Hacking ideologies: Open Source, a capitalist movement

Writen as a 24c3 (24th Chaos Communication Congress, Volldampf voraus!) event proposal. Based on unpublished dissertation “Free Software”, Aug 2007.

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Believe. “The World is Yours.” (Ian Brown, 2007)
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The Open Source initiative re-interpreted Free Software to include it into the
neo-liberal ideology and the capitalist economy – whose aims are contrary to
the FS starting axioms/freedoms. This platform will focus on ideological
and political aspects of this. It will also suggest FS recovery strategies.

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What is Re-interpretation of FS by Open Source ?

In The Revenge of the Hackers, Eric Raymond talks about Open Source
goals in clear terms:

“Our success after Netscape would depend on replacing the negative FSF
stereotypes with positive stereotypes of our own–pragmatic tales,
sweet to managers’ and investors’ ears, of higher reliability and
lower cost and better features. In conventional marketing terms, our
job was to re-brand the product, and build its reputation into one the
corporate world would hasten to buy.”

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The move of the Open Source initiative to bring Free Software
closer to capitalism shows that:

a) there is a gap between the Free Software movement and capitalism;

b) without a significant institutional intervention and
re-interpretation that gap can not be overcome;

c) it is the founding documents (practice of Open Source doesn’t differ),
ethics that Richard Stallman stands by so fiercely, that are
the bite that capitalism can not subsume, swallow in its original form.

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O’Reilly role: conferences, books, lobbying.

Here’s some neo-liberal text-book propaganda:

“standardization, and thus commodification, are both natural market
forces as well as key events in human history”.

Ian Murdoch, founder of Debianin “Open Source and the
Commoditization of Software” (O’Reilly)

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Multitude misunderstood – time for education

Lack of understanding of the difference between Open Source and Free
Software is best seen when in one of the masterpieces of recent social
theory (Hardt/Negri’s “Multitude”) term “open-source” was referenced
with the “Free as in Freedom” book on Stallman.

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Freedom is Politics

Badiou/Zizek: politics is not parliaments, debates compromises,
voting. On the contrary, it is subjectively, militantly, unilaterally,
deciding what seems impossible at the time of the decision.

Actually existing freedom is to choose outside of the given coordinates
in which choice takes place. It is to re-configure the conditions, to
change the scope of “possible outcomes”.

This is the difference between Lenin’s concept of freedom and the liberal,
parliamentary, formal freedom, which consists in participating in the
what is already given, already structured. (Zizek, “On Belief”)

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Truth of RMS (Badiou)

Could we not say that this is precisely what Richard Stallman did with
his choice of leaving the job he had at the MIT Lab to devote all his
time to re-create the world of software, from scratch, with an
entirely new set of co-ordinates?

Respect or disrespect the printer licence? Neither! Free Software instead.

Badiou: acting in follow up to an event — event that prompts our
reaction/decision — and pursuing the truth of it through fidelity to
it, through fidelity to the retroactively constructed event that
changes us.

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Paradox/Subject: axioms-openness, a missing link

One might rightly assume that in the sphere of rational tasks knowledge
and science would be the decisive spheres. Yet, some issues can not be
settled that way.

No science is pure, cleansed of ideology.
Think maths. Axioms – Not to be questioned.
Does that make maths dogmatic? Of course not.
Sciences rely on axiomatic foundations.

ONE: Free Software relies on the set of principles called freedoms.
These are axioms. Not up for discussion.

TWO: Free Software communities function through open participation.
Its progress is through ongoing collaborative production and critique.

Stallman’s truth (printer event + fidelity) stands in the sharp contrast,
indeed in total opposition, to the attributes of the movement he founded.

Openness and collaboration flourished from closed starting points,
from axioms. This is what i call The Paradox of a becoming Subject.

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GNU manifesto applied: punishment for capitalists?

food, shelter, health, education, labour

from GNU manifesto:
“Don’t programmers deserve a reward for their creativity? If anything
deserves a reward, it is social contribution. Creativity can be a
social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the
results. If programmers deserve to be rewarded for creating innovative
programs, by the same token they deserve to be punished if they
restrict the use of these programs.”

Consider applying this to the economy. What would it mean to assert
that economic productivity can be a social contribution only if its
results can be shared? It is already shared, many would say: one gets
a salary for one’s work. This would not satisfy FS criteria. If we
narrow down the concept of economic productivity to food, shelter,
health, education – conclusion could be that capitalists restrict use
of the above elements by subverting them into closed, private wealth
generation schemes. And hence, deserve punishment.

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Inbuilt obsolescence – will they expire us one day,
on the retirement day?

from GNU manifesto:
“Extracting money from users of a program by restricting their use of
it is destructive because the restrictions reduce the amount and the
ways that the program can be used. This reduces the amount of wealth
that humanity derives from the program. When there is a deliberate
choice to restrict, the harmful consequences are deliberate destruction.”

Consider inbuilt obsolescence – a capitalist invention whereby products are
designed to fail in order for the development of new products to be
justified by demand created by the inbuilt timed failure of the old ones.

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AIDS/malaria today: Parliamentary Capitalist Ethics of Death

First, why parliamentary?
Because, as a supreme body, parliaments have the power to stop this.
Yet, they don’t. The actively encourage and protect it.

Given today’s drugs, AIDS could be contained worldwide in relatively
short period of time, but corporations, governments (and the catholic
church) stand in the way of dying millions being protected (Alain
Badiou, “Century”, 2007).

The production of drugs could follow the example of Free Software, be
created in a more collaborative way, publishing recipes and allowing
it to be freely produced, by anyone, for any purpose.

When ethics and its laws allow death on such scale to occur, although
the society has the means to prevent it, we have to ask: what is the
difference between tens of millions dead in two world wars and the
dead of malaria and AIDS today? The former were killed while later are
let to die – by the ethics of death.

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Patents, Copyright, Mass Death

Hacking needs access to what it hacks on, and it needs sharing to grow
the knowledge of how it operates. Parliamentary Capitalist law aims to
limit access. Such law is opposed to the ethics of hacking.

Sharing of drug recipes for the prevention of deadly epidemics is explicitly
and deliberately forbidden by the parliamentary capitalist law.

No humans, let alone hackers, should support such law.
Patents and copyright belong to the same ethics.
One that allows millions of AIDS and malaria deaths, annually.

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Open Source is a neo-liberal, parliamentary capitalist social movement.

Neo-liberalism claims they’re “just doing it” for the sake of a better
economy, without any ideological beliefs. As if any economy, or any act,
was possible without decisions determined by a set of ideas and beliefs.

This is why Nike’s slogan “just do it”
is the best summary of the capitalist ideology ever.

And this is why “Open source is a development methodology;
free software is a social movement” (Stallman), misses the crucial point.

Open Source is not just a development methodology, but a social
movement too, a social movement of a different kind, with different,
parliamentary capitalist, goals.

Another problem lies in the claims that Open Source separates ethics from the
technical side of Free Software (Stallman, “Why ‘Open Source’ misses
the point about Free Software”), thus making it acceptable to corporations.

This implies two wrong statements about Open Source:

a) it has no ethics of its own;

b) there are purely technical solutions which can be used without
any ethical, political, or ideological commitments.

The result of these mistakes is widespread comparison of Free
Software and Open Source on false, crucially misleading terms:

- one (FS) operating under the weight and demand of its ethics;

- the other (OS) getting away without being examined at all, basking in
the purity of its technical attributes and various business-friendly tags

This is how the ethics, the ideology and, indeed, the politics of Open Source
slip through unexamined and unchallenged — like the capitalist ideologies
whose key strategy has historically been to accuse any political opponents
of ethical commitments, while insisting on their own “pragmatism” and
on the purely technical aspect of “just getting things done”.

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Finally … piracy? WHAT PIRACY?

Parliamentary capitalism (in its propaganda materials also known
as liberal democracy) is based on the idea that majority should
determine, via its representatives, how a state is governed and
an economy run. Cisco tells us in their marketing materials that vast
majority of the Internet traffic today is p2p traffic. If vast majority of
users practice p2p and disregard law, should not then, by the
capitalist parliamentary logic of majority rule, law be changed,
since that is what majority wants?

Parliaments and representatives act to prevent us from having laws
that will act on our behalf, regardless of our position of minority,
or majority – the logic by which they operate is different, it is
the logic of capital.

The hacks we desperately need are in the realm of thoughts – We need
to change our thinking about the law and its relations to politics,
while continuing expansion of p2p technologies and techniques.
If more hacking of ideas/thoughts was discussed and encouraged,
we would soon render discussions on piracy/laws/illegal/legal
obsolete. Instead, we would focus on what political and economic
structures do we want, to protect whom, to encourage what?
And how do we do it.

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Believe. “The World is Yours.” (Ian Brown, 2007)
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