The hacker movement as a continuation of labour struggle.
Capital & Class › Nbr. 2009, June 2009
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The hacker movement as a continuation of labour struggle.
Introduction
In this article, we propose that the history of labour struggle is continued in the hacker movement--for example, in the case of employees who crash their employers' computer equipment. Framing the discussion in this way highlights the kinship between the tradition of machine breaking in labour conflicts and hackers who break into corporate servers or write viruses. (1) But this connection is also valid for the hackers engaged in developing free software and open source software (FOSS)--and indeed, we are mainly concerned with the activity of the latter group. Advocates of 'open source' tend to portray its development model as a neutral advancement of the method for developing software that leads to better technologies. (2) In support of their claim, they can point to the wide adoption of FOSS applications by the computer industry. For instance, the dominant server software and scripting language on the worldwide web are the Apache HTTP server (Netcraft, 2008) and the PHP programming language (Hughes, 2002). Linux runs on more architectures and devices than any other operating system today (Kroah-Hartman, 2006); Sendmail is responsible for routing the majority of email messages; BIND is indisputably the most widely used DNS server; and even the world wide web itself (3) is free software. Due to the terms under which these products are distributed, they are available for everyone to use, modify, redistribute and sell--that is, redistribute for a price. The motivation of hackers for writing software and giving it away for free is one of the most widely debated topics among academics studying the hacker movement. Economists try to square this behaviour of hackers with the assumption of the rational economic man. They assume that hackers hand out software for free in order to improve their reputation and thus employability in the future: that the monetary reward has just been postponed (Lerner & Tirole, 2002). But while this statement may describe a current trend in the computer underground, it fails to explain the motivation of hackers prior to the establishment of a market in FOSS products. Neither does the opportunity--cost model take into account hackers who spend their time on illegal activities such as writing viruses and cracking encryptions. When hackers are asked about their motives, they play down the economic incentives and point to the fun of writing software, often comparing the joy of writing free software with the toil of waged labour (Shah, 2006). (4) In our view, the joy of participating in FOSS projects should be seen against the backdrop of alienated work relation...See the full content of this document
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