5. Locke and Land Title
To understand this generative pattern, it helps to notice a historical
analogy for these customs that is far outside the domain of hackers'
usual concerns. As students of legal history and political philosophy
may recognize, the theory of property they imply is virtually
identical to the Anglo-American common-law theory of land tenure!
In this theory, there are three ways to acquire ownership of land.
On a frontier, where land exists that has never had an owner, one
can acquire ownership by homesteading, mixing one's labor
with the unowned land, fencing it, and defending one's title.
The usual means of transfer in settled areas is transfer of
title, that is receiving the deed from the previous owner.
In this theory, the concept of `chain of title' is important.
The ideal proof of ownership is a chain of deeds and transfers
extending back to when the land was originally homesteaded.
Finally, the common-law theory recognizes that land title may be lost
or abandoned (for example, if the owner dies without heirs, or the
records needed to establish chain of title to vacant land are gone).
A piece of land that has become derelict in this way may be claimed by
adverse possession -- one moves in, improves it, and defends
title as if homesteading.
This theory, like hacker customs, evolved organically in a context
where central authority was weak or nonexistent. It developed over a
period of a thousand years from Norse and Germanic tribal law.
Because it was systematized and rationalized in the early modern era
by the English political philosopher John Locke, it is sometimes
referred to as the `Lockean' theory of property.
Logically similar theories have tended to evolve wherever property has
high economic or survival value and no single authority is powerful
enough to force central allocation of scarce goods. This is true even
in the hunter-gatherer cultures that are sometimes romantically
thought to have no concept of `property'. For example, in the
traditions of the !Kung San bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, there is
no ownership of hunting grounds. But there is ownership of
water-holes and springs under a theory recognizably akin to Locke's.
The !Kung San example is instructive, because it shows that Lockean
property customs arise only where the expected return from the
resource exceeds the expected cost of defending it. Hunting grounds
are not property because the return from hunting is highly
unpredictable and variable, and (although highly prized) not a
necessity for day-to-day survival. Waterholes, on the other hand, are
vital to survival and small enough to defend.
The `noosphere' of this paper's title is the territory of ideas, the
space of all possible thoughts . What we see
implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property
rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs.
Hence `homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a
new open-source project does.
Fare Rideau <rideau@ens.fr> correctly points out that hackers do
not exactly operate in the territory of pure ideas. He asserts that
what hackers own is programming projects -- intensional focus
points of material labour (development, service, etc), to which are
associated things like reputation, trustworthiness, etc. He therefore
asserts that the space spanned by hacker projects, is not the
noosphere but a sort of dual of it, the space of noosphere-exploring
program projects. (With a nod to the astrophysicists out there, it
would be etymologically correct to call this dual space the
`ergosphere' or `sphere of work'.)
In practice, the distinction between noosphere and ergosphere is not
important for the purposes of this paper. It is dubious whether the
`noosphere' in the pure sense Fare insists on can be said to exist in
any meaningful way; one would almost have to be a Platonist
philosopher to believe in it. And the distinction between noosphere
and ergosphere is only of practical importance if one wishes
to assert that ideas (the elements of the noosphere) cannot be owned,
but their instantiations as projects can. This question leads to
issues in the theory of intellectual property which are beyond the
scope of this paper.
To avoid confusion, however, it is important to note that neither the
noosphere nor the ergosphere is the same as the totality of virtual
locations in electronic media that is sometimes (to the disgust of
most hackers) called `cyberspace'. Property there is regulated by
completely different rules that are closer to those of the material
substratum -- essentially, he who owns the media and machines on which
a part of `cyberspace' is hosted owns that piece of cyberspace as a
result.
The Lockean structure suggests strongly that open-source hackers
observe the customs they do in order to defend some kind of expected
return from their effort. The return must be more significant than
the effort of homesteading projects, the cost of maintaining version
histories that document `chain of title', and the time cost of doing
public notifications and a waiting period before taking adverse
possession of an orphaned project.
Furthermore, the `yield' from open source must be something more than
simply the use of the software, something else that would be
compromised or diluted by forking. If use were the only issue, there
would be no taboo against forking, and open-source ownership would not
resemble land tenure at all. In fact, this alternate world (where use
is the only yield) is the one implied by existing open-source
licenses.
We can eliminate some candidate kinds of yield right away. Because
you can't coerce effectively over a network connection, seeking power
is right out. Likewise, the open-source culture doesn't have anything
much resembling money or an internal scarcity economy, so hackers
cannot be pursuing anything very closely analogous to material wealth.
There is one way that open-source activity can help people become
wealthier, however -- a way that provides a valuable clue to what
actually motivates it. Occasionally, the reputation one gains in the
hacker culture can spill over into the real world in economically
significant ways. It can get you a better job offer, or a consulting
contract, or a book deal.
This kind of side effect, however, is at best rare and marginal for
most hackers; far too much so to make it convincing as a sole
explanation, even if we ignore the repeated protestations by hackers that
they're doing what they do not for money but out of idealism or love.
However, the way such economic side-effects are mediated is worth
examination. Below we'll see that an understanding of the dynamics of
reputation within the open-source culture itself has
considerable explanatory power.