2. The Varieties of Hacker Ideology
The ideology of the Internet open-source culture (what hackers say
they believe) is a fairly complex topic in itself. All members agree
that open source (that is, software which is freely redistributable
and can readily be evolved and modified to fit changing needs) is a
good thing and worthy of significant and collective effort. This
agreement effectively defines membership in the culture. However, the
reasons individuals and various subcultures give for this
belief vary considerably.
One degree of variation is zealotry; whether open source development
is regarded merely as a convenient means to an end (good tools and fun
toys and an interesting game to play) or as an end in itself.
A person of great zeal might say ``Free software is my life! I exist
to create useful, beautiful programs and information resources, and
then give them away.'' A person of moderate zeal might say ``Open source
is a good thing which I am willing to spend significant time helping
happen''. A person of little zeal might say ``Yes, open source is
OK sometimes. I play with it and respect people who build it''.
Another degree of variation is in hostility to commercial software and/or
the companies perceived to dominate the commercial software market.
A very anticommercial person might say ``Commercial software is theft and
hoarding. I write free software to end this evil.'' A moderately
anticommercial person might say ``Commercial software in general is OK because
programmers deserve to get paid, but companies that coast on shoddy
products and throw their weight around are evil.'' An un-anticommercial
person might say ``Commercial software is OK, I just use and/or write
open-source software because I like it better''.
All nine of the attitudes implied by the cross-product of the above
categories are represented in the open-source culture. The reason
it is worthwhile to point out the distinctions is because they imply
different agendas, and different adaptive and cooperative behaviors.
Historically, the most visible and best-organized part of the hacker
culture has been both very zealous and very anticommercial. The Free
Software Foundation founded by Richard M. Stallman (RMS) supported
a great deal of open-source development from the early 1980s on,
including tools like Emacs and GCC which are still basic to the Internet
open-source world, and seem likely to remain so for the forseeable
future.
For many years the FSF was the single most important focus of
open-source hacking, producing a huge number of tools still critical
to the culture. The FSF was also long the only sponsor of open source
with an institutional identity visible to outside observers of the
hacker culture. They effectively defined the term `free software',
deliberately giving it a confrontational weight (which the newer label
`
open source' just as
deliberately avoids).
Thus, perceptions of the hacker culture from both within and outside
it tended to identify the culture with the FSF's zealous attitude and
perceived anticommercial aims (RMS himself denies he is
anticommercial, but his program has been so read by most people,
including many of his most vocal partisans). The FSF's vigorous and
explicit drive to ``Stamp Out Software Hoarding!'' became the closest
thing to a hacker ideology, and RMS the closest thing to a leader of
the hacker culture.
The FSF's license terms, the ``General Public Licence'' (GPL),
expresses the FSF's attitudes. It is very widely used in the
open-source world. North Carolina's Sunsite is the largest and most
popular software archive in the Linux world. In July 1997 about half
the Sunsite software packages with explicit license terms used GPL.
But the FSF was never the only game in town. There was always a
quieter, less confrontational and more market-friendly strain in the
hacker culture. The pragmatists were loyal not so much to an ideology
as to a group of engineering traditions founded on early open-source
efforts which predated the FSF. These traditions included, most
importantly, the intertwined technical cultures of Unix and the
pre-commercial Internet.
The typical pragmatist attitude is only moderately anticommercial, and
its major grievance against the corporate world is not `hoarding' per
se. Rather it is that world's perverse refusal to adopt superior
approaches incorporating Unix and open standards and open-source
software. If the pragmatist hates anything, it is less likely to be
`hoarders' in general than the current King Log of the software
establishment; formerly IBM, now Microsoft.
To pragmatists, the GPL is important as a tool rather than an end in
itself. Its main value is not as a weapon against `hoarding', but as
a tool for encouraging software sharing and the growth of
bazaar-mode
development communities. The pragmatist values having good tools and
toys more than he dislikes commercialism, and may use high-quality
commercial software without ideological discomfort. At the same time,
his open-source experience has taught him standards of technical
quality that very little closed software can meet.
Po mnoho let se úhel pohledu pragmatiků projevoval uvnitř hackerovské kultury hlavně jako tvrdohlavý proud odmítání kompletně ... . V průběhu 80. a částečně 90. let tíhly tyto postoje ke spojení s fanoušky Berkeley Unixu, uživateli BSD-licence a ranými pokusy vybudovat open-source Unixy ze základny BSD. Avšak tyto pokusy selhaly při vytváření bazaarových komunit významnějších velikostí, rozdrobily se a staly se neefektivními.
Not until the Linux explosion of early 1993-1994 did pragmatism
find a real power base. Although Linus Torvalds never made a point of
opposing RMS, he set an example by looking benignly on the growth of a
commercial Linux industry, by publicly endorsing the use of
high-quality commercial software for specific tasks, and by gently
deriding the more purist and fanatical elements in the culture.
A side effect of the rapid growth of Linux was the induction of a
large number of new hackers for which Linux was their primary loyalty
and the FSF's agenda primarily of historical interest. Though the
newer wave of Linux hackers might describe the system as ``the choice
of a GNU generation'', most tended to emulate Torvalds more than Stallman.
Increasingly it was the anticommercial purists who found themselves in
a minority. How much things had changed would not become apparent
until the Netscape announcement in February 1998 that it would
distribute Navigator 5.0 in source. This excited more interest in `free
software' within the corporate world. The subsequent call to the hacker
culture to exploit this unprecedented opportunity and to re-label its
product from `free software' to `open source' was met with a level of
instant approval that surprised everybody involved.
In a reinforcing development, the pragmatist part of the culture was
itself becoming polycentric by the mid-1990s. Other semi-independent
communities with their own self-consciousness and charismatic leaders
began to bud from the Unix/Internet root stock. Of these, the most
important after Linux was the Perl culture under Larry Wall. Smaller,
but still significant, were the traditions building up around John
Osterhout's Tcl and Guido Van Rossum's Python languages. All three of
these communities expressed their ideological independence by devising
their own, non-GPL licensing schemes.