Coding Places: Software Practice in a South American City by Yuri Takhteyev, and: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman (review)

Yuri Takhteyev’s Coding Places is an ethnographic study of software development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. As such, it offers a welcome and necessary counterpoint to Gabriella Coleman’s Coding Freedom, which examines the culture of free software and open source hackers, primarily in the United States. Coleman’s work is an excellent look into the moral world of free software and the pleasures of coding that motivate it. While free software is a critique of the dominant intellectual property regime of the West, it itself stems from and reinterprets a liberal ethics, one which focuses on free speech and individual creative expression.

Coleman’s book focuses on the ethical and affective dimensions of being a “hacker,” a programmer devoted to producing “free software.” On the ethical side, by “free,” hackers mean “free as in speech,” not merely free of monetary cost, “as in [free] beer.” In chapter 5, Coleman describes the emergence of a free software politics, in which code is seen not as technological artifact (and thus property) but as speech, protected under the First Amendment of the US Constitution. In chapter 2, Coleman recounts the historical emergence of the free software movement in response to the gradual enclosure of software under a legal intellectual property regime. The hacker Richard Stallman created the GNU Public License (GPL), which used copyright to force users to freely share software that used code licensed under the GPL, cleverly subverting intellectual property through its own mechanisms. The conclusion examines how the political success of free software depends upon a disavowal of traditional political divisions into “liberal” and “conservative.” This agnosticism allows open source to be used both by corporations such as IBM and by leftist activist groups.

Beyond exploring the ethics of free software, Coleman’s book really shines in her ethnographic account of the affective and aesthetic dimensions of hacking. Hackers program for fun, a pleasure gained through overcoming the frustrations of obdurate computers. This pleasure comes in part from craftsmanship, from making useful technology. However, pleasure is also located in the process itself, often involving a blissful, transcendent state of flow. It is in order to continue experiencing this pleasure that hackers have turned to open source, as a way of protecting and controlling the conditions of their own labor. In chapter 3, Coleman examines the celebration of cleverness among hackers, both in hacking code and in hacking everyday language through witty humor, and looks at cleverness as both an expression of the pleasure of hacking and a celebration of individual ingenuity and meritocracy.

Coleman locates a tension between individualist elitism and communalist populism within the free software community—newcomers are often faced with a semihostile retort of “RTFM” (Read the Fucking Manual) when asking questions. Software developers are expected to be smart enough to find things out for themselves, not told the answer, and if documentation does not exist, in the open source community it is expected that a developer should go write it himself. A similar tension between elitism and populism emerges in Coleman’s examination of the community that develops Debian, a Linux operating system. As free and open software, the Debian project is committed to allowing interested developers to join and contribute. Yet, as a meritocratic community, it is also concerned with maintaining the quality of the software, and only the most trusted and prolific contributors are given the status of “maintainers,” gatekeepers of the code. Constant jokes of a “cabal” attest to this lingering tension—when maintainers make decisions, they must be careful to show that they are not acting in self-interest but in the interests of the community, lest they appear to overreach in their power. The ideal of meritocracy allowed the maintainers to reach their positions, but in...