two_bits_notizen

The CUltural Significance of Free Software

Introduction

- Free Software (as free of charge and constraints) seems to violate economic logic
- culture understood as an experiment, that changes quickly, crosses a lot of boundaries, contains patterns, which
  are going to be revealed
- practices and ideas of Free Software have extended to other realms of life and creativity (music, film...)
- Free Software exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge
- introduces "recursive public", one collective that is independent od other forms of constituted power and concerned
  with material and practical maintenance and modification of technical, pracital means od its own existence as
  a publicad t
	- does not replace the term "public sphere", rather a mean to understand and specify those and e.g. clarify the
	  relation between the internet and Free Software
	- Free software is one instance of this kind of public
- the internet is not a form of recursive public, but vitally important to those


Recursive Publics and the Reorientation of Power

- the reorientation of knowledge and power is a cultural reorientation, not only an economic or legal one
- recursive publics are concerned with the ability to control and modify the infrastructure that allowed tem to come into
  being in the first place
- Author calls Free Software a recursive public in order to hint at the democratic significance and to suggest that the
  current understanding of a public sphere is inadequate to understand the current reorientation of Power and Knowledge
	- to oppose and understand of free software as purely ideological and to include creation, modification,
	  maintenance of software, networks in the term of political activity
	- they are recursive not only because of the self-grounding of identities, but because they are also concerned
	  with the strata of this grounding, for instance with net neutrality
	- they give the playing field a kind of agency [hence voice] and respond with direct engagement and modification
		- rather than modifying it to their own advantage
- the reorientation has to key aspects: Availablity and Modifiability (adaptability), the latter also raises questions
  about the finality of a product (when is it finished?)
	- the key practice of Free Software is the modification and reuse of free Software Code
- Modifiability is an often-claimed advantage, but what is the cultural significance?
	- seemingly unassailable practices are confounded (like the published book) and it is an imperative for enduring
	  infrastructures
- all these issues have become commonplace, pracitices associated with Free Software have provided a starting point for
  recursive publics, as they transform them as they debate ways of dealing with their productions
- not all of them share a common goal, but a social imaginary, that defines a relationship between technology, governance,
  and the internet - scholars, musicians, scienist have adopted rejectin, refined practices that have made up Free Software


Experiment and Modulation

- five components of Free Software:
	1. movement
	2. sharing source code
	3. conceptualizing Openness
	4. applying copyright and copyleft licenses
	5. coordination and collaboration

Three Ways of Looking at Two Bits

- makes three kinds of contribution: empirical, methodological and theoretical

- empirically, the book studies, what geeks are like and shows them in de midst of figuring things out
	- but the geeks are not the objects of the book
- methodologically, Two Bits contributes to the discussion, how distributed phenomena can be studied
	- Free software is an object, that does not have a single geographic site
- theoretically, Two Bits deals with a refining of the terms of public sphere, rather than studying whether it fits
  Habermas' definition



Part I - The Internet


From the Facts of Human Acitivity

Boston, Author meets two people he has met and talked to before and they lead a conversation about a startup they
have founded

Geeks and Recursive Publics

- analytical concept: Geeks are bound together as a recursive public
- recursive meaning: 1. modify and maintain networks and the dscourse that is thereby enabled 2. recursive depth, they
  argue about technology, but also through it
	- so a recursive public is only possible through discursive and recursive reference to the very means of creating
	  this public

Geeks and their Internets

- refers to Geeks as Geeks as people that care about the Internet as a flexible and standardized structure

Operating Systems and Social Systems

Berlin, author is at a somewhat Hacker conference in the WMF and is involved in numerous discussions about geek issues
- Author realizes that the political lives of some folks have mixed up operating systems and social systems

The idea of Order at the Keyboard

- "public sphere" by CHarles Taylor builds on the work of Habermas and refers to a social imaginary, between a concrete
  existence and imagined rational existence, related to other imagined spaces through the idea of "moral and social order"
  that has developed in the West and around the World.
- it resists the distinction between the material world and ideologies
	- the concept of public sphere also wants to bypass the dichotomoy between ideas and material pactice
- affinity of Geeks to each other is processed through and by ideas of order that are both moral and technical and mix
  up operating systems and social systems

The Internet Silk Road

Author did research on the Silk Mailing List

From Napster to the Internet

The discussion about the shut-down of Napster yielded a discussion not only about right and ideas (e.g. is it legal to
share music?) but also about the infrastructes that allow such arguing and sharing, also the immediate connection to the
decentralized routing protocols

- Many geeks discover the nature of this order by coming to understand how the Internet works and who created it
- some rech this understanding by participation inf Free Sotware
- the story of the process how the Internet was standardizes is a well-known of the Internet Engineering Task Force and
  their Request for Comments


Resquests for Comments

- the IETF and its RFC exemplify key features of the moral and technical order the geeks share
- the stories and practices make up a social imaginary, according to Charles Taylor
- the IETF has control over the key process of Internet standardization and their standards are de facto legitimate
- IETF mamber David Clark said: We reject kings, presidents and votin. We believe in rough consensus and runnin code
	- this quote emphasizes the necessity of arguing wih and through technology
	- geeks make a difference between argument-by-talk and argument-by-technology
	- a frequent response by geeks is to dismiss arguments as mere talk
		- but they enforce this mindset (common imaginary) also by talk
		- so there is a political component to coding, even if the talk disappears and the code remains
		- the inevitability of technique evolving and subverting "talk" consist in a social imaginary shared
		  by many people who spend their time blogging, coding, patching, hacking, or: creating a recursive
		  public enabled by the Internet
	- the leap of a discussion about Napster to the core protocols of the Internet is an example of the second core
	  characteristic of recursive publics: the importance of understanding the Internet as a set of layers,
		- each enabling the next and each requiring an openness that leads to maximum creativity and prevents
		  central control

Conclusion: Recursive Public

- What brings the geeks together then? The Internet? But WHY?
	- the affinity to each other is strucered by shared moral and technical understandings of ordern
	- they are an independent public that has the ability build, maintain and modify itseld, that is not restriced
	  to the activities of speaking, writing, arguing
	- recursive publics form through their experience with the internet, since this is the kind of thing they can
	  inhabit and transform
- what is distinctive about the recursive public?
	- the ability to include the practice of creating this infrastrucire as part of the activity of being public or
	  contesting control
	- the ability to "recurse" through the laers of that infrastrucre, maintaining its publicness at each level
	  without making it into an unchanging, static, unmodifiable thing
- being associated by the internet creates geeks, that clearly understand what this association means and enables
  creation, distribution, modification of software, music, movies, science, knowledge
	- the infrastructure (the internet) is part of the social imaginary
- a corporation is also based on a shared imaginary, of the economy, of how markets, echanges etc are supposed to work
- it is the creation of a set of relations and practices that are generally inflexible, ince it requires a commitment
  of humans, time, capital
- networks and software can be equally concrete, but they are arguably more flexible and reprogrammable than a stock
  exchange, since all the layers can be altered, or used in a clever way (like Napster) though deeper layers are
  harder to change, but they do not face any restrictions by law, goverment or organization (yet)
- Affinity or membership in a recursive public depend on adopting the moral and technical imaginations of that order
- there is a shared imagination of The Public and not only of competing publics,
	- the Internet provides a platform throguh which geek can associatate, ceate in an autonomous manner, independent
	  of the conventional forms of power, so independent, that event states can make use od this infrastructure and
	  become geeks themselbes without necessarily endangering this independence


2. Protestant Reformers, Polymaths, Transhumanists

The author poses the question, whether geeks are modern. He sees it rather as problem that involves an attitude
- do geeks despise the the present or not?  how do they connect the historically unique problems they face to the
  generalities of relations in which they narrate them as problems of liberty, knowledge, power an enlightment?
- he differs between polymaths, who see technology as an intervention into a complicated, historically unique field
  of people, customs, other technologies and laws and transhumanists, who see technology as a product of human action
  but not of human design and which is impossible to control or resist

Protestant Reformation

Geeks love allegories about the protestant reformation, it gives them a way to assert that they prefer reformation
rather than revolution
- he first level of alegories is one of "religious wars" over technologies, that accomplish the same thing and the
  devotion is rather arbitrary and based on background and belief
	- eg one between apple and microsoft or Emacs vs Vi
		- they imply fundamental differences when in fact the differences are rather small
- another level of this is the reference to the reformation, e.g. comparing Torvalds to Luther
- the references to Reformation (e.g. in the discussion about power/control or licenses) allow geeks to not being forced
  into an anticapitalist position, they rather wish to maintain a space for critique and the moral evaluation of
  comtemporary capitalism and competition

Polymaths and Transhumanists

- the standard colloquial explanations of the state don't do justic to the kinds of moral and technical imaginations of
  order - geeks live in a world of software, networks, infrastructures, a world that often does not match with experience
- to geeks, proselytization seems obvious, they want to help friends to understand their world, since it will structure
  their lives as well
- geeks seek independence, but the conventional political philosophies (like anarchism) miss out the aspect of the
  operating systems, within which geeks live and in turn seek to build and extend
- there are different opinions of geeks about the uniqueness of their platform, as it is new but can still be compared
  to generalities liek progress, technology, liberty...
- Foucault sees modernity rather as an attitude towards the past, than as a period of time, and it struggles with
  attitudes of countermodernity
- being modern means to confront the present as a problem that can be transformed by human action, is not an inevitable
  outcome of a process beyond human control (latter is transhumanism)
- when geeks tell stories of the past, they do so in order to heroize the present, although not all of them do so, within
  the spectrum of polymaths and transhumanist are attitudes of modernity and countermodernity
- they speak differently about technology and have different ideas about progress and liberty
	- they speak differently about the role of technology and its relation to the present and future, depending on
	  their rich understanding of the complex technical and politival environment they live in

Polymaths

- polymathy is avowed dilettantism, which results from the necessity of being able to evaluate disparate fields to build
  software, emerges from large projects
- they have a rather down-to-earth attitude towards technology, see ist as something that is a mean, but in the end, it
  is human action that can modify thing
- they are highly aware of standards, regulations, history and posibility, thus do not despise the present, but insist
  both on reflecting and intervening
- they are pragmatic, in the end, technology is not a solution but a part of a series of factors

Transhumanists:

- more of a concern with the the whole, totality, universal
- refers to power of technology to transcent limits of the hman body
- contains various groups but actually reveals a certain attitude towards technical intervention, innovation and politics
	- understanding of technological progress can be udnerstood by the term "singularity"
	- it is the point when the speed of technical progress os larger than the human comprehension of this progress
	- it presumes a constand technical acceleration, and the glance into the future should order the interventions
	  in the present, a mode of histroical consciousness, that privileges inevitability of technological progress
	  over inevitability of human power
	- this notion leads to a state of constant technological becoming, inconceivable by a human mind
	- for transhumanists, technology does not dissolve, humans dissolve within the solution of technology
	- technological progress is both subject and law-like to intelligent manipulation
		- it is inevitable becase of the massive parallel human curiosity
- it is pointless to argue bot technology, but not to argue with it and through it
- transhumanists despise the present as intolerably slow descent into the future of immortality and superhuman self-
  improvement, they are countermodern
	- they fear destruction because of too  much turbulent and ignorant human resistence
- technology does not develop without the contribution of human beings, according to the parochial demands of the day
  though, but this does by no menas determine the eventual outcome of technical progress


Conclusion:

- geeks sometimes display a mix of different political categories, but they are precisely interesting because they are
  involved in the creation of new things, tha chancte the meaning of political categories
- their politics are mixed up with technical details of the internet
- this reveals how they think through the speifici, historically unique situation of the internet to the generel problems
  of e.g. knowledge, power, liberty, progress

- Geeks are geeks because they come togehter in new forms of their own reation in ways that are not easy to identify
  ( not language, nation..) but the internet is not the only reason for that affinity, the collective affinity is referred
  to here as recursive public
- it is impossible to identify particular typed of people, hence it is necessary to turn to histroically specific sets
  of practices that form the substance of their affinity
- understanding <free Software through its changing practices gies access to life world of the geeks and reveals the
  structure of how a recursive public comes into being



II FREE SOFTWARE

3. The Movement


Forking Free Software

Netscape published its source code in 1998
- it was seen by some geeks as an attempt to regain some hacker-cred
- the reasons recapitulate some core practices of Free Software

Sharing Source Code
- secrecy was practiced in order to prevent others from copying a program and competing with it
- Zawinski (experienced in Free Software) claimed, that the source code could be given away as a product like the product
  itself, as this strategy did not make any sense for business yet, only from a developer-perspective
- hence they realeased it 1998 in the middle of the dotcom boom

Conceptualizing Open Systems
- the browser wars over to 1990ies caused Netscape and Microsoft to stray far from the original vision by Berners-Lee to
  keep the protocol and its implementations all open
- the incompatibility problems of the brwoser learly represented the manipulation of the standard process  for the benefit
  of competitive advantage
- releasing the source code hence was widesely seen as perhaps the only way to bypass this development
- the right to redistribution that accompany an Open soruce license made it possible to comply the browser with th
  standards

Writing Licenses
- netscape wrote its own license and many hackers were unsatisfied wih this situation
- it was the result of a rather complex network of contracts, business and licenses
- every new licence though is being scrutinized
- many others adopted the NPL which was a problem, since it only adapted to the specific situation of Netscape

Coordinating Collaboration
- Free Software is often advertised as harnessing the effort of numerous porgrammers
- but software engineering in fact is a notoriously hard porblem
- the mozilla code release needed to incorporate the contributions of outsiders who didn't work for netcape
	- needed to be enticed, an assured that they could track their contributions
	- it needed a transparent interne-based coordinations system
- it required an organizational systems in which contributions from inside and outside hat to be looked at, verified and
  decided upon whether to be used
- in 2004 mozilla had slowly creeped up the charts and one of the most widely used Free Software apps
- whereas the original netscape had failed
	- mozilla was rather seperated from netscape but the latter was not so easy to enter for outsiders

Formenting Movements
- the period at the end of the 90ies was an exciting time for developers,
- netscape's decision came in a time of a self-reflection of people that were involved in Free Software
- 1999, Tim O'Reilly held a conference, the Freeware Summit
- Raymond Peresn suffested Open Source as an alternative name and created the Open Source Initiative
- the motivations to contribute were different, (business-wisse sensible, fun, technical necessity...)
- To Raymond, who opted for  Free Software definition that was more plasubile to investors and venture capitalists, the
  definition byStallman was a dogmatic impossibl communicms, rather than liberty
- felt that stallmans rhethtoric got in the way of businesses recognizing the clever inversion of property rights
- it hit a common feeling of people that those who got rich with software werent those who actually built it
- different approaches, deifnitions and udnerstandings evolved in that time, but all were contributing to mainly the
  same thing

A movement?

- the movement is made up of stories and is a practice of storytelling
- whenever it is introduced a story of Free Software or Open Source is being told to explain irs porpose
- the stories reveal alwys a stared moral anfd technical imagination that makes up Free Software as a reursive public

Conclusion

- both practices, one in favor of liberty/creativity, the other in favor of businesses/organizations, giv geeks ways of
  making sense of a practice that they share in almost all of its details
	- bot narratives give arguments in what way they are different from the mainstream


4. Sharing Source Code

- source code is both a tool that performs concrete actions and an expressive medium too
- nothing about source code requires the sharing, however sharing it has turned into a legal practice
- the story of shared code can be narratend along UNIX and C
- Unix was proiliferated via an academic sharing of chunks of Code and it was hence stabilized by people that were
  interested in the maintaining of Unix ( primal recursive public)
- Unix had become a philosophy for geeks to think aout how we shall live in a world of machines, software and networks

Before Source
- in the 50ies to 70ies the first "higher" languages appeared, that allowed a human being to talk to the machine not via
  binaries or via plugging relays
- the power of the computer rests on its programmability, in principle it can be made into solving any calculation, which
  was proven by Turing
- programmers int the 50ies did think about sharing their alogirthms but not the program, since they were highly specific
- with the introduction of programming languages, a distinction between the source and the target language evolved
- the problem of portability was not inly a technical problem, but also a economical-political poblem

-----several parts left out of a detailed analysis of the history of UNIX

Conclusion

- UNIX is not only a technical achievement but the creation of a set of norms for shaing source code
	- in a quasi-commercial, quas-academic, networked and planetwide environment
- sharing the code has taken three basic forms:
	- porting code, teaching corde, forking code
- Unix was a way of implmenting ideas of a moral and technical order
- as source code comes to inlcude more of the acivities of everyday communication and creation, its history will
  illuminate the kinds of order that emerge in practices and technologies that are tied into the UNIX philosophy

COnceiving Open Systems

- the term "open" has to be explained since it was differently conceived

Hopelessly Plural
- we do not live in the world of "THE computer", we live in a world of many computers
	- there is no general-purpose computer
- computer were customized to particular interests
	- the development to an incresing interest in the information generated rather than i the generating machine
	  led to a demand for interoperability
- Open Systems emerged in the 80ies, a question of standard adoption
	- eg convincing all the manufacturers of UNIX based computers to adopt the same basic standard for the system
	- in reality, such a standard was far from obious, difficult to create
- by the 90ies, no corportation hat Openness set as a goal, but noone objected the demand
	- it was somewhat a cultural imperative, relecting a longstanding imaginary, rooted in liberal democratic notions

C------several parts left out

Conclusion:

the open system battles of the 1980ies set the context for free software
- the failure to reate a standard UNIX operating system opened the door for microsoft and the LINUX kernel to emerge
- the success of the TCP/IP protocols forced mutliple competing network schemes into a standard and to the singular
   entitiy of the Internet, that inherited the moral-technical order of Free Software
- this infrastructure is rechnical (protocols and standards) and moral (expressing ideas about the proper order and
  organization of commercial efforts to provide software and computing power) at once
- with the invention of Unix, the dichotomies of commerial/noncommercial, capitalist/communist etc don't capture the
  context anymore
- the blind spot of open systems also provided the impetus to start fihuring out the legal and economic aspects of Free
  Software and initatied the experiments with copyright licensing and innovative coordination/collaboration

6.Writing Open Licenses

Conclusion:
Stallmann founded the Free Softwarte Foundation in 1985 - years followed of various battles among hackers
- the FSF distributed a wide range of ftware via arpanet and usenet and was refined, it always came along with the
  DISTRIB File, referenced a file called COPYING, which contained the GNU EMACS GPL
- creation of GPL and FSF was an expression of the hacker ethic
- but there is more to that: it was a cmmune, indepndent of but insinuating into the existing rules and pracices of the
  world od corporate and university software,
	- it was a radical alternative that emphasized the sovereignty of individuals, opting out if national-corporate-
  	  unitity
- significance of GPL stems from its embedding within and emergence from the legal and technical infrastructure
	- the hacker ethic does not demand the total absence of organizations, it rather requires their proliferation and
	  modulation
- the GPL has become the most widely used and scrutinized legal license
- the EMACS controversy was not the only one to erupt the lives of programmers, it has rather become a rite for young
  programmers to be involved in these discussions

The Emacs debate has determined the outcome of maby subsequent fights by giving form to the Free Software license and
its uses

7. Coordinating Collabortaions

.-.-----left out

Conclusion: Experiments and Modulation

- coordination is a key component of Free Software,
- free software is the result of a complicated story of experimentation and construction
- linux are collective social experiments, in which there are complex trchnologies and tools, systems of coordination and
  governance, and moral and technical orders already present
- free software is a practice that changes with the results of new experiments
- the internet changes the confitions of social organiuation and the relationship between power and knowledge
	- Free software is an example of an attempt to make this transformation public
	- it proceed as a  recursive public by proposing and providing alternatives
- free software comnfronts the infrastructure by which it is possible to propose criticism and offer alternatived
	- this results in a recursive public filles not only with infividuals who govern their own actions but also with
	  code and concepts and licenses and forms of coordination that turn these actions into viable, technical forms of
	  life, useful to inhabitants of the present


PART III MODULATIONS

8. If we succeed, we will diasappear

- Connexions and Creative Commons did emerge from Free Software, rather than from a different area like education

Stories of Connexion

Modulations - from free software to connexions

- connexions was both a free software product and an experiment based on free software
-


9 Reuse, Modification and the Nonexistence of Norms

two questions:
1. Exploring in ethnographic detail how the modulations of Free Sotware undertaken by Connexions and
Creative Commons are related to the problems of norms of scholarly production and reuse
2. Existence or Nonexistence of Norms?

Whiteboards: What was Publication?

Free Software functions as a template, that is being traced on a less well known practice and see where the forms match
up and where not,
Considering the meaning of print for scholars in the past. The list of theories about media to knowlede is long. The
history ofpublication does not start with the printing,

Conclusion

Free Software is constantly changing, as it is an experiment, that never seeks its own conclusion.
One question remains: Can it in the process of change preseve the moral anf technical order that created it?
It the recursive public something that survives?
Does Free Software exist for more than its own sake?


- author argues for seeing a continuity
- question, where reasearchers sould focus on in order to find out wheher somehing is a recursive public or not
	- are software ad networks involved
	- are the participants trying to coordinate via the internet
	- are they taking in advantage the contributions of voluntaries
	- are the contributos aware of actively pursuing questions of ideology
		- most of the practices are not considered as recursive public
		- they might deal with licenses and want information and knowledhe to be free, but
		- not neccessarily the infrastructute that meks the information available, not interested in
		  allowing participatns to modulate the system as such
		- not: youtube, myspace, etc.
	- corners of the open access movement are more likely to meet the criteria
		- participants rather see it as a movement than a corporate entity
		- are focused on the availability and the collective modulation
		- commitment to becoming a recursive public also raises questions about the nature of quality, reliability
		  and finality of scientific daa an results and these are discussed
	- other fiels are also open to terms of analysis, offered in two bits
		- justifies, that it has meaning for a loner time span than jst the past years
	- considering the age of the internet indicates another question: What difference does Free Software today
	  introduce with respect to knowledge and power yesterday
- if government seeks the consent of the governed, it mus also seek to ensure the stability and realiability of the
  knowledge in which that cnsent is propped
	- free software is a response to a problem, namely the challenge of creating regimes of governance that require
	  reliable empirical knowledge as a basis for political legitimacy
	- problem of constant real-world pracitce in creating the infrastructure by which individuals come to inhabit and
	  understand their own governance

the threads of two bits:
	1. the body of the inernet has its origins in the work of figuring out free software, both before and after
  	   it was recognized as such
	2. neither the internet nor the computer are the cause of a reorientation of knowledge and power but tools that
	   render possible modulation of settled practices, they reveal a much older problem regarding the legitimacy of
	   the means of circulation and production of knowledge
	3. free sftware is a practical response to these older problems and
	4. the best way to understand this response is by seeing it as a recursive public that is spexific to the technical
	   and moral imagination of order in the contemporary world of geeks

with free software we posess a rage of tools, responses and ways to work through the complexity toward the promises of a
shared imagination of legitimate and just goernance

free software can be exclusive but can also be joined and without it the alternative would be to create no new rules
it does no however belong to geeks and is not the only form of becoming public but it will have a profound structuring
effect on any forms that follow