hacking the global

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HACKING THE GLOBAL Sara Schoonmaker

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Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Redlands, 1200 E. Colton Ave, Redlands, CA, 92373, USA E-mail: Available online: 02 Mar 2012

To cite this article: Sara Schoonmaker (2012): HACKING THE GLOBAL, Information, Communication & Society, DOI:10.1080/1369118X.2012.665938 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.665938

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Sara Schoonmaker HACKING THE GLOBAL Constructing markets and commons

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through free software

This paper explores software’s pivotal role in the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism. The author theorizes Free Software as a new form of property that is infecting capitalism like a virus, challenging the system of private property central to its dominant logic. Free Software can be produced by developers working for free in peer communities or in profit-oriented firms. The author explores the conditions under which Free Software is produced through peer versus marketbased production, emphasizing the implications for constructing the Free Software market and the digital commons. The author identifies actors’ motivations, the organizational structure of production, and financial resources as three factors shaping these conditions. The author focuses on the case of Ubuntu, a Free Software operating system that is available free of charge on the Internet. Ubuntu is produced by Canonical, a Free Software, market-based firm, through an intriguing combination of market-based and peer production that both embodies and transforms capitalist practices. Keywords globalization; Free Software; commons; Ubuntu; information technology (Received 6 February 2012; final version received 7 February 2012) Software plays a pivotal role in the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism. It is the code that powers communications and information technologies, from computers to the Internet to social media. As computers, software and the Internet become increasingly enmeshed in economic, political, social, and cultural practices, the ability to create and control software is thus one of the most compelling issues of our time. Indeed, control over software has wide-ranging implications for the transformation of capitalism and the development of the digital commons.

Information, Communication & Society 2012, pp. 1 –17, iFirst Article ISSN 1369-118X print/ISSN 1468-4462 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis http://www.tandfonline.com http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2012.665938

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Free Software is integral to these developments. It is a new form of property based upon a complex form of community ownership, rather than strictly private ownership. This new form of property acts like a virus in the market, shifting the economic and political conditions of capitalist production. When the source code is open, users can modify and share the software; this disrupts the power of proprietary software companies to control software’s production and sale. Free Software makes it possible to develop alternative forms of globalization from below, offering a prime example of what Gibson-graham (1996) calls ‘the end of capitalism as we knew it’. Free Software originates in, and continues to rely upon, what Benkler (2006) calls processes of peer production where individual producers choose to engage in production outside of a traditional organizational hierarchy. Equally importantly, however, proprietary strategies also shape and are shaped by the production and distribution of Free Software. Indeed, corporate interests in profit-making lie at the heart of struggles to undermine Free Software, to rid the body of capitalism from the virus that threatens to transform the dominance of private property. Rather than being relics from a bygone historical era of industrial production, proprietary strategies are central to the struggles over Free Software and the Internet in contemporary capitalist development. This article is divided into three sections. First, I examine Free Software as what Kelty (2008, p. 2) calls a ‘reorientation of power and knowledge’. I explore the development of Free Software as part of a larger process of hacking the global political economy, which challenges private property as the dominant logic of capitalism. Building upon So¨derberg (2008), I understand Free Software as having the potential to contribute to restructuring capitalism by resisting corporate control over communications and information technology and the labor involved with producing it. Second, I explore the conditions under which Free Software is produced through peer versus market-based production, emphasizing the implications for constructing the Free Software market and the digital commons. I identify actors’ motivations, the organizational structure of production, and financial resources as three factors shaping these conditions. I focus on the case of Ubuntu, a Free Software operating system that is available free of charge on the Internet. Ubuntu is produced by Canonical, a Free Software, marketbased firm, through an intriguing combination of market-based and peer production that both embodies and transforms capitalist practices. Finally, I analyze Canonical’s hybrid form of production by conceptualizing Free Software as a virus that infects the system of private property, undermining the dominant logic of capitalism and creating conditions to transform structures of power and knowledge. I critique Benkler’s emphasis on software’s form of production, based upon my findings that Free Software can be produced through both peer and market-based processes.

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Methods For this study, I conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 33 Free Software activists, developers, and business executives with diverse relationships to Free Software communities. I selected and recruited respondents after engaging in participant observation at Free Software community events, such as an Ubuntu download party in Paris in 2009; the Open World Forum in Paris in 2010 and 2011; and the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles in 2011. In 2010 and 2011, I was invited to attend a 3-day corporate meeting of a Free Software services company that I refer to with the pseudonym of Digitech. I conducted participant observation at these meetings, which were attended by the corporate headquarters staff and the managers from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. I interviewed 20 of these participants, 8 in person at the corporate meetings and the rest over Skype. I used a snowball sampling method to generate other participants in the study, asking participants to recommend people with whom they had worked in Free Software businesses, community or activist groups, or other projects around the world. Interviews generally lasted between 45 and 90 minutes; they were taperecorded and transcribed. Since I speak French, Spanish, and Portuguese, I offered interviewees the option of doing the interview in those languages or in English. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for participants to express their ideas fully. One interviewee chose Spanish, 7 chose French, and 25 chose English. At times, we used English to clarify ideas during the interviews in other languages. In addition to this primary data, I drew upon secondary data about Free Software firms, users’ and activist groups that was available online, as part of virtual communities where Free Software proponents create, respond to and share information. These websites and blogs were critical sites where Free Software proponents met to generate information about their perspectives and struggles. Cyberspace was one of the main research sites for this project; websites and blogs constituted what Karim (2003, p. 16) called ‘transnational third spaces’ where actors engage creatively in tackling their problems. As Bernal (2006, p. 163) argued, such online interactions allow participants to ‘build upon existing social networks on the ground, bring them together and extend their membership and significance in novel ways’. My research methodology thus integrated ethnographic observation and interviewing ‘on the ground’ with a blend of online ethnography. This combination of approaches allowed me to understand observations more fully. Following Emerson et al. (2001), I employed a range of strategies to record field notes. While observing at Free Software events, I often noted the participants involved and their approach toward the event and each other; I also jotted down main points from talks or discussion that followed presentations. After conducting interviews, I noted details about our interactions; the scene where the interview

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took place; and about my sense of how the participant related to me and to the interview process. I also wrote more extended field notes to help me to recall and order sequences of events. I combined this ethnographic observation and interviewing process with reading the literature on Free Software; this allowed me to identify Free Software projects with theoretical significance for developing the Free Software market and the digital commons. As will be discussed further below, Ubuntu was one such project. Once I had identified that project as potentially significant, I used snowball sampling; I asked interview participants whether they knew people involved with Ubuntu, Canonical, and Debian. I also recruited one participant who was a key speaker and organizer at the Ubuntu download party in Paris. Of the interviews conducted to date, 2 interviewees were based in the United States; 4 in Canada; 10 in France; 2 in the UK; 4 in the Netherlands; 3 in Germany; 1 in Spain; 1 in Portugal; 2 in Tunisia; 3 in Nigeria; and 1 in Brazil. I interviewed some people more than once over a period of months or years between 2009 and 2011.

Hacking the global political economy Free Software hackers and activists laid the groundwork to create it as a new form of property based on complex forms of community ownership, rather than strictly proprietary ownership. In 1984, Richard Stallman responded to changes in the software market as IBM, Microsoft, and other firms waged successful legal battles to extend copyright law to software. He sought to protect the freedom that software developers enjoyed up until that time, to write, share, and redistribute code as they saw fit. Stallman began work on a Free Software alternative to Unix, called Gnu’s Not Unix (GNU). In 1985, he founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) with the mission of promoting and protecting software freedom. In 1989, Stallman created the legal foundation for this freedom by establishing Free Software as a new form of property copyright under the GNU General Public License (GNU GPL). He wielded the foundational hack into the legal system that gave users of software under that license access to the source code so they could run, modify, and share the software for any purpose; most importantly, users of that software were required to keep the source code open for future users. Stallman and the FSF thus created a new form of property, protected by the very copyright law it was designed to circumvent; the GNU GPL was aptly dubbed ‘copyleft’ (Stallman 2002a, 2002b; Coleman 2004). The legal status of the GNU GPL had profound implications for the global political economy. It sparked action by other proponents of the freedom to make full use of the potential of communications and information technologies to share and remix a wide range of works. In 2001, Creative Commons was founded with support from the Center of the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School.

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It followed and expanded Stallman’s foundational legal hack into multiple domains to establish the conditions for what law professor and activist Lessig (2004) called ‘Free Culture’. Inspired in part by the GNU GPL, Creative Commons offered resources for users to develop a range of licenses under copyright law; this enabled writers, musicians, and other artists to protect some of their rights of ownership over their creative works while allowing different degrees of sharing and remixing by others. Indeed, the legal and political conditions to protect the development of the digital commons were made possible by creating new forms of property that allowed individuals, firms, governments, and other organizations to develop and share Free Culture. To varying degrees and in diverse ways, the above actors were concerned with the conditions of openness of software code, as well as the openness of the Internet. They formed what Kelty (2005, p. 185) called a ‘recursive public . . . a group constituted by a shared, profound concern for the technical and legal conditions of possibility for their own association’. Kelty (2005, 2008) focused on the recursive public that he referred to as geeks; these software developers were concerned with technical protocols and standards that keep the Internet open. They worked actively to maintain that openness. Over the past decades, a growing range of artists have used Creative Commons licenses to expand the scope of free culture, and thus played an important role as recursive publics. They hacked the political, and particularly the political –legal definition of property, by participating in and expanding alternative forms of property. These political hacks created Free Software as what Kelty (2008, p. 4) calls ‘a very specific set of technical, legal, and social practices that now require the Internet’. Following Kelty (2008, p. 2), I view Free Software as ‘no longer only about software – it exemplifies a more general reorientation of power and knowledge’. As Lessig (2008) argued, this reorientation involves a transition from Read Only (RO) to Read/Write (RW) Culture. Consumers of culture are transforming into producers, becoming active in ways made possible by digital technology: creating, remixing, sharing, and redistributing cultural forms through YouTube videos, social networking sites, and much more. Free Software is thus integrally linked to Free Culture and to the social practices of sharing involved with it. As will be explored further in the next section, Free Software is central to the social construction of new markets and of the digital commons, where the effects of this reorientation of power and knowledge can be discerned in distinct ways. I build upon So¨derberg (2008) to understand this reorientation as having the potential to restructure and resist capitalism.

Markets and commons This potential is rooted in the viral nature of Free Software, which can be produced through both market-based and peer production. As noted above, peer

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production originated largely in the Free Software communities, whose growth was a catalyst for its application in other areas. For example, thousands of people contribute to the development and documentation of Free Software, or volunteer at trade shows to educate the public or the business community about Free Software. They engage in these activities without any monetary compensation or without a boss looking over their shoulder. They communicate with each other and coordinate their activities in a range of ways – through wikis, Internet Relay Chat, Skype conference calls, microblogs on Identica and Twitter, and meetings like the Ubuntu Developers Summit or the Open World Forum. At those meetings, hackers gather to troubleshoot bugs, exchange ideas, and learn about new releases. As Coleman (2010) argues, hacker conferences foster the development process by providing opportunities for practitioners to interact face-to-face, complementing more common forms of online interaction and strengthening their relationships. These decentralized, collaborative activities are not the only way, however, that Free Software is produced. To understand how Free Software shapes the broader development of a digital commons, it is important to grasp the variety of conditions involved in its production. These conditions are shaped by the strategies Free Software producers employ in their relationship to the market. Indeed, Free Software is produced under conditions ranging from peer production to market-based, proprietary production. As Bollier (2008) argues, the boundaries between peer and proprietary production are shifting. In the field of Free Software, these boundaries are blurring in two ways. First, Free Software has become increasingly integrated into the business activities of market-based corporations that also use (or even develop) proprietary software, like IBM and Google. IBM has been funding Free Software development since 1999, since such software allows it to meet particular specialized needs of some of its customers (Capek et al. 2005; Schoonmaker 2007). As firms in a range of sectors employ Free Software, Linux in particular has become integrated into business activities in stable, ongoing ways, particularly on servers. Defense contractors and financial security firms use Free Software due to its heightened security and the availability of round-the-clock troubleshooting services from top software engineers. Second, there are a growing number of Free Software, for-profit companies with traditional managerial hierarchies, such as Red Hat. These market-based firms are oriented toward making a profit in the Free Software sector. They engage in a mix of business activities that may include some software development; however, many such firms make most of their money through service contracts. Clients pay them to have developers customize systems to meet their needs, troubleshoot bugs, or provide other services to adapt the software and keep it running optimally for the client’s operations. These Free Software,

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market-based firms hire Free Software developers and other professionals who are paid for their work. Such forms of producing Free Software are deeply integrated with, or even primarily oriented toward, making a profit on the market; however, many of these activities simultaneously contribute to developing the digital commons. In addition to their paid employment at market-based firms, many of these developers also participate voluntarily in peer-produced Free Software projects. Furthermore, they might advance the digital commons by volunteering at trade shows or engaging in political activities to support and defend Free Software. As Benkler (2006, p. 123) rightly notes, commons-based peer production ‘can coexist and develop a mutually reinforcing relationship with market-based organizations that adapt to and adopt, instead of fight, them’. The conditions under which Free Software production is tied to either market or peer-based production are largely shaped by the producers’ motivations. Benkler (2006) and Weber (2004) both emphasize the importance of developers’ status motivations in engaging in peer production. Peer production is oriented toward social standing in the Free Software community rather than toward making money. For example, Free Software developers gain social status in Free Software communities by making key contributions to a project, whether or not they may gain economic rewards. Benkler (2006, p. 98) argues that peer production draws upon motivations ‘oriented toward fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs’. For example, in large scale peer production projects like the Linux kernel, a kind of ‘meritocratic hierarchy’ exists, which nonetheless contrasts markedly in ‘style, practical implementation, and organizational role with that of the manager in the firm’ (Benkler 2006, p. 63). Authority in such a hierarchy is based upon the respect that peer producers hold for a leader’s contributions, as well as on the leader’s powers of persuasion. Since large-scale peer production projects involve interdependent contributions from individuals, these projects are organized to make it possible for individuals to contribute in a wide range of ways, such as coding, writing documentation, and translation. Individuals with diverse abilities, levels of training, commitment, or availability can thus all participate in the project. The production of Ubuntu is particularly interesting because it begins with a large-scale peer production in the Debian community and then combines it with market-based production. Similarly, the motivations of its participants blend social elements of wanting to contribute to the Free Software community with more traditional economic goals of building a profitable business.

Ubuntu’s dual process of production Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means, ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. According to the Ubuntu homepage,

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‘the Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers’ (http://www.ubuntu.com/project/about-ubuntu). Ubuntu was initially created in 2004 by Mark Shuttleworth, a South African software developer contributing to Debian, one of the strongest and most established Free Software projects. Indeed, a 2004 case study of the Debian project revealed that there were 417 Debian developers in Europe (Germany, the UK, France, Spain, Italy, The Netherlands, and Sweden) and 364 in North America (the United States and Canada) (Gonzalez-Barahona & Robles 2006). The total number of Debian developers grew from 216 in 1998 to 859 in 2002 and about 1,237 in 2004. In 2004, these developers were part of a broader Debian community of about 1,300 volunteers working on a range of tasks around the world (Robles et al. 2005). On a financial level, Shuttleworth’s decision to found Ubuntu was made possible by his previous successes in the business world. In 1995, while a student in Finance and Information Systems at the University of Cape Town, Shuttleworth founded Thawte, a highly successful company specializing in providing secure, authenticated, encrypted Internet transactions. According to Shuttleworth’s website, Thawte ‘became the first company to produce a full-security encrypted e-commerce web server that was commercially available outside the United States’ (http://www.markshuttleworth.com/biography). Netscape and Microsoft recognized Thawte as a secure system for website certification, contributing to the firm’s growing reputation as an international leader in Internet transaction security. In 1999, Shuttleworth made a fortune by selling Thawte to VeriSign, providing him the opportunity to found the HBD investment company, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and eventually to found Canonical and the Ubuntu project. He was CEO of Canonical from 2004 until 2010, when he shifted his focus at Canonical to leading design and product strategy (http://www. markshuttleworth.com/biography). Officially, Canonical is a market-based firm that is in the business of providing services to customers; toward this end, it charges substantial fees for those service contracts. A fuller consideration of Shuttleworth’s motives and business practices, however, reveals that Canonical does not orient its activities primarily around making a profit. According to an interview with Alain, who works on Canonical’s cloud project, the firm operated at a loss for the first 5 years. This was not a surprise; indeed, Shuttleworth did not expect to make a profit, at least in the beginning. He viewed the company as an experiment; he was happy to fund it to give it time to grow before putting the emphasis on profitability. In the short term, Shuttleworth would be satisfied if the company would break even by making enough money to pay for everyone working on Ubuntu. Thus, Shuttleworth’s motivations in founding Canonical were social, rather than primarily economic. Canonical is philosophically committed to supporting Ubuntu as Free Software that will always be free of charge for anyone to use. In that respect, the firm is contributing to the digital commons by creating a

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resource which anyone can download or contribute to, and which receives regular updates over time. As noted above, however, these social motivations are combined with market-oriented goals of building a profitable business. This market orientation is reflected in Canonical’s structure, comprised of an organizational hierarchy with considerable power for the CEO. Canonical can best be understood as a market-based firm that relies on peer production by the Debian community for the vast majority of its software development. This has been the case since its founding in 2004, when Shuttleworth gathered a team of Debian developers to create Ubuntu as a Linux operating system for the desktop, cloud, and server. In Alain’s interview, he noted that Shuttleworth started Canonical partly because he wanted to provide more direction for the software development occurring in the Debian community. What Benkler (2006) characterized as the heart of peer production, where each individual contributed to a project according to his or her own interests without centralized coordination, Shuttleworth viewed as a problem. He wanted to create a commercial entity with a more defined authority structure to meet the needs of firms in the Free Software market. Companies that wanted to deploy Debian software on a large scale would thus be able to get support from Canonical. Alain stated, We know that there’s one thing that CIOs don’t like, is to take chances. So one way of limiting the chances is to have a contract with someone else to get blamed. That’s most of their job. That’s why they went to Microsoft and that’s why they can go a company named Red Hat or Novell or they can go to Canonical, for services, but they cannot go to the community called Debian or anything else. Shuttleworth’s goal in founding Canonical and creating Ubuntu was thus partly to remedy what he viewed as the drawbacks of peer production. Similar issues have been noted by researchers studying the process of volunteer participation in the Debian project. Indeed, in a study conducted between 1998 and 2004, Robles et al. (2005) found that in most cases when developers left a project they had been working on in the Debian community, other developers would step in and continue the project. This practice of regeneration allowed for projects to be sustained over time, even when developers left. Regeneration did not occur in all cases, however, which meant that users of a particular software package were not supported once a developer left. This problem might be remedied by setting up clear ways to distinguish software packages that receive less support from those that would have longer term support. Users can thus be aware of the potential problems they might encounter with certain packages. For example, if a project involved dozens of core developers working together in an active community, that package would have a much greater chance of being sustained over time than a project maintained by a single developer (Robles et al. 2005).

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Canonical’s business model was designed to address such problems by ensuring more sustainable support for users. Under this model, Ubuntu is released every 6 months. Every 2 years, a release is issued that is designated to receive long-term support (LTS) from Canonical for the next 2 years. Users who do not want to adapt to changes in their operating system every 6 months can thus opt to use the LTS releases with guaranteed support for a longer period. Major changes to the operating system are generally reserved for the LTS releases. The first Ubuntu release, version 4.10 and code named Warty Warthog, was issued in October 2004. By 2010, Ubuntu 10.10 was listed in PC World’s 100 top products in December of 2010, based on its ability to ‘breathe new life into a PC or break free from commercial software’, as well as the quality of Linux as ‘arguably the most secure PC platform you can find’ (PC World 2010, p. 100). Canonical’s business model is a prime example of the conditions under which market-based production can be designed to address what Shuttleworth and the above researchers viewed as problems with peer production. Shuttleworth and his team of developers created a hierarchical structure that built upon the work being done in the Debian community, where developers were engaged in a wide range of projects around the world. Establishing Canonical as a commercial entity transformed the way that the software was produced and delivered, as well as the ways that users were able to consume it. It offered users distinct options so that they could choose the type of release that best fit their needs. Creating Canonical and Ubuntu thus made the software developed by the peer producers in the Debian community available to the market in a more traditionally structured form. Indeed, Canonical sought to enter the desktop software market by making Ubuntu accessible and easy to use for businesses and individuals alike. Ubuntu is one of the few free operating systems geared toward use on the desktop, as well as the cloud and server; it is designed to target individual users without programming or other technical knowledge, as well as businesses and software developers. Ubuntu is an intriguing case to explore the conditions under which the production of Free Software takes market-based rather than peer-based forms. Shuttleworth’s critiques of the peer production model, combined with his financial wealth and commitment to building Free Software, led him to experiment with creating a market-based firm with strong ties to peer production. The result is a rich hybrid form, a mix of peer and market-based production, that both embodies and transforms capitalist practices. Ubuntu is available free of charge and has open source code; however, it incorporates some proprietary code as well. As discussed above, the dual cycle model of development involves collaboration between Debian developers engaged in peer production, the vast majority of whom are unpaid, and the paid workers at Canonical. In our interview, Alain noted that Canonical’s policy is not to fund or participate extensively in software development. In contrast, its mission is to take the software created

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by the Debian community and integrate it in a way that makes sense and is easiest to use. Canonical’s strategy is controversial, however; tensions arise between profitoriented marketing activities and peer production oriented toward developing the digital commons. What Alain describes as the firm’s work of integration is not highly valued by many participants in the Free Software communities. As a result, community members criticize Canonical for taking from the community and not contributing back. They emphasize the importance of the shared contribution to the development of the software itself. Coding is generally valued above other kinds of work, especially among software developers. Indeed, the process of software development is often viewed as the foundation of Free Software communities, without which nothing else could exist. In response to these critiques, Alain notes that the company’s work to integrate Free Software applications into Ubuntu allows those applications to become more widely available. Since Ubuntu currently has about 15 million users, all of those people will potentially learn about and use the application. Alain noted the example of the person who developed the ‘cheese’ application so that people can take pictures of themselves; he questioned whether the developer of such an application should be unhappy that Canonical took her software, included it in Ubuntu, released it to 15 million people, but did not contribute back to further developing the application. Alain emphasized the importance of the work of integrating and distributing the software. He noted that often, ‘developers think in developer terms, marketers think in marketers’ terms, users think in users’ terms’. He argued that most of the resentment in the community comes from the fact that people only think in some of those terms. Very often, a developer will tell Canonical that they are not contributing enough to the kernel. But from Alain’s point of view, the developer should be proud that Canonical takes the kernel, almost exactly as it is at a certain point in time, to make the next distribution of Ubuntu. The problem is that people doing particular kinds of work in the community often fail to appreciate the importance of contributions markedly different from their own. Alain’s interview illuminates intriguing unintended consequences of Canonical’s profit-oriented marketing practices. By marketing Free Software and distributing it as widely as possible, Canonical enhances its own chances of eventually becoming profitable. Simultaneously, however, it contributes to the broader process of constructing the Free Software market by making that software available to a broader range of users. Indeed, these capitalist marketing practices challenge the dominance of private property and promote the development of the digital commons. Paradoxically, over the long term, such capitalist marketing of Free Software may undermine the market position of proprietary software firms. Such unintended consequences are rooted in the viral nature of Free Software as a new form of property. This form of property may be created by

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developers working for free in a peer community or for pay in a market-based firm; it may be marketed for a profit or given away. The nature of the production or marketing process itself does not alter the nature of Free Software as community-based property. This is where my perspective diverges from Benkler (2006), who emphasizes the importance of the peer production process as the major difference from the market-based, proprietary model. From my perspective, it is the nature of Free Software as a new form of property that distinguishes it most decisively from proprietary software, not the process through which it is produced. Indeed, this new form of property acts like a virus within the social relations of capitalism, infecting the body of private property until it mutates. As So¨derberg (2008, p. 8) argues, ‘[d]efiance against copyright law, the advancement of an open technological platform, and the assertion of the right to share information freely are a rejection of the commodity form as such. The individual author is under threat to be dissolved into the anonymous, ambulant, and playful authorship of user collectives’. In a similar vein, I view the development of Free Software as a new form of property antithetical to the commodity form, acting as a viral infection that sparks restructuring and the potential for radical change.

Property as virus The case of Ubuntu and Canonical provides a clear example of this viral role of Free Software as a new form of property. Indeed, the property virus is so strong, and so decisive in its effects, that it can be created in the context of peer or market-based production. For example, a developer we will call Pierre worked extensively for free in the Debian community in his spare time, while also working at a paid job as a database administrator in a French marketbased company. Through all his hard work, Pierre ended up creating a critical part of the Ubuntu operating system. Pierre gained considerable status for this achievement, which led him to get a paid job as a developer at a marketbased Free Software company. Alain posed key questions to understand the implications of this case: ‘Was that time [spent developing Ubuntu] well spent? I think so. Was that free? At the beginning, yes. Is it still free today? No. But he’s still an enthusiast, as I am’. Indeed, developers know that their unpaid work in the peer community could eventually earn them a reputation as an excellent developer, and potentially an opportunity to get paid for their work. In such cases, developers like Pierre cross the boundary from peer to market-based production. As So¨derberg (2008, p. 6) states, ‘the production process has left the direct site of production. There are no clear boundaries any longer between work time and leisure time, between inside and outside of the factory, and between waged and volunteer labour . . . the labour process has been diffused to the whole of society’. While Benkler’s (2006) distinction between peer and market-based production is useful in conceptualizing

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differences in production processes, it is important to recognize the limitations of this perspective. Indeed, Pierre and others’ work in peer production both shapes and is shaped by market-based processes; it contributes to a broader process of constructing the market, as the skills and technological developments they forge put them in a position to do similar work in market-based firms. And most importantly in contrast to Benkler (2006), the nature of their work as paid or unpaid does not affect the nature of the software they produce. As long as the source code is open, they are producing Free Software, whether they are getting paid by a market-based firm or not. The openness of the code distinguishes free from proprietary software; however, all software shares an important characteristic. As Weber (2004, p. 154) argues, all software has an ‘antirival’ quality, where ‘the value of a piece of software to any user increases as more people use the software on their machines and in their particular settings’. Major proprietary software firms like Microsoft and Apple are keenly aware of this, offering promotional deals to school systems; colleges and universities; and college students to broader their user base among youth. In the process, it becomes easier to share files and communicate with other users whose systems run the same software. The knowledge and skills involved with using computers and the Internet may become identified with knowledge of particularly popular programs, like the Microsoft Office Suite. Proprietary software firms thus build upon the antirival nature of software to strengthen their user base and bolster their profits as increasing numbers of users rely upon their programs. At the same time, to protect their own profits, they must ensure that all users pay for the software. These firms thus oppose file-sharing, remixing, and other collaborative practices as illegal acts of ‘piracy’. Free Software proponents also seek to broaden the user base. Unlike proprietary firms, as long as a core group of developers continues to produce Free Software, expanding the numbers of users who neither pay for or contribute to the software still facilitates market growth. The antirival nature of all software merges with the viral nature of Free Software as a new form of community created and owned property, giving rise to intriguing implications for constructing the software market. As Weber (2004, p. 154) puts it, ‘the system as a whole positively benefits from free riders’ (emphasis in original). The task of Free Software proponents is to broaden the software’s user base, often by giving it away for free. The more people use Free Software, the larger the community becomes that can share files and communicate with each other without relying on proprietary systems. Weber’s (2004) work is thus useful in understanding more about why the viral nature of Free Software is decisive for the development of the market and the digital commons, regardless of whether that software is produced through peer or market-based processes. In a similar vein, Bollier (2008,

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p. 234) argues that common-based peer production is spreading through the market:

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Especially when the commons has strong mechanisms to preserve its valuecreating capacity, . . . such as the [GNU General Public License] GPL, open networks are helping to convert more market activity into commons-based activity, or at least shifting the boundary between commodity markets and proprietary, high-value-added markets. (Bollier 2008, p. 234) Indeed, by defining Free Software as a new form of property created and owned in community, the GNU GPL established legal conditions to challenge capitalism’s dominant logic of private property. It is part of what Bollier (2008, p. 2) called a ‘viral spiral’, a ‘corkscrew paradigm of change’. In the viral spiral, ideas posted on the Internet can be shared and remixed virtually instantaneously, potentially becoming ‘a platform used by later generations to build their own follow-on innovations’ (Bollier 2008, p. 2). From this perspective, Canonical is playing a decisive role in the development of both the market and the commons. As discussed above, a key part of Canonical’s mission is to expand the users of Free Software to include more individuals as well as firms. Toward this end, one of Canonical’s major goals is to expand the number of Ubuntu users from 15 million to 200 million in the next 4 years. Obviously, such growth would greatly increase Canonical’s chances of becoming profitable. Beyond this, however, such an increase in Ubuntu users would have broader implications for the development of the market for Free Software. These users might eventually pay for services contracts with Canonical or with other market-based Free Software firms, as well as simply expanding the base of people using Free Software platforms. Equally important, growing numbers of Ubuntu users could contribute to the development of the digital commons. Indeed, all Free Software users are potential contributors to the community, since they have the opportunity to write code, troubleshoot bugs, and do translation, among other things. The commons is rooted in the creation of Free Software as a new form of property that involves and requires diverse kinds of participation.

Conclusion: on the power of hacking and contagion Free Software is part of a broader reorientation of power and knowledge, where expanding the range of participation in the processes of production and use strengthens the commons as a whole. This reorientation is rooted in the nature of Free Software as a viral form of property defined by licenses like the GNU GPL. Power arises from processes of sharing, redistribution, and inclusion ensured by the GPL; such power is integrally connected to knowledge

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of software development, distribution, user education, and services designed to meet the particular needs of different kinds of users. Free Software proponents hack new forms of globalization, arising from activities simultaneously grounded in local sites and coordinated globally through the Internet. They challenge the dominant form of neoliberal globalization rooted in the expansion of global capital and private property. Since software provides the infrastructure for so much economic, political, social, and cultural activity, undoing the dominance of private property in software has repercussions for myriad spheres. It gives rise to diverse capitalist practices that mix peer production with market operations, as in the case of Canonical, Ubuntu, and Debian. This case illuminates the importance of three interconnected, yet distinct, factors shaping the conditions under which Free Software is produced by market-based or peer production processes: actors’ motivations, organizational structure, and financial resources. First, in peer production such as the Debian community, participants are motivated to contribute to the development of Free Software and the digital commons. Peer production, however, is interconnected with market-based processes, including the potential for future employment. The status involved with contributing to peer production may lead peer producers to get job offers as paid developers in market-based firms. Second, Canonical, as a market-based Free Software firm, was structured to allow it to make a profit over the long term. As CEO, Shuttleworth chose a more traditional organizational hierarchy to remedy problems he associated with peer production. In the short term, however, Shuttleworth’s motivation was to contribute to the development and marketing of Ubuntu and the expansion of its user base. This development of the Free Software market and the digital commons was thus a higher short term priority than making a profit. Finally, Shuttleworth’s wealth provided the financial resources necessary to found Canonical. Market processes, and especially the need for individuals and firms to survive within capitalist economies, thus permeated virtually all the conditions involved with peer and market-based production of Free Software. The ubiquity of market processes has unintended consequences, however, when combined with the viral form of Free Software. Indeed, the profit-oriented marketing of Ubuntu advances the broader processes of constructing the Free Software market and the digital commons. As long as Free Software is legally protected by copyleft and continually developed through peer and marketbased production, it will retain its viral quality. This new form of property can be integrated into business operations in myriad ways, all of which ‘infect’ capitalism’s dominant proprietary logic. Free Software can thus be understood as a reorientation of power and knowledge that allows particular capitalist activities to undermine the dominant form of capitalism. This viral form of property creates conditions to hack the global political economy, sparking contradictory, complex processes of social change.

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References Benkler, Y. (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press, New Haven. Bernal, V. (2006) ‘Diaspora, cyberspace and political imagination: the Eritrean diaspora online’, Global Networks, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 161–179. Bollier, D. (2008) Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, The New Press, New York. Capek, P. G., Frank, S. P., Gerdt, S. & Shields, D. (2005) ‘A history of IBM’s opensource involvement and strategy’, IBM Systems Journal, vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 249–257. Coleman, E. G. (2004) ‘The political agnosticism of free and open source software and the inadvertent politics of contrast’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 3, pp. 507–519. Coleman, E. G. (2010) ‘The hacker conference: a ritual condensation and celebration of a lifeworld’, Anthropological Quarterly, vol. 83, no. 1, pp. 99–124. Emerson, R. M., Fretz, R. L. & Shaw, L. L. (2001) ‘Participant observation and fieldnotes’, in Handbook of Ethnography, P. Atkinson, A. Coffey, S. Delamont, J. Lofland & L. Lofland, Sage, Thousand Oaks, pp. 352 –366. Gibson-Graham, J. K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (as we knew it), Blackwell Publishers, Oxford. Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M. & Robles, G. (2006) ‘Libre software in Europe’, in Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution, eds C. DiBona, D. Cooper & M. Stone, O’Reilly, Beijing, pp. 161–188. Karim, K. H. (2003) ‘Mapping diasporic mediascapes’, in The Media of Diaspora, ed. K. H. Karim, Routledge Press, London, pp. 1–18. Kelty, C. M. (2005) ‘Geeks, social imaginaries, and recursive publics’, Cultural Anthropology, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 185–214. Kelty, C. M. (2008) Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, Duke University Press, Durham and London. Lessig, L. (2004) Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, Penguin Group, New York. Lessig, L. (2008) Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy, Penguin Group, New York. PC World (2010) ‘The 100 best products of 2010’, PC World, vol. 28, no. 12, pp. 86 –90, 92, 94, 96, 98, 100. Robles, G., Gonzalez-Barahona, J. M. & Michlmayr, M. (2005) ‘Evolution of volunteer participation in libre software projects: Evidence from Debian’, in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Open Source Systems, eds M. Scotto & G. Succi, University of Genova, Genova, pp. 100–107. Schoonmaker, S. (2007) ‘Globalization from below: Free software and alternatives to neoliberalism’, Development and Change, vol. 38, no. 6, pp. 999–1020. So¨derberg, J. (2008) ‘Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement’, Routledge, New York.

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Stallman, R. M. (2002a) ‘Misinterpreting copyright – a series of errors’, in Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, ed. J. Gay, GNU Press, Boston, pp. 77–86. Stallman, R. M. (2002b) ‘What is copyleft?’ in Free Software Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, ed. J. Gay, GNU Press, Boston, pp. 89–90. Weber, S. (2004) The Success of Open Source, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

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Internet sources Mark Shuttleworth biography [online] Available at: http://www.markshuttleworth. com/biography. Ubuntu homepage. [online] Available at: http://www.ubuntu.com/project/aboutubuntu.

Interviews Alain (pseudonym). Canonical cloud project (2010) Interview by author. Paris. Pierre (pseudoynm). Debian developer and Free Software activist (2009) Interview by author. Paris. Sara Schoonmaker is a development sociologist specializing in the dynamics of global development in the context of technological change in communications and information technologies. She is particularly interested in creating alternatives to the dominant forms of neoliberal globalization and consumer culture. Address: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Redlands, 1200 E. Colton Ave., Redlands, CA 92373, USA. [email: sara_schoonmaker@ redlands.edu]

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