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- ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:15:01 -0500 From: Biella Coleman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: Dissertation chapter Resent-Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2005 18:15:16 -0500 (CDT) Resent-From: [email protected] Hi. As many of you know, I have been spending the last number of years working on a dissertation for the Anthropology department at the University of Chicago, a dissertation whose focus is the ethics and politics of the F/OSS movement. Just recently I have successfully defended the dissertation and would like to share some of the results with the Debian project, since much of my material derives from this project. Although Debian is not the main topic (see the abstract below for the overview), as part of my research I interviewed many Debian developers, have attended various conferences, have been a regular on various IRC channels, and have also given one presentation at Debconf. I am now sending the link to the Debian chapter as this is the one that will probably be of most interest. Soon I will make the whole document available. I am going to write a longer document, provisionally entitled "An Honest Declaration about Dissertations (HDD)," to explain some of the idiosyncrasies of a social science dissertation. For now I just want to mention a few things to keep in mind when reading this chapter. As far as writing genres go, dissertations have to be one of the oddest known to human kind. They tend to be incredibly arcane and, at times, many of us try to stuff as much information as possible in them in the hopes we can mine them in future times for articles. One of the strange things about a dissertation is the audience. We tend to write the document with only a few people in mind: the dissertation committee. They are, after all, the one's with the power to pass you. You thought it took forever to get Sarge released, I've been trying to get this dissertation stable for 8 years, after all that time you just really want to pass and move on to work on other projects. One is also forced to juggle the desires and recommendations of various committee members, which, in most cases, is truly an incredible hack because there are often 3 or more highly opinionated, and fiercely independent members. They all want to see a piece of themselves in your work and without any revision control system at our disposal, there are inevitably some conflicts that arise during the course of our implementation of their advice. We students try to fix the document as best as we can and hope that we hack a good enough solution but there are often some strange consequences of this acrobatic endeavor. Thankfully most of my 5 committee members have provided stellar advice that did nothing but improve the overall quality of my dissertation. Even while I was primarily writing for my committee, I wrote this particular chapter with the Debian community in mind. At times, my prose may strike as heavy handed, filled with excessive jargon, but I purposively tried to write this chapter in a way that was accessible for a general population yet satisfied the expectations of my committee members. The first half of the chapter also covers the type of ground (history, social contract, etc) that you all know well but was otherwise an enigma to my committee. The second half is the more analytical part, with a focused examination of the lived experience of ethics as it unfolds on Debian. I would also like to mention that this chapter, and even the whole dissertation, is not meant to provide "The Explanation" as to why F/OSS as technical movement exists, its effects, or why developers choose to participate. Instead, I have a set of questions largely related to ethics and politics, and I hope I illuminate on these particular questions in my work. In other words, my dissertation is only a slice of a larger pie of social reality of Debian or F/OSS, and not meant to provide a total explanation of the pie. Later in my declaration, I will have much more to say about this topic. Dissertations, even if approved, are really in beta. Even if it took what seemed like an endless number of years to complete, I can attest that a book length document is no piece of cake to write, especially since they rarely give us students a recipe on how to start, proceed, or finish. Instead, our mentors expect us to figure it out the good old fashion way: on our own and through trial and error. We experiment, and hope it comes out half-decent. Then we spend the next few years working on it, yet again, and transform it into more substantial articles and, hopefully, a book. Indeed, next year I have the opportunity to work on articles and a book version at Rutgers University where I have a postdoctoral position. Since this is still a work-in-progress, I would really appreciate any feedback on this chapter and for those who dare read the other 400 pages, on the whole dissertation. The only caveat is I am moving in less than 2 weeks so if you respond to me during that time period, I probably won't have the time to get back to you until after the unholy trinity of packing, moving, and unpacking. Finally, here I have linked to the acknowledgments, table of contents, and prologue. Unfortunately my official acknowledgments are quite scanty in the sense that I have not named most of the Debian developers who have spent hours with me during interviews or informally talking to me on irc or in person. If I had named one person, I would have had to named like 100 others and this was just not possible. But I want to say yet again, how much I have appreciated *everyones* help and participation. I have really enjoyed the interviews, the parties, the dinners, the cons, etc., and have learned a tremendous amount from everyone. I can't thank everyone enough. Thanks and enjoy! Gabriella (Biella) Coleman Table of Contents, Prologue etc.: http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-prologue.pdf Chapter 6: http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-chapter-six.pdf http://healthhacker.org/biella/coleman-chapter-six.doc Short Abstract: The Social Construction of Freedom in Free and Open Source Software: Hackers, Ethics, and the Liberal Tradition This dissertation, based on fieldwork conducted on the Debian free software project and among hackers living in the Bay area between January 2001 and May 2003, is an ethnography of the ethics and politics of free and open source hackers. What was once a fringe and esoteric hobbyist technical practice - the production of free and open source software - has veritably exploded since 1998. This domain of practice is still populated by hobbyists, many of whom refer to themselves with pride as hackers - computer aficionados driven by an inquisitive passion for tinkering and committed to an ethic of information freedom. My aim in this dissertation is to evaluate the rise of expressive rights among hackers as a historically and culturally specific practice of liberal freedom that can only be made sensible through the lens of a hacker technical way of life - in which their pragmatics and poetics are given serious consideration. Moving and integrating various levels of analysis: the phenomenology of technical praxis, the sociological creation of an ethical practice that unfolds in the hacker public sphere and the FOSS project, and the historical rise of reflective signification through overt political dissent, I offer a comprehensive account of how hackers have come to value and enact freedom, what they mean by it, and suggest some ideas about the broader political effects of their practices. I argue that hacker values for expressive freedom are a particular instantiation of a wider liberal tradition. Instead of an emphasis of self-determination and individuality based on the acquisition of property, hackers have placed emphasis on individuality as a form of critical self-determination that requires unrestricted access to knowledge in order to constantly develop technical skills and to progress the state of their technical art. Important for the purposes of this dissertation is that hackers challenge one sacred realm of liberal jurisprudence -intellectual property -by drawing on and reformulating ideals from another one - free speech. Thus, in its political dimension, even if left unstated by developers, FOSS represents a liberal critique from within the liberal tradition. More specifically, FOSS captures the growing fault line between two of America's most cherished sets of rights, both of which have grown in importance and legal scope in the last hundred years: free speech and intellectual property rights. In my conclusion, I argue that while FOSS is a technical movement based on the principles of free speech, its ability to usher political transformation is not primarily rooted in the power of language or in the discursive articulation of a broad political vision. Instead, it effectively works as a politics of critique by performing a political message through acts of labor, one that states economic incentives are unnecessary to secure creative output-a message that a wide range of groups are also willing to entertain because this dominion lacks any overt political affiliation Through its publicly visible embodiment, the production of this technology has become one of the most striking indictments against long-standing rational choice or free-market justifications for intellectual property principles and has concurrently inspired the establishment of a range of progressive "open source" endeavors in law, journalism, education, and science that emphasize the importance of productive autonomy, volunteer labor, collaboration, and open access to knowledge. _____________________________________________________________________ A Roaming Sato http://www.healthhacker.org/satoroams - -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". 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