From the web page
http://tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/homesteading.html
Homesteading the Noosphere
by Eric S. Raymond
April 1998
After observing a contradiction between the `official' ideology
defined by open-source licenses and the actual behavior of
hackers, we examine the actual customs which regulate the
ownership and control of open-source software. We discover that
they imply an underlying theory of property rights homologous to
the Lockean theory of land tenure. We relate that to an analysis
of the hacker culture as a `gift culture' in which participants
compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity
away. We then examine the implications of this analysis for
conflict resolution in the culture, and develop some
prescriptive implications.
1. An Introductory Contradiction
2. The Varieties of Hacker Ideology
3. Promiscuous Theory, Puritan Practice
4. Ownership and Open Source
5. Locke and Land Title
6. The Hacker Culture as Gift Economy
7. The Joy of Hacking
8. The Many Faces of Reputation
9. Ownership Rights and Reputation Incentives
10. The Problem of Ego
11. The Value of Humility
12. Global Implications of the Reputation-Game Model
13. Noospheric Property and the Ethology of Territory
14. Causes of Conflict
15. Project Structures and Ownership
16. Conflict and Conflict Resolution
17. Acculturation Mechanisms and the Link to Academia
18. Conclusion: From Custom to Customary Law
19. Questions for Further Research
20. Bibliography, Notes, and Acknowledgements
21. Version history
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1. An Introductory Contradiction
Anyone who watches the busy, tremendously productive world of
Internet open-source software for a while is bound to notice an
interesting contradiction between what open-source hackers say
they believe and the way they actually behave -- between the
official ideology of the open-source culture and its actual
practice.
Cultures are adaptive machines. The open-source culture is a
response to an identifiable set of drives and pressures. As
usual, the culture's adaptation to its circumstances manifests
both as conscious ideology and as implicit, unconscious or
semi-conscious knowledge. And, as is not uncommon, the
unconscious adaptations are partly at odds with the conscious
ideology.
In this paper, we will dig around the roots of that
contradiction, and use it to discover those drives and
pressures. We will deduce some interesting things about the
hacker culture and its customs. We will conclude by suggesting
ways in which the culture's implicit knowledge can be leveraged
better.
Labels in square brackets refer to the bibliography/endnotes.
----------
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 zealous and anticommercial 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.
For many years, the pragmatist point of view expressed itself
within the hacker culture mainly as a stubborn current of
refusal to completely buy into the GPL in particular or the
FSF's agenda in general. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, this
attitude tended to be associated with fans of Berkeley Unix,
users of the BSD license, and the early efforts to build
open-source Unixes from the BSD source base. These efforts,
however, failed to build bazaar communities of significant size,
and became seriously fragmented and ineffective.
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.
----------
3. Promiscuous Theory, Puritan Practice
Through all these changes, nevertheless, there remained a broad
consensus theory of what `free software' or `open source' is.
The clearest expression of this common theory can be found in
the various open-source licenses, all of which have crucial
common elements.
In 1997 these common elements were distilled into the Debian
Free Software Guidelines, which became the Open Source
Definition. Under the guidelines defined by the OSD, an
open-source license must protect an unconditional right of any
party to modify (and redistribute modified versions of)
open-source software.
Thus, the implicit theory of the OSD (and OSD-conformant
licenses such as the GPL, the BSD license, and Perl's Artistic
License) is that anyone can hack anything. Nothing prevents half
a dozen different people from taking any given open-source
product (such as, say the Free Software Foundations's gcc C
compiler), duplicating the sources, running off with them in
different evolutionary directions, but all claiming to be the
product.
In practice, however, such `forking' almost never happens.
Splits in major projects have been rare, and always accompanied
by re-labeling and a large volume of public self-justification.
It is clear that, in such cases as the GNU Emacs/XEmacs split,
or the gcc/egcs split, or the various fissionings of the BSD
splinter groups, that the splitters felt they were going against
a fairly powerful community norm.
In fact (and in contradiction to the anyone-can-hack-anything
consensus theory) the open-source culture has an elaborate but
largely unadmitted set of ownership customs. These customs
regulate who can modify software, the circumstances under which
it can be modified, and (especially) who has the right to
redistribute modified versions back to the community.
The taboos of a culture throw its norms into sharp relief.
Therefore, it will be useful later on if we summarize some
important ones here.
* There is strong social pressure against forking projects. It
does not happen except under plea of dire necessity, with
much public self-justification, and with a renaming.
* Distributing changes to a project without the cooperation of
the moderators is frowned upon, except in special cases like
essentially trivial porting fixes.
* Removing a person's name from a project history, credits or
maintainer list is absolutely not done without the person's
explicit consent.
In the remainder of this paper, we shall examine these taboos
and ownership customs in detail. We shall inquire not only into
how they function but what they reveal about the underlying
social dynamics and incentive structures of the open-source
community.
----------
4. Ownership and Open Source
What does `ownership' mean when property is infinitely
reduplicable, highly malleable, and the surrounding culture has
neither coercive power relationships nor material scarcity
economics?
Actually, in the case of the open-source culture this is an easy
question to answer. The owner(s) of a software project are those
who have the exclusive right, recognized by the community at
large, to re-distribute modified versions.
(In discussing `ownership' in this section I will use the
singular, as though all projects are owned by some one person.
It should be understood, however, that projects may be owned by
groups. We shall examine the internal dynamics of such groups
later in this paper.)
According to the standard open-source licenses, all parties are
equals in the evolutionary game. But in practice there is a very
well-recognized distinction between `official' patches, approved
and integrated into the evolving software by the publicly
recognized maintainers, and `rogue' patches by third parties.
Rogue patches are unusual, and generally not trusted [RP].
That public redistribution is the fundamental issue is easy to
establish. Custom encourages people to patch software for
personal use when necessary. Custom is indifferent to people who
redistribute modified versions within a closed user or
development group. It is only when modifications are posted to
the open-source community in general, to compete with the
original, that ownership becomes an issue.
There are, in general, three ways to acquire ownership of an
open-source project. One, the most obvious, is to found the
project. When a project has only one maintainer since its
inception and the maintainer is still active, custom does not
even permit a question as to who owns the project.
The second way is to have ownership of the project handed to you
by the previous owner (this is sometimes known as `passing the
baton'). It is well understood in the community that project
owners have a duty to pass projects to competent successors when
they are no longer willing or able to invest needed time in
development or maintenance work.
It is significant that in the case of major projects, such
transfers of control are generally announced with some fanfare.
While it is unheard of for the open-source community at large to
actually interfere in the owner's choice of succession,
customary practice clearly incorporates a premise that public
legitimacy is important.
For minor projects, it is generally sufficient for a change
history included with the project distribution to note the
change of ownership. The clear presumption is that if the former
owner has not in fact voluntarily transferred control, he or she
may reassert control with community backing by objecting
publicly within a reasonable period of time.
The third way to acquire ownership of a project is to observe
that it needs work and the owner has disappeared or lost
interest. If you want to do this, it is your responsibility to
make the effort to find the owner. If you don't succeed, then
you may announce in a relevant place (such as a Usenet newsgroup
dedicated to the application area) that the project appears to
be orphaned, and that you are considering taking responsibility
for it.
Custom demands that you allow some time to pass before following
up with an announcement that you have declared yourself the new
owner. In this interval, if someone else announces that they
have been actually working on the project, their claim trumps
yours. It is considered good form to give public notice of your
intentions more than once. More points for good form if you
announce in many relevant forums (related newsgroups, mailing
lists); and still more if you show patience in waiting for
replies. In general, the more visible effort you make to allow
the previous owner or other claimants to respond, the better
your claim if no response is forthcoming.
If you have gone through this process in sight of the project's
user community, and there are no objections, then you may claim
ownership of the orphaned project and so note in its history
file. This, however, is less secure than being passed the baton,
and you cannot expect to be considered fully legitimate until
you have made substantial improvements in the sight of the user
community.
I have observed these customs in action for twenty years, going
back to the pre-FSF ancient history of open-source software.
They have several very interesting features. One of the most
interesting is that most hackers have followed them without
being fully aware of doing so. Indeed, the above may be the
first conscious and reasonably complete summary ever to have
been written down.
Another is that, for unconscious customs, they have been
followed with remarkable (even astonishing) consistency. I have
observed the evolution of literally hundreds of open-source
projects, and I can still count the number of significant
violations I have observed or heard about on my fingers.
Yet a third interesting feature is that as these customs have
evolved over time, they have done so in a consistent direction.
That direction has been to encourage more public accountability,
more public notice, and more care about preserving the credits
and change histories of projects in ways which (among other
things) establish the legitimacy of the present owners.
These features suggest that the customs are not accidental, but
are products of some kind of implicit agenda or generative
pattern in the open-source culture that is utterly fundamental
to the way it operates.
An early respondent pointed out that contrasting the Internet
hacker culture with the cracker/pirate culture (the ``warez
d00dz'' centered around game-cracking and pirate bulletin-board
systems) illuminates the generative patterns of both rather
well. We'll return to the d00dz for contrast later in the paper.
----------
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 [N]. 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 <[log in to unmask]> 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.
----------
6. The Hacker Culture as Gift Economy
To understand the role of reputation in the open-source culture,
it is helpful to move from history further into anthropology and
economics, and examine the difference between exchange cultures
and gift cultures.
Human beings have an innate drive to compete for social status;
it's wired in by our evolutionary history. For the 90% of that
history that ran before the invention of agriculture, our
ancestors lived in small nomadic hunting-gathering bands.
High-status individuals got the healthiest mates and access to
the best food. This drive for status expresses itself in
different ways, depending largely on the degree of scarcity of
survival goods.
Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity
and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining
social status.
The simplest way is the command hierarchy. In command
hierarchies, allocation of scarce goods is done by one central
authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale very
poorly [Mal]; they become increasingly brutal and inefficient as
they get larger. For this reason, command hierarchies above the
size of an extended family are almost always parasites on a
larger economy of a different type. In command hierarchies,
social status is primarily determined by access to coercive
power.
Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a
sophisticated adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command
model, scales quite well. Allocation of scarce goods is done in
a decentralized way through trade and voluntary cooperation (and
in fact, the dominating effect of competitive desire is to
produce cooperative behavior). In an exchange economy, social
status is primarily determined by having control of things (not
necessarily material things) to use or trade.
Most people have implicit mental models for both of the above,
and how they interact with each other. Government, the military,
and organized crime (for example) are command hierarchies
parasitic on the broader exchange economy we call `the free
market'. There's a third model, however, that is radically
different from either and not generally recognized except by
anthropologists; the gift culture.
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.
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.
This observation is not in itself entirely sufficient to explain
the observed features of hacker culture, however. The cracker
d00dz have a gift culture which thrives in the same (electronic)
media as that of the hackers, but their behavior is very
different. The group mentality in their culture is much stronger
and more exclusive than among hackers. They hoard secrets rather
than sharing them; one is much more likely to find cracker
groups distributing sourceless executables that crack software
than tips that give away how they did it.
What this shows, in case it wasn't obvious, is that there is
more than one way to run a gift culture. History and values
matter. I have summarized the history of the hacker culture
elsewhere in [HH]; the ways in which it shaped present behavior
are not mysterious. Hackers have defined their culture by set of
choices about the form which their competition will take. It is
that form which we will examine in the remainder of this paper.
----------
7. The Joy of Hacking
In making this `reputation game' analysis, by the way, I do not
mean to devalue or ignore the pure artistic satisfaction of
designing beautiful software and making it work. We all
experience this kind of satisfaction and thrive on it. People
for whom it is not a significant motivation never become hackers
in the first place, just as people who don't love music never
become composers.
So perhaps we should consider another model of hacker behavior
in which the pure joy of craftsmanship is the primary
motivation. This `craftsmanship' model would have to explain
hacker custom as a way of maximizing both the opportunities for
craftsmanship and the quality of the results. Does this conflict
with or suggest different results than the `reputation game'
model?
Not really. In examining the `craftsmanship' model, we come back
to the same problems that constrain hackerdom to operate like a
gift culture. How can one maximize quality if there is no metric
for quality? If scarcity economics doesn't operate, what metrics
are available besides peer evaluation? It appears that any
craftsmanship culture ultimately must structure itself through a
reputation game -- and, in fact, we can observe exactly this
dynamic in many historical craftsmanship cultures from the
medieval guilds onwards.
In one important respect, the `craftsmanship' model is weaker
than the `gift culture' model; by itself, it doesn't help
explain the contradiction we began this paper with.
Finally, the `craftsmanship' motivation itself may not be
psychologically as far removed from the reputation game as we
might like to assume. Imagine your beautiful program locked up
in a drawer and never used again. Now imagine it being used
effectively and with pleasure by many people. Which dream gives
you satisfaction?
Nevertheless, we'll keep an eye on the craftsmanship model. It
is intuitively appealing to many hackers, and explains some
aspects of individual behavior well enough.
After I published the first version of this paper, an anonymous
respondent commented: ``You may not work to get reputation, but
the reputation is a real payment with consequences if you do the
job well.'' This is a subtle and important point. The reputation
incentives continue to operate whether or not a craftsman is
aware of them; thus, ultimately, whether or not a hacker
understands his own behavior as part of the reputation game, his
behavior will be shaped by that game.
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8. The Many Faces of Reputation
There are reasons general to every gift culture why peer repute
(prestige) is worth playing for:
First and most obviously, good reputation among one's peers is a
primary reward. We're wired to experience it that way for
evolutionary reasons touched on earlier. (Many people learn to
redirect their drive for prestige into various sublimations that
have no obvious connection to a visible peer group, such as
``honor'', ``ethical integrity'', ``piety'' etc.; this does not
change the underlying mechanism.)
Secondly, prestige is a good way (and in a pure gift economy,
the only way) to attract attention and cooperation from others.
If one is well known for generosity, intelligence, fair dealing,
leadership ability, or other good qualities, it becomes much
easier to persuade other people that they will gain by
association with you.
Thirdly, if your gift economy is in contact with or intertwined
with an exchange economy or a command hierarchy, your reputation
may spill over and earn you higher status there.
Beyond these general reasons, the peculiar conditions of the
hacker culture make prestige even more valuable than it would be
in a `real world' gift culture.
The main `peculiar condition' is that the artifacts one gives
away (or, interpreted another way, are the visible sign of one's
gift of energy and time) are very complex. Their value is
nowhere near as obvious as that of material gifts or
exchange-economy money. It is much harder to objectively
distinguish a fine gift from a poor one. Accordingly, the
success of a giver's bid for status is delicately dependent on
the critical judgement of peers.
Another peculiarity is the relative purity of the open-source
culture. Most gift cultures are compromised -- either by
exchange-economy relationships such as trade in luxury goods, or
by command-economy relationships such as family or clan
groupings. No significant analogues of these exist in the
open-source culture; thus, ways of gaining status other than by
peer repute are virtually absent.
----------
9. Ownership Rights and Reputation Incentives
We are now in a position to pull together the previous analyses
into a coherent account of hacker ownership customs. We
understand the yield from homesteading the noosphere now; it is
peer repute in the gift culture of hackers, with all the
secondary gains and side-effects that implies.
From this understanding, we can analyze the Lockean property
customs of hackerdom as a means of maximizing reputation
incentives; of ensuring that peer credit goes where it is due
and does not go where it is not due.
The three taboos we observed above make perfect sense under this
analysis. One's reputation can suffer unfairly if someone else
misappropriates or mangles one's work; these taboos (and related
customs) attempt to prevent this from happening.
* Forking projects is bad because it exposes pre-fork
contributors to a reputation risk they can only control by
being active in both child projects simultaneously after the
fork. (This would generally be too confusing or difficult to
be practical.)
* Distributing rogue patches (or, much worse, rogue binaries)
exposes the owners to an unfair reputation risk. Even if the
official code is perfect, the owners will catch flak from
bugs in the patches (but see [RP]).
* Surreptitiously filing someone's name off a project is, in
cultural context, one of the ultimate crimes. It steals the
victim's gift to be presented as the thief's own.
All three of these taboo behaviors inflict global harm on the
open-source community as well as local harm on the victim(s).
Implicitly they damage the entire community by decreasing each
potential contributor's perceived likelihood that
gift/productive behavior will be rewarded.
It's important to note that there are alternate candidate
explanations for two of these three taboos.
First, hackers often explain their antipathy to forking projects
by bemoaning the wasteful duplication of work it would imply as
the child products evolved in more-or-less parallel into the
future. They may also observe that forking tends to split the
co-developer community, leaving both child projects with fewer
brains to work with than the parent.
A respondent has pointed out that it is unusual for more than
one offspring of a fork to survive with significant `market
share' into the long term. This strengthens the incentives for
all parties to cooperate and avoid forking, because it's hard to
know in advance who will be on the losing side and see a lot of
their work either disappear entirely or languish in obscurity.
Dislike of rogue patches is often explained by observing that
they can complicate bug-tracking enormously, and inflict work on
maintainers who have quite enough to do catching their own
mistakes.
There is considerable truth to these explanations, and they
certainly do their bit to reinforce the Lockean logic of
ownership. But while intellectually attractive, they fail to
explain why so much emotion and territoriality gets displayed on
the infrequent occasions that the taboos get bent or broken --
not just by the injured parties, but by bystanders and observers
who often react quite harshly. Cold-blooded concerns about
duplication of work and maintainance hassles simply do not
sufficiently explain the observed behavior.
Then, too, there is the third taboo. It's hard to see how
anything but the reputation-game analysis can explain this. The
fact that this taboo is seldom analyzed much more deeply than
``It wouldn't be fair'' is revealing in its own way, as we shall
see in the next section.
----------
10. The Problem of Ego
At the beginning of the paper I mentioned that the unconscious
adaptive knowledge of a culture is often at odds with its
conscious ideology. We've seen one major example of this already
in the fact that Lockean ownership customs have been widely
followed despite the fact that they violate the stated intent of
the standard licenses.
I have observed another interesting example of this phenomenon
when discussing the reputation-game analysis with hackers. This
is that many hackers resisted the analysis and showed a strong
reluctance to admit that their behavior was motivated by a
desire for peer repute or, as I incautiously labeled it at the
time, `ego satisfaction'.
This illustrates an interesting point about the hacker culture.
It consciously distrusts and despises egotism and ego-based
motivations; Self-promotion tends to be mercilessly criticized,
even when the community might appear to have something to gain
from it. So much so, in fact, that the culture's `big men' and
tribal elders are required to talk softly and humorously
deprecate themselves at every turn in order to maintain their
status. How this attitude meshes with an incentive structure
that apparently runs almost entirely on ego cries out for
explanation.
A large part of it, certainly, stems from the generally negative
Europo-American attitude towards `ego'. The cultural matrix of
most hackers teaches them that desiring ego satisfaction is a
bad (or at least immature) motivation; that ego is at best an
eccentricity tolerable only in prima-donnas and often an actual
sign of mental pathology. Only sublimated and disguised forms
like ``peer repute'', ``self-esteem'', ``professionalism'' or
``pride of accomplishment'' are generally acceptable.
I could write an entire other essay on the unhealthy roots of
this part of our cultural inheritance, and the astonishing
amount of self-deceptive harm we do by believing (against all
the evidence of psychology and behavior) that we ever have truly
`selfless' motives. Perhaps I would, if Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche and Ayn Rand had not already done an entirely
competent job (whatever their other failings) of deconstructing
`altruism' into unacknowledged kinds of self-interest.
But I am not doing moral philosophy or psychology here, so I
will simply observe one minor kind of harm done by the belief
that ego is evil, which is this: it has made it emotionally
difficult for many hackers to consciously understand the social
dynamics of their own culture!
But we are not quite done with this line of investigation. The
surrounding culture's taboo against visibly ego-driven behavior
is so much intensified in the hacker (sub)culture that one must
suspect it of having some sort of special adaptive function for
hackers. Certainly the taboo is weaker among many other gift
cultures, such as the peer cultures of theater people or the
very wealthy!
----------
11. The Value of Humility
Having established that prestige is central to the hacker
culture's reward mechanisms, we now need to understand why it
has seemed so important that this fact remain semi-covert and
largely unadmitted.
The contrast with the pirate culture is instructive. In that
culture, status-seeking behavior is overt and even blatant.
These crackers seek acclaim for releasing "zero-day warez"
(cracked software redistributed on the day of the original
uncracked version's release) but are closemouthed about how they
do it. These magicians don't like to give away their tricks.
And, as a result, the knowledge base of the cracker culture as a
whole increases only slowly.
In the hacker community, by contrast, one's work is one's
statement. There's a very strict meritocracy (the best
craftsmanship wins) and there's a strong ethos that quality
should (indeed must) be left to speak for itself. The best brag
is code that ``just works'', and that any competent programmer
can see is good stuff. Thus, the hacker culture's knowledge base
increases rapidly.
A taboo against ego-driven posturing therefore increases
productivity. But that's a second-order effect; what is being
directly protected here is the quality of the information in the
community's peer-evaluation system. That is, boasting or
self-importance is suppressed because it behaves like noise
tending to corrupt the vital signals from experiments in
creative and cooperative behavior.
The hacker culture's medium of gifting is intangible, its
communications channels are poor at expressing emotional nuance,
and face-to-face contact among its members is the exception
rather than the rule. This gives it a lower tolerance of noise
than most other gift cultures, and goes a long way to explain
the example in public humility required of its tribal elders.
Talking softly is also functional if one aspires to be a
maintainer of a successful project; one must convince the
community that one has good judgement, because most of the
maintainer's job is going to be judging other people's code. Who
would be inclined to contribute work to someone who clearly
can't judge the quality of their own code, or whose behavior
suggests they will attempt to unfairly hog the reputation return
from the project? Potential contributors want project leaders
with enough humility and class be able to to say, when
objectively appropriate, ``Yes, that does work better than my
version, I'll use it'' -- and to give credit where credit is
due.
Yet another reason for humble behavior is that in the open
source world, you seldom want to give the impression that a
project is `done'. This might lead a potential contributor not
to feel needed. The way to maximize your leverage is to be
humble about the state of the program. If one does one's
bragging through the code, and then says ``Well shucks, it
doesn't do x, y, and z, so it can't be that good'', patches for
x, y, and z will often swiftly follow.
Finally, I have personally observed that the self-deprecating
behavior of some leading hackers reflects a real (and not
unjustified) fear of becoming the object of a personality cult.
Linus Torvalds and Larry Wall both provide clear and numerous
examples of such avoidance behavior. Once on a dinner expedition
with Larry Wall I joked ``You're the alpha hacker here -- you
get to pick the restaurant''. He flinched audibly. And rightly
so; failing to distinguish their shared values from their
leaders has ruined a good many communities, a pattern of which
he and Linus cannot fail to be fully aware. On the other hand,
most hackers would love to have Larry's problem, if they could
but bring themselves to admit it.
----------
12. Global Implications of the Reputation-Game Model
The reputation-game analysis has some more implications that may
not be immediately obvious. Many of these derive from the fact
that one gains more prestige from founding a successful project
than from cooperating in an existing one. One also gains more
from projects which are strikingly innovative, as opposed to
being `me, too' incremental improvements on software that
already exists. On the other hand, software that nobody but the
author understands or has a need for is a non-starter in the
reputation game, and it's often easier to attract good notice by
contributing to an existing project than it is to get people to
notice a new one. Finally, it's much harder to compete with an
already successful project than it is to fill an empty niche.
Thus, there's an optimum distance from one's neighbors (the most
similar competing projects). Too close and one's product will be
a ``me, too!'' of limited value, a poor gift (one would be
better off contributing to an existing project). Too far away,
and nobody will be able to use, understand, or perceive the
relevance of one's effort (again, a poor gift). This creates a
pattern of homesteading in the noosphere that rather resembles
that of settlers spreading into a physical frontier -- not
random, but like a diffusion-limited fractal wave. Projects tend
to get started to fill functional gaps near the frontier.
Some very successful projects become `category killers'; nobody
wants to homestead anywhere near them because competing against
the established base for the attention of hackers would be too
hard. People who might otherwise found their own distinct
efforts end up, instead, adding extensions for these big,
successful projects. The classic `category killer' example is
GNU Emacs; its variants fill the ecological niche for a
fully-programmable editor so completely that nobody has even
attempted a truly different design since the early 1980s.
Instead, people write Emacs modes.
Globally, these two tendencies (gap-filling and
category-killers) have driven a broadly predictable trend in
project starts over time. In the 1970s most of the open source
that existed was toys and demos. In the 1980s the push was in
development and Internet tools. In the 1990s the action shifted
to operating systems. In each case, a new and more difficult
level of problems was attacked when the possibilities of the
previous one had been nearly exhausted.
This trend has interesting implications for the near future. In
early 1998, Linux looks very much like a category-killer for the
niche `free operating systems' -- people who might otherwise
write competing OSs are now writing Linux device drivers and
extensions instead. And most of the lower-level tools the
culture ever imagined having as open-source already exist.
What's left?
Applications. As the year 2000 approaches, it seems safe to
predict that open-source development effort will increasingly
shift towards the last virgin territory -- programs for
non-techies. A clear early indicator is the development of GIMP,
the Photoshop-like image workshop that is open source's first
major application with the kind of end-user-friendly GUI
interface considered de rigeur in commercial applications for
the last decade. Another is the amount of buzz surrounding
application-toolkit projects like KDE and GNOME.
Finally, the reputation-game analysis explains the oft-cited
dictum that you do not become a hacker by calling yourself a
hacker -- you become a hacker when other hackers call you a
hacker. A `hacker', considered in this light, is somebody who
has shown (by contributing gifts) that he or she both has
technical ability and understands how the reputation game works.
This judgement is mostly one of awareness and acculturation, and
can only be delivered by those already well inside the culture.
----------
13. Noospheric Property and the Ethology of Territory
To understand the consequences of property customs, it will help
us to look at them from yet another angle; that of animal
ethology, specifically the ethology of territory.
Property is an abstraction of animal territoriality, which
evolved as a way of reducing intra-species violence. By marking
his bounds, and respecting the bounds of others, a wolf
diminishes his chances of being in a fight which could weaken or
kill him and make him less reproductively successful.
Similarly, the function of property in human societies is to
prevent inter-human conflict by setting bounds that clearly
separate peaceful behavior from aggression. It is sometimes
fashionable to describe human property as an arbitrary social
convention, but this is dead wrong. Anybody who has ever owned a
dog who barked when strangers came near its owner's property has
experienced the essential continuity between animal
territoriality and human property. Our domesticated cousins of
the wolf are instinctively smarter about this than a good many
human political theorists.
Claiming property (like marking territory) is a performative
act, a way of declaring what boundaries will be defended.
Community support of property claims is a way to minimize
friction and maximize cooperative behavior. These things remain
true even when the ``property claim'' is much more abstract than
a fence or a dog's bark, even when it's just the statement of
the project maintainer's name in a README file. It's still an
abstraction of territoriality, and (like other forms of
property) our instinct-founded models of property are
territorial ones evolved to assist conflict resolution.
This ethological analysis at first seems very abstract and
difficult to relate to actual hacker behavior. But it has some
important consequences. One is in explaining the popularity of
World Wide Web sites, and especially why open-source projects
with websites seem so much more `real' and substantial than
those without them.
Considered objectively, this seems hard to explain. Compared to
the effort involved in originating and maintaining even a small
program, a web page is easy, so it's hard to consider a web page
evidence of substance or unusual effort.
Nor are the functional characteristics of the Web itself
sufficient explanation. The communication functions of a web
page can be as well or better served by a combination of an FTP
site, a mailing list, and Usenet postings. In fact it's quite
unusual for a project's routine communications to be done over
the Web rather than via a mailing list or newsgroup. Why, then,
the popularity of Web sites as project homes?
The metaphor implicit in the term `home page' provides an
important clue. While founding an open-source project is a
territorial claim in the noosphere (and customarily recognized
as such) it is not a terribly compelling one on the
psychological level. Software, after all, has no natural
location and is instantly reduplicable. It's assimilable to our
instinctive notions of `territory' and `property', but only
after some effort.
A project home page concretizes an abstract homesteading in the
space of possible programs by expressing it as `home' territory
in the more spatially-organized realm of the World Wide Web.
Descending from the noosphere to `cyberspace' doesn't get us all
the way to the real world of fences and barking dogs yet, but it
does hook the abstract property claim more securely to our
instinctive wiring about territory. And this is why projects
with web pages seem more `real'.
This ethological analysis also encourages us to look more
closely at mechanisms for handling conflict in the open-source
culture. It leads us to expect that, in addition to maximizing
reputation incentives, ownership customs should also have a role
in preventing and resolving conflicts.
----------
14. Causes of Conflict
In conflicts over open-source software we can identify four
major issues:
* Who gets to make binding decisions about a project?
* Who gets credit or blame for what?
* How to reduce duplication of effort and prevent rogue
versions from complicating bug tracking?
* What is the Right Thing, technically speaking?
If we take a second look at the ``What is the Right Thing''
issue, however, it tends to vanish. For any such question,
either there is an objective way to decide it accepted by all
parties or there isn't. If there is, game over and everybody
wins. If there isn't, it reduces to ``who decides?''.
Accordingly, the three problems a conflict-resolution theory has
to resolve about a project are (A) where the buck stops on
design decisions, (B) how to decide which contributors are
credited and how, and (C) how to keep a project group and
product from fissioning into multiple branches.
The role of ownership customs in resolving issues (A) and (C) is
clear. Custom affirms that the owners of the project make the
binding decisions. We have previously observed that custom also
exerts heavy pressure against dilution of ownership by forking.
It's instructive to notice that these customs make sense even if
one forgets the reputation game and examines them from within a
pure `craftmanship' model of the hacker culture. In this view
these customs have less to do with the dilution of reputation
incentives than with protecting a craftsman's right to execute
his vision in his chosen way.
The craftsmanship model is not, however, sufficient to explain
hacker customs about issue (B), who gets credit for what
(because a pure craftsman, one unconcerned with the reputation
game, would have no motive to care). To analyze these, we need
to take the Lockean theory one step further and examine
conflicts and the operation of property rights within projects
as well as between them.
----------
15. Project Structures and Ownership
The trivial case is that in which the project has a single
owner/maintainer. In that case there is no possible conflict.
The owner makes all decisions and collects all credit and blame.
The only possible conflicts are over succession issues -- who
gets to be the new owner if the old one disappears or loses
interest. The community also has an interest, under issue (C),
in preventing forking. These interests are expressed by a
cultural norm that an owner/maintainer should publicly hand
title to someone if he or she can no longer maintain the
project.
The simplest non-trivial case is when a project has multiple
co-maintainers working under a single `benevolent dictator' who
owns the project. Custom favors this mode for group projects; it
has been shown to work on projects as large as the Linux kernel
or Emacs, and solves the ``who decides'' problem in a way that
is not obviously worse than any of the alternatives.
Typically, a benevolent-dictator organization evolves from an
owner-maintainer organization as the founder attracts
contributors. Even if the owner stays dictator, it introduces a
new level of possible disputes over who gets credited for what
parts of the project.
In this situation, custom places an obligation on the
owner/dictator to credit contributors fairly (through, for
example, appropriate mentions in README or history files). In
terms of the Lockean property model, this means that by
contributing to a project you earn part of its reputation return
(positive or negative).
Pursuing this logic, we see that a `benevolent dictator' does
not in fact own his entire project unqualifiedly. Though he has
the right to make binding decisions, he in effect trades away
shares of the total reputation return in exchange for others'
work. The analogy with sharecropping on a farm is almost
irresistible, except that a contributor's name stays in the
credits and continues to `earn' to some degree even after that
contributor is no longer active.
As benevolent-dictator projects add more participants, they tend
to develop two tiers of contributors; ordinary contributors and
co-developers. A typical path to becoming a co-developer is
taking responsibility for a major subsystem of the project.
Another is to take the role of `lord high fixer', characterizing
and fixing many bugs. In this way or others, co-developers are
the contributors who make a substantial and continuing
investment of time in the project.
The subsystem-owner role is particularly important for our
analysis and deserves further examination. Hackers like to say
that `authority follows responsibility'. A co-developer who
accepts maintainance responsibility for a given subsystem
generally gets to control both the implementation of that
subsystem and its interfaces with the rest of the project,
subject only to correction by the project leader (acting as
architect). We observe that this rule effectively creates
enclosed properties on the Lockean model within a project, and
has exactly the same conflict-prevention role as other property
boundaries.
By custom, the `dictator' or project leader in a project with
co-developers is expected to consult with those co-developers on
key decisions. This is especially so if the decision concerns a
subsystem which a co-developer `owns' (that is, has invested
time in and taken responsibility for). A wise leader,
recognizing the function of the project's internal property
boundaries, will not lightly interfere with or reverse decisions
made by subsystem owners.
Some very large projects discard the `benevolent dictator' model
entirely. One way to do this is turn the co-developers into a
voting committee (as with Apache). Another is rotating
dictatorship, in which control is occasionally passed from one
member to another within a circle of senior co-developers (the
Perl developers organize themselves this way).
Such complicated arrangements are widely considered unstable and
difficult. Clearly this perceived difficulty is largely a
function of the known hazards of design-by-committee, and of
committees themselves; these are problems the hacker culture
consciously understands. However, I think some of the visceral
discomfort hackers feel about committee or rotating-chair
organizations is because they're hard to fit into the
unconscious Lockean model hackers use for reasoning about the
simpler cases. It's problematic, in these complex organizations,
to do an accounting of either ownership in the sense of control
or ownership of reputation returns. It's hard to see where the
internal boundaries are, and thus hard to avoid conflict unless
the group enjoys an exceptionally high level of harmony and
trust.
----------
16. Conflict and Conflict Resolution
We've seen that within projects, an increasing complexity of
roles is expressed by a distribution of design authority and
partial property rights. While this is an efficient way to
distribute incentives, it also dilutes the authority of the
project leader -- most importantly, it dilutes the leader's
authority to squash potential conflicts.
While technical arguments over design might seem the most
obvious risk for internecine conflict, they are seldom a serious
cause of strife. These are usually relatively easily resolved by
the territorial rule that authority follows responsibility.
Another way of resolving conflicts is by seniority -- if two
contributors or groups of contributors have a dispute, and the
dispute cannot be resolved objectively, and neither owns the
territory of the dispute, the side that has put the most work
into the project as a whole (that is, the side with the most
property rights in the whole project) wins.
These rules generally suffice to resolve most project disputes.
When they do not, fiat of the project leader usually suffices.
Disputes that survive both these filters are rare.
Conflicts do not as a rule become serious unless these two
criteria ("authority follows responsibility" and "seniority
wins") point in different directions, and the authority of the
project leader is weak or absent. The most obvious case in which
this may occur is a succession dispute following the
disappearance of the project lead. I have been in one fight of
this kind. It was ugly, painful, protracted, only resolved when
all parties became exhausted enough to hand control to an
outside person, and I devoutly hope I am never anywhere near
anything of the kind again.
Ultimately, all of these conflict-resolution mechanisms rest on
the wider hacker community's willingness to enforce them. The
only available enforcement mechanisms are flaming and shunning
-- public condemnation of those who break custom, and refusal to
cooperate with them after they have done so.
----------
17. Acculturation Mechanisms and the Link to Academia
An early version of this paper posed the following research
question: How does the community inform and instruct its members
as to its customs? Are the customs self-evident or
self-organising at a semi-conscious level, are they taught by
example, are they taught by explicit instruction?
Teaching by explicit instruction is clearly rare, if only
because few explicit descriptions of the culture's norms have
existed to be used up to now.
Many norms are taught by example. To cite one very simple case,
there is a norm that every software distribution should have a
file called README or READ.ME that contains first-look
instructions for browsing the distribution. This convention has
been well established since at least the early 1980s, but up to
now it has never been written down. One derives it from looking
at many distributions.
On the other hand, some hacker customs are self-organizing once
one has acquired a basic (perhaps unconscious) understanding of
the reputation game. Most hackers never have to be taught the
three taboos I listed in Section Three, or at least would claim
if asked that they are self-evident rather than transmitted.
This phenomenon invites closer analysis -- and perhaps we can
find its explanation in the process by which hackers acquire
knowledge about the culture.
Many cultures use hidden clues (more precisely `mysteries' in
the religio/mystical sense) as an acculturation mechanism. These
are secrets which are not revealed to outsiders, but are
expected to be discovered or deduced by the aspiring newbie. To
be accepted inside, one must demonstrate that one both
understands the mystery and has learned it in a culturally
approved way.
The hacker culture makes unusually conscious and extensive use
of such clues or tests. We can see this process operating at at
least three levels:
* Password-like specific mysteries. As one example, there is a
USENET newsgroup called alt.sysadmin.recovery that has a
very explicit such secret; you cannot post without knowing
it, and knowing it is considered evidence you are fit to
post. The regulars have a strong taboo against revealing
this secret.
* The requirement of initiation into certain technical
mysteries. One must absorb a good deal of technical
knowledge before one can give valued gifts (e.g. one must
know at least one of the major computer languages). This
requirement functions in the large in the way hidden clues
do in the small, as a filter for qualities (such as
capability for abstract thinking, persistence, and mental
flexibility) which are necessary to function in the culture.
* Social-context mysteries. One becomes involved in the
culture through attaching oneself to specific projects. Each
project is a live social context of hackers which the
would-be contributor has to investigate and understand
socially as well as technically in order to function.
(Concretely, a common way one does this is by reading the
project's Web pages and/or email archives) It is through
these project groups that newbies experience the behavioral
example of experienced hackers.
In the process of acquiring these mysteries, the would-be hacker
picks up contextual knowledge which (after a while) does make
the three taboos and other customs seem `self-evident'.
One might, incidentally, argue that the structure of the hacker
gift culture itself is its own central mystery. One is not
considered acculturated (concretely: no one will call you a
hacker) until one demonstrates a gut-level understanding of the
reputation game and its implied customs, taboos, and usages. But
this is trivial; all cultures demand such understanding from
would-be joiners. Furthermore the hacker culture evinces no
desire to have its internal logic and folkways kept secret --
or, at least, nobody has ever flamed me for revealing them!
Respondents to this paper too numerous to list have pointed out
that hacker ownership customs seem intimately related to (and
may derive directly from) the practices of the academic world,
especially the scientific research commmunity. This research
community has similar problems in mining a territory of
potentially productive ideas, and exhibits very similar adaptive
solutions to those problems in the ways it uses peer review and
reputation.
Since many hackers have had formative exposure to academia (it's
common to learn how to hack while in college) the extent to
which academia shares adaptive patterns with the hacker culture
is of more than casual interest in understanding how these
customs are applied.
Obvious parallels with the hacker `gift culture' as I have
characterized it abound in academia. Once a researcher achieves
tenure, there is no need to worry about survival issues (Indeed,
the concept of tenure can probably be traced back to an earlier
gift culture in which ``natural philosophers'' were primarily
wealthy gentlemen with time on their hands to devote to
research.) In the absence of survival issues reputation
enhancement becomes the driving goal, which encourages sharing
of new ideas and research through journals and other media. This
makes objective functional sense because scientific research,
like the hacker culture, relies heavily on the idea of `standing
upon the shoulders of giants', and not having to rediscover
basic principles over and over again.
Some have gone so far as to suggest that hacker customs are
merely a reflection of the research community's folkways and are
actually (for most) acquired there. This probably overstates the
case, if only because hacker custom seems to be readily aquired
by intelligent high-schoolers!
There is a more interesting possibility here. I suspect academia
and the hacker culture share adaptive patterns not because
they're genetically related, but because they've both evolved
the one most optimal social organization for what they're trying
to do, given the laws of nature and and the instinctive wiring
of human beings. 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.
This point, if true, is of more than (excuse me) academic
interest. It suggests from a slightly different angle one of the
speculations in The Cathedral And The Bazaar; that, ultimately,
the industrial-capitalist mode of software production was doomed
to be outcompeted from the moment capitalism began to create
enough of a wealth surplus for many programmers to live in a
post-scarcity gift culture.
----------
18. Conclusion: From Custom to Customary Law
We have examined the customs which regulate the ownership and
control of open-source software. We have seen how they imply an
underlying theory of property rights homologous to the Lockean
theory of land tenure. We have related that to an analysis of
the hacker culture as a `gift culture' in which participants
compete for prestige by giving time, energy, and creativity
away. We have examined the implications of this analysis for
conflict resolution in the culture.
The next logical question to ask is "Why does this matter?"
Hackers developed these customs without conscious analysis and
(up to now) have followed them without conscious analysis. It's
not immediately clear that conscious analysis has gained us
anything practical -- unless, perhaps, we can move from
description to prescription and deduce ways to improve the
functioning of these customs.
We have found a close logical analogy for hacker customs in the
theory of land tenure under the Anglo-American common-law
tradition. Historically [Miller], the European tribal cultures
that invented this tradition improved their dispute-resolution
systems by moving from a system of unarticulated, semi-conscious
custom to a body of explicit customary law memorized by tribal
wisemen -- and eventually written down.
Perhaps, as our population rises and acculturation of all new
members becomes more difficult, it is time for the hacker
culture to do something analogous -- to develop written codes of
good practice for resolving the various sorts of disputes that
can arise in connection with open-source projects, and a
tradition of arbitration in which senior members of the
community may be asked to mediate disputes.
The analysis in this paper suggests the outlines of what such a
code might look like, making explicit that which was previously
implicit. No such codes could be imposed from above; they would
have to be voluntarily adopted by the founders or owners of
individual projects. Nor could they be completely rigid, as the
pressures on the culture are likely to change over time.
Finally, for enforcement of such codes to work, they would have
to reflect a broad consensus of the hacker tribe.
I have begun work on such a code, tentatively titled the
"Malvern Protocol" after the little town where I live. If the
general analysis in this paper becomes sufficiently widely
accepted, I will make the Malvern Protocol publicly available as
a model code for dispute resolution. Parties interested in
critiquing and developing this code, or just offering feedback
on whether they think it's a good idea or not, are invited to
contact me by email.
----------
19. Questions for Further Research
The culture's (and my own) understanding of large projects that
don't follow a benevolent-dictator model is weak. Most such
projects fail. A few become spectacularly successful and
important (Perl, Apache, KDE). Nobody really understands where
the difference lies. (There's a vague sense abroad that each
such project is sui generis and stands or falls on the group
dynamic of its particular members, but is this true or are there
replicable strategies a group can follow?)
As a matter of observable fact, people who found successful
projects gather more prestige than people who do arguably equal
amounts of work debugging and assisting with successful
projects. Is this a rational valuation of comparative effort, or
is it a second-order effect of the unconscious territorial model
we have adduced here?
----------
20. Bibliography, Notes, and Acknowledgements
[Miller] Miller, William Ian; Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud,
Law, and Society in Saga Iceland; University of Chicago Press
1990, ISBN 0-226-52680-1. A fascinating study of Icelandic
folkmoot law, which both illuminates the ancestry of the Lockean
theory of property and describes the later stages of a
historical process by which custom passed into customary law and
thence to written law.
[Mal] Malaclypse the Younger; Principia Discordia, or How I
Found Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her;
Loompanics, ISBN 1-55950-040-9. Amidst much enlightening
silliness, the `SNAFU principle' provides a rather trenchant
analysis of why command hierarchies don't scale well. There's a
browseable HTML version.
[BCT] J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.); The adapted
mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New
York: Oxford University Press 1992. An excellent introduction to
evolutionary psychology. Some of the papers bear directly on the
three cultural types I discuss (command/exchange/gift),
suggesting that these patterns are wired into the human psyche
fairly deep.
[MHG] Goldhaber, Michael K.; The Attention Economy and the Net.
I discovered this paper after my version 1.7. It has obvious
flaws (Goldhaber's argument for the inapplicability of economic
reasoning to attention does not bear close examination), but
Goldhaber nevertheless has funny and perceptive things to say
about the role of attention-seeking in organizing behavior. The
prestige or peer repute I have discussed can fruitfully be
viewed as a particular case of attention in his sense.
[HH] I have summarized the history of hackerdom at
http://earthspace.net/~esr/faqs/hacker-hist.html. The book that
will explain it really well remains to be written, probably not
by me.
[N] The term `noosphere' is an obscure term of art in philosophy
derived from the Greek `nous' meaning `mind', `spirit', or
`breath'. It is pronounced KNOW-uh-sfeer (two o-sounds, one long
and stressed, one short and unstressed tending towards schwa).
If one is being excruciatingly correct about one's orthography,
it is properly spelled with a diaresis over one `o' -- just
don't ask me which one.
[RP] There are some subtleties about rogue patches. One can
divide them into `friendly' and `unfriendly' types. A `friendly'
patch is designed to be merged back into the project's main-line
sources under the maintainer's control (whether or not that
merge actually happens); an `unfriendly' one is intended to yank
the project in a direction the maintainer doesn't approve. Some
projects (notably the Linux kernel itself) are pretty relaxed
about friendly patches and even encourage independent
distribution of them as part of their beta-test phase. An
unfriendly patch, on the other hand, represents a decision to
compete with the original and is a serious matter. Maintaining a
whole raft of unfriendly patches tends to lead to forking.
I am indebted to Michael Funk <[log in to unmask]> for
pointing out how instructive a contrast with hackers the pirate
culture are. Robert Lanphier <[log in to unmask]> contributed much
to the discussion of egoless behavior. Eric Kidd
<[log in to unmask]> highlighted the role of valuing humility
in preventing cults of personality. The section on global
effects was inspired by comments from Daniel Burn
<[log in to unmask]>. Mike Whitaker
<[log in to unmask]> inspired the main thread in the section on
acculturation.
----------
21. Version history
I am solely responsible for what has gone into this paper, and
any errors or misconceptions. However, I have welcomed comments
and feedback and used them to improve the paper -- a process
which I do not expect to end at any predefined time.
10 April 1998: Version 1.2 published on the Web.
12 April 1998: Version 1.3. Typo fixes and responses to first
round of public comments. First four items in bibliography. An
anonymously contributed observation about reputation incentives
operating even when the craftsman is unaware of them. Added
instructive contrasts with warez d00dz, material on the
`software should speak for itself' premise, and observations on
avoiding personality cults. As a result of all these changes,
the section on `The Problem of Ego' grew and fissioned.
16 April 1998: Version 1.7. New section on `Global implications'
discusses historical tends in the colonization of the noosphere,
and examines the `category-killer' phenomenon. Added another
research question.
27 April 1998: Version 1.8. Added Goldhaber to the bibliography.
This is the version that will go in the Linux Expo proceedings.
26 May 1998: Version 1.9: Incorporated Fare Rideau's
noosphere/ergosphere distinction. Incorporated RMS's assertion
that he is not anticommercial. New section on acculturation and
academia (thanks to Ross J. Reedstrom, Eran Tromer, Allen
MacInnes, and others). More about humility, (`egoless behavior')
from Jerry Fass and Marsh Ray.
11 July 1998: Version 1.10: Remove Fare Rideau's reference to
`fame' at his suggestion.
----------
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