguably, Torvalds’s laissez-faire attitudes were what assured the terrific success of Linux, as compared to GNU, which failed to produce a usable open source operating system kernel.
To be sure, Torvalds and his cohort thought of programming as a way to have fun—as the title of Torvalds’s autobiography, “Just for Fun,” makes clear—and they were committed to collaboration and cooperation with others. But they were not militant in their devotion to such endeavors, nor did they think of software development as a sort of ideological crusade. They did not, in other words, evidently seethe against the world of closed-source software development, or view what they were doing as a way to gain “revenge” against some kind of evil empire of proprietary software, as Raymond supposed. (If Torvalds seethed against anything in the early 1990s, it was Minix, an academic Unix clone whose source code was publicly available, and which hardly incarnated the principles that, according to Raymond, open source hackers were fighting against.)
It is also difficult to square an interpretation of Linux and the open source movement of the 1990s as the triumph of hacker culture with the fact that, since that time, the purest representatives of the MIT-era hacker culture—people such as Stallman—have remained on the sidelines of the mainstream open source community. (Actually, Stallman strongly disavows association with the open source movement, which he views as “missing the point” of the software-freedom principles that emerged from the hacker culture of the 1960s and 1970s.)
Instead, the open source world for nearly the last two decades has been dominated by individuals and companies that have done much to advance Linux development, but have shown little interest in the ideas that Raymond associated with hacker culture. Canonical has built business models that pair Ubuntu Linux with various proprietary products, and its founder, Mark Shuttleworth, made his fortune in the 1990s writing security-certificate software, not hacking in the free software or open source communities. Jim Whithurst, Red Hat‘s current CEO, who has led the company quite successfully since 2007, made his name before that as an executive at Delta Airlines, in an industry that is about as far removed from the epicenter of the hacker culture as one can get.
Last but not least, the whole premise of a monolithic hacker culture is murky and difficult to digest—not only because Steven Levy’s account of its origins at MIT in the 1960s lacks documentation, and occasionally makes some fuzzy claims that are difficult or impossible to substantiate, but also because Raymond’s definition of hacker values various substantially from Levy’s—and neither definition accounts consistently for what leaders of the free software and open source worlds have actually done.
For instance, according to Levy, one of the tenets of the hacker ethic—which he describes in explicit terms in chapter two of “Hackers”—is to “Mistrust Authority [and] Promote Decentralization.” Principled opposition to authority of any kind is absent from Raymond’s description of open source culture, where, on the contrary, programmers’ subordination to “benevolent dictators” is key to the organizational success of most software projects, according to Raymond. And a commitment to decentralization was not evident in, for example, the GNU project, where development was centrally coordinated, much more so than it has ever been for Linux (a fact that Raymond seemed to see as part of the explanation for Linux’s success in the face of GNU’s flagging progress).
For these reasons, the very idea that there is such a thing as a unified and consistent “hacker culture,” which explains how open source programmers think, and what makes open source software and companies different from their closed-source counterparts, is a very tough sell.
Hackers, or Academics?
And, anyway, to the extent that it is possible to identify a distinct set of values that permeate open source culture—such as the importance of peer review and the openness of information—they are not very different at all from the principles that prevail (most of the time, at least) within the world of academia—which, like modern open source, coexists perfectly well with, and often complements, commercial endeavors.
It’s also hard to imagine how academic values could not have exerted a strong influence on the figures who played important roles in laying the foundation for what became Linux and open source, since virtually all of them, after all, began their careers in universities. Even Unix itself, despite being born in the commercial setting of Bell Labs, saw its first real-world applications largely on university campuses, and one of its founders, Ken Thompson, was committed enough to academia to take a visiting professorship at Berkeley in 1975 after helping to create Unix in the late 1960s.
The notion that modern open source culture can best be understood in terms of its origins in academic settings, rather than with reference to the nebulous hacker ethic or culture that Steven Levy narrowly traced to a model railroad club, is not a new idea. Nikolai Bezroukov was perhaps the first to make the argument in a major public way, when he published a paper in the journal “First Monday” in 1999 which argued, among other things, that open source functions “more like a regular scientific community than some [open source software] apologists would like to acknowledge.” Raymond flatly and aggressively rejected such claims, and contended in another essay that, far from being “genetically related,” academia and open source simply happened to share some similarities “because they’ve both evolved the one most optimal social organization for what they’re trying to do.” I don’t think that’s true.
Of course, I am an academic by trade—though certainly not a computer scientist—so maybe my tendency to see the origins of open source culture in academia, rather than the hacker ethic Levy and Raymond struggled to define, is simply a reflection of my interpretive bias. I’d love to know what you all think, since, as I have noted, I am trying to understand these issues well enough to write a book about them. Feel free to share thoughts below, or to contact me privately.
This is an interesting
This is an interesting article and the points seem fairly sound. I do have some quibbles.
Reference to Raymond’s “benevolent dictators” is taken perhaps a touch out of context. The thing about these projects is that participation is voluntary and of course forking is possible; what makes Raymond’s dictators “benevolent” is precisely that they have no coercive power–if people start not liking what they dictate, they can leave. Dictators of convenience, as it were. And since they exist on a project-by-project basis across Raymond’s whole “bazaar”, I don’t think his approach can really be considered as inconsistent as you paint it. Meanwhile, in practice it seems that increasingly, as more sophistication is gained and people realize there are alternatives to the model, open source projects have moved away from the benevolent dictatorship towards models like what you get in Debian or the Apache foundation, which are quite decentralized and flat in their organization.
I do agree that there is a strong inheritance in Open Source/Free Software circles from academia. But at the same time, I think maybe you’re painting academia in colours that are rather too neutral. For instance, you say “which, like modern open source, coexists perfectly well with, and often complements, commercial endeavors.” as if this were obvious and uncontested on the academic side. This is a rather naive perspective. In fact, there is quite a lot of unease in the academic world about the penetration of the academy by corporate money and values, and a great deal of tension between the academic, scientific model of information sharing and building on top of others’ research, and the corporate emphasis on “intellectual property”, bringing knowledge into silos of patenting and trade secrets. More generally, academic values are not apolitical, let alone anti-political. University campuses have very often been important sources of political ideas and energy, and arguably the commitment to education and to advancement and sharing of knowledge itself has ideological implications. Going back to the hacker ethic, surely if the hacker ethic was influenced by or even born from academic values, it was more specifically influenced by and came out of the intellectual and political ferment of campuses in the sixties. Given Raymond’s own politics, which I understand are essentially the uniquely American right wing free-market Libertarianism, he would no doubt particularly object to that interpretation since of course the main political strand of the sixties campus was, while certainly small-l libertarian, very much left wing and often explicitly socialist. Not that the Free Software or “hacker” ethos is explicitly left wing, but I do think it draws on that strand of academic tradition. At that, Raymond’s “hacker ethic” approach is perhaps quite consciously trying to downplay that strand. There does seem to be a long-standing split, which Raymond didn’t so much create as bring into the open, between the “Open Source”, somewhat market-oriented, individual-freedom-emphasizing ethos, typified perhaps by the BSD license side of the old licensing arguments, and the “Free Software”, vaguely left wing, collective-freedom-emphasizing ethos, typified by the GPL and other “copyleft” licenses. The Free Software side was I think definitely coming out of an academic worldview, and specifically a left-ish sixties emancipatory academic worldview. Raymond wasn’t and the politics of the individualist libertarian and their fondness for the BSD-style license aren’t normally associated with academics. Raymond also, though, emphasized the utility value of openness. He made a basically ideological claim that openness was always more useful, and that does tie into the academic approach to knowledge. While Raymond’s politics and his version of the “hacker ethos” I think haven’t actually been that influential, less so than the Free Software ethic of sharing and so forth, his claims about the utility value of openness have been much more so. Linus Torvalds is somewhat the extreme version of someone who kind of buys that–for Linus, only on a case-by-case basis given his active mistrust of principle.
The article’s concentration on Linus Torvalds I think leads it to overstate the thesis a bit. Torvalds is known for a particularly “pragmatic” stance which consciously eschews all “ideological” content to his use of open source software. There are a lot of people involved in open source who are not rigid ideologues and who are there for more or less practical purposes or even as their work for a company, but who nevertheless retain an affinity for software openness and freedom that goes beyond the strictly instrumental. Open and Free is still the team they’re more or less on, and they may not study the writings of Raymond or Stallman or have even read through the GPL, but they have still somewhat absorbed the ideas and prejudices involved. If you ask them why they’re using some specific open source solution or contributing to some project, they may give practical reasons which relate to open source having various practical advantages, or contributing back meaning you don’t have to maintain a forked code base. But I would suspect that while their reasons may be real, and they may even be right about it, underpinning that is that they don’t believe open is better because they think it works better, rather they are happy to think it works better because they believe in it as a Good Thing based on Open Source/Free Software ethical values.
Torvalds’ insistence on pure pragmatism has occasionally come back to bite him. The Bitkeeper episode, in which he used a closed source program to do versioning, eventually resulted in the need to create a replacement in a hurry; the ending was happy since Torvalds quickly slapped together Git, which has of course become huge. But it was interesting that Bitkeeper became a problem for exactly the sort of reasons that cause Free Software purists to object to closed source programs, and indeed created just the sort of problem that led Richard Stallman to start thinking in the directions that led to Free Software and the GPL in the first place. Which leads me to my last objection to the article’s approach–it seems to treat principles, politics, “hacker culture” and so forth as just sort of things floating in the air with no real relationship to anything or raison d’etre. In fact the idea of Free Software came from encountering a certain category of problems and concluding, using intellectual tools brought from the academic world and from campus political ideas, that these problems were not just random but had a structural basis and so could not really be addressed without addressing the causes. The “hacker ethic” itself is a much less formal thing, but it still I think represents an attempt to grapple with the then-new advent of computer and network technologies, the information contained on them, and their social and power implications.
Many of the people who have built the huge edifice of open source software that has taken over such huge swaths of the computing landscape know little about Free Software, don’t have a left wing bone in their body, and care little about the “hacker ethic” or the academy. But the reason they are using the intellectual tools created by people who did come out of those traditions is that those ideas, ideologies and traditions have very real applications to very real problems.
Sharp observations and clear
Sharp observations and clear thinking. Thank you!
@all: Also make sure to read
@all: Also make sure to read “Coding Freedom” by Gabriella Coleman. It’s less about the history, but gives interesting insights into an anthropologists’ view of the OSS scene…
You can consider also reading
You can consider also reading this lengthy article by Evgeny Morozov (article called “The Meme Hustler” submitted on The blaffler site) about the differences between the Free Software and the Open Source movement. It seems that you’re using those two interchangeably and Morozov explains the deep differences between the two movements.
Anyway, a very nice and in-depth article. indeed your academic involvement introduces some bias IMHO (I’m an academic too).