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[pdftitle={Free Software as Collaborative Text},
pdfauthor={Florian Cramer},
pdfcreator={Florian Cramer},
pdfkeywords={Free Software, copyleft, net arts, net literature},
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\begin{document}

\title{Free Software as Collaborative Text}


\author{Florian Cramer}


\lyxaddress{c/o Freie Universität Berlin, Seminar für Allgemeine und Vergleichende
Literaturwissenschaft, Hüttenweg 9, 14195 Berlin}


\email{cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de}


\date{September 15, 2000}


\thanks{This paper was presented at the conference \emph{Interface} \emph{5}
on the panel \emph{Minor Media Operations}, Hamburg, Warburg-Haus,
September 15, 2000}

\maketitle

\section{What is \emph{}Free Software?}


\subsection{Why discuss Free Software in the context of net arts and net cultures? }

Since about two years, Free Software---or {}``Open Source{}''---has
drawn increasing attention from artistic net cultures. The \emph{Wizards
of OS} conference, first held in Berlin in 1999, was the most prolific
event to bridge the gap between the arts, humanities and social sciences
on the one hand and Free Software culture on the other. The politics
of copyleft and free distribution of code and knowledge soon turned
out to be a common ground of discourse. In this paper, I will take
a different aspect into consideration by reading Free Software as
a net culture and its code as a multi-layered, collaborative text.
Seen as a literary practice, Free Software development is an avant-garde
of writing in digital networks, and even more: Since Free Software
is at the heart of the technical \emph{}infrastructure of the Internet,
it has---to a large extent---written its own digital network. 


\subsection{Definition of Free Software}

In this paper, {}``Free Software{}'' does not refer to {}``Freeware{}'',
{}``Shareware{}'' or other proprietary software given away at no
cost---like Microsoft Internet Explorer, QuickTime and Real Player---,
but is understood in accordance with the definitions of Free Software Foundation \url{http://www.fsf.org}
as \emph{}software which is {}``free as free speech, not as free
beer{}''. Among the best-known examples of Free Software are the
Linux kernel, the GNU tools and the Apache web server. 

Since 1998, the term {}``Free Software{}'' competes with {}``Open
Source{}'', a term launched by a group around the writer and programmer
Eric S. Raymond. According to this group, {}``Open Source{}'' is
only a different name for the same thing to gain more mainstream acceptance
in the world of computing.\footnote{%
To quote from Raymond's \emph{Frequently Asked Questions about Open
Source}: {}``The Open Source Initiative is a marketing program for
free software. It's a pitch for free software on solid pragmatic grounds
rather than ideological tub-thumping. The winning substance has not
changed, the losing attitude and symbolism have.{}'' \cite{osi:oss-faq}
} The \emph{Open Source Definition} \cite{osi:osd} therefore draws
upon the older \emph{Free Software Guidelines} \cite{debian:dfsg}
of Debian, a non-commercial GNU/Linux distribution made by volunteers.\footnote{%
Both the \emph{Debian Free Software Guidelines} and the \emph{Open
Source Definition} were originally drafted by Bruce Perens, a Free
Software developer and editor of the website technocrat.net \url{http://www.technocrat.net}.
} The guidelines can be summarized as follows:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Free Software may be freely copied.
\item Not only the executable binary code, but also the program source code
are freely available.
\item The source code may be modified and used for other programs by anyone.
\item There are no restrictions on the use of Free Software. Even if Free
Software is used for commercial purposes, no license fees have to
be paid.
\item There are no restrictions on the distribution of Free Software. Free
Software may be sold for money even without paying the programmers. 
\end{enumerate}
Since the same criteria apply to {}``Open Source{}'', the two concepts
indeed do not differ in technical terms. Yet each of both terms has
its ambiguities: While {}``Free Software{}'' tends to get confused
with Freeware and Shareware,\footnote{%
i.e. binary-only software which can be downloaded freely and used
without licenses fees (Freeware) or by paying comparatively small
licenses fees (Shareware).
} {}``Open Source{}'' is easy to be mixed up with {}``open standards{}''---like
the HTML format and the http protocol---and with software like Sun's
\emph{Java} whose source code is publicly available, but only under
a restrictive license. It is particularly important to differentiate
{}``Open Source{}'' and {}``Free Software{}'' from open standards.
While open standards are mandatory technical specifications set up
by committees like the \emph{Internet Engineering Taskforce} (IETF)
and the \emph{World Wide Web Consortium} (W3C), {}``Open Source{}''
or {}``Free Software{}'' developers code whatever they like for
their own fun, and they are free to split their projects and develop
the code into separate directions if a consensus can no longer be
reached.\footnote{%
A prominent example is the XEmacs \url{http://www.xemacs.org}text
editor which {}``forked{}'' its codebase from GNU Emacs \url{http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs.htm}.
The same would be impossible in open standards development. The social
dynamics and institutional control of open standards development is
excellently described in Jeanette Hofmanns (German) essay \emph{Der
Erfolg offener Standards und seine Nebenwirkungen} \cite{hofmann:offene-standards}.
} 

Since misconceptions of {}``Open Source{}'' are so common, I will
stick with the less popular, but somewhat clearer term {}``Free Software{}''.


\subsection{Free Software History}

It is not accidental that history of Free Software runs parallel to
the history of the Internet. The Internet is built on Unix networking
technology to a large extent. Academic institutions could get Unix
for a {}``nominal fee{}'' including its source code in the early
1970s, and it remains to be the historical base or model of the common
Free Software operating systems BSD and GNU/Linux. 

The affinity of the Internet and Unix technology still persists on
various level: E-Mail is nothing but the Unix \emph{mail} command.
An E-Mail address of the form \emph{xy@z.com} is made up of what's
historically a user name on a multiuser operating system and, following
the {}``@{}'', the system's host name. This host name is resolved
via the free Unix software \emph{bind} according to the Internet domain
name system (DNS); DNS itself is nothing but a networked extension
of the Unix system file \emph{/etc/hosts}. Since the Internet has
marginalized or even replaced proprietary computer networks like IBM's
EARN/Bitnet, Compuserve, the German Btx and the French Minitel, Unix
networking technology is standard on all computing platforms. 

In the 1970s, multiuser operating systems particularly attracted student
hacker communities at the MIT and at the University of California
at Berkeley. The concepts of open, decentralized computer networks
and free multiuser operating systems have their origin in the computer
science labs of these institutions. While the MIT hackers wrote their
own operating system ITS and the Berkeley hackers improved and extended
the original Unix codebase, their {}``hacks{}'' eventually evolved
into: 

\begin{enumerate}
\item the BSD family of operating systems with the free versions FreeBSD,
NetBSD and OpenBSD. All of them use a codebase that was originally
developed in Berkeley under the project leadership of Bill Joy.
\item the GNU/Linux operating system. All major Linux-based operating system
distributions---RedHat Linux, SuSE Linux, Turbo Linux, Debian GNU/Linux,
Mandrake Linux, Corel Linux OS and Caldera OpenLinux, to name only
a few---build on the GNU software written since 1984 by the Free Software
Foundation (FSF) and on the Linux kernel written since 1991 under
the project leadership of Linus Torvalds.\footnote{%
There is an ongoing debate in Free Software culture whether operating
systems based on the Linux kernel should be called {}``Linux{}''
or rather {}``GNU/Linux{}''. In order to be functional at all, a
{}``Linux{}'' setup relies upon the GNU C Compiler (gcc) to translate
all program sourcecode into machine-executable binary software, the
GNU C Library (glibc) as the interface between the Linux kernel and
userspace applications, and the GNU tools for the basic user commands.
Although it is possible to replace at least the GNU tools and the
glibc with non-GNU workalikes, all common {}``Linux{}'' distributions
use the Linux + GNU software setup. I will therefore stick with the
name {}``GNU/Linux{}'' where I refer not only to the kernel, but
to the whole operating system.
} The FSF was founded and is still being led by former MIT hacker Richard
M. Stallman.
\end{enumerate}
Open technology has been a key factor for the acceptance of computers
and networking: The open architecture of the IBM Personal Computer
made computers cheap and popular since the 1980s, and with the open
architecture of the Internet, global networking became popular in
the early 1990s. Lately, Free Software has made high-end Unix server
computing available to anyone willing to learn the technical details.
Whether Free Software can become as popular on mainstream desktop
computers and eventually de-commoditize all computer software, remains
to be seen, but is not the question I want to investigate here.


\section{Free Software as a Net Culture}

In the middle of the 1990s, {}``net culture{}'' became the keyword
for artistic, art-critical and political discourse in the Internet.
The term was closely identified with mailing lists like Nettime \url{http://www.nettime.org}
and Rhizome \url{http://www.rhizome.org}, conferences like the one
where I present this paper and print publications like the Nettime
anthology \cite{readme-nettime}. {}``Net culture{}'' used to be
pronounced as a singular noun in these forums and media referring
only to the discourse they created.

Free Software is an outstanding example that there is not one, but
many net cultures. It predates artistic net cultures in the Internet
by roughly twenty years. The Free Software copyleft can be seen as
the quintessential reflection of this long experience. Invented to
preserve the traditional academic-artistic freedom of speech and citation
in the digital realm, the copyleft has radically rewritten it nevertheless.
The concept that code, i.e. text, may not only be freely copied, but
even modified ({}``patched{}''), willfully recycled and commercially
redistributed by anyone without the author's permit is foreign to
the post-medieval Western arts and sciences. In print culture, such
practices are considered plagiarism and theft. 

Even for the digital net arts, the copyleft remains an unresolved
challenge. Many, if not most net artworks depend on proprietary authoring
and display software,\footnote{%
Such as Macromedia's \emph{Shockwave} and \emph{Flash} in {}``Net.art{}'',
Opcode's \emph{MAX} in electronic music and Eastgate's \emph{Storyspace}
in hypertext fictions.
} and the distribution terms of their code are rarely clarified.\footnote{%
The artist group 0100101110101101.ORG \url{http://www.0100101110101101.org}
put this issue up front when it mirrored and partially modified well-known
\emph{Net.art} web sites on its own web site.
} Yet Free Software has as subtly as significantly influenced the digitally
networked arts. Without free E-mail server software like Majordomo \url{http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/}
and Sendmail \url{http://www.sendmail.org}---and the overall possibilty
to set up inexpensive servers using the GNU/Linux and BSD operating
systems on stock PC hardware---, the artistic net cultures of \emph{Nettime}
et.al. hardly could have operated non-commercially and with free participation.\footnote{%
Early artistic computer networks like the Thing BBS \url{http://www.thing.net}
charged their subscribers (at least in Berlin) before they migrated
into the Internet.
} Friedrich Kittler's observation that artistic tools conceptually
shape what is made with them \cite{kittler:aufschreibesysteme} also
applies to the net arts. The fact that \emph{Majordomo} and \emph{Sendmail}
became major tools of artistic net activity is an important---but
of course not the sole---explanation why contemporary \emph{Net.art}
tends towards conceptual, discursive and text-heavy work instead of
the immersive {}``virtual reality{}'' environments many critics
had expected them to deliver. The latter would have required expensive
proprietary software for design and display, closed high-speed networks
and, as a result, dependence on highly funded institutional infrastructures,
limited community participation and top-down instead of bottom-up
organization of this particular net culture.


\section{Free Software as Writing}

The relevance of Free Software for other net cultures is not limited
to the tools it has created and the infrastructures it has made possible,
simply because those tools themselves are the very object of Free
Software culture: \emph{}they are \emph{text}, results of complex
textual processing. Moreover, this text is being produced with tools
which themselves are free code. 

While the phenomenon that text is being built with tools which are
source text themselves applies to the proprietary software as well,
there is an important difference: Free Software source text is not
withdrawn from the public. It cannot be abandoned by company management
and does not disappear when development has ceased. All Free Software
builds up to a public repository of text-coded, free-to-use knowledge.
It accumulates to an archive. Instead of being written from scratch,
new Free Software can be built from whatsoever is in that archive.
Free Software therefore is highly intertextual. Free Software development
is the earliest and still most successful practice of collaborative
writing in computer networks. With its system of textual production
and politics of code, Free Software is by far the more advanced net
literature than what is commonly understood as net poetry and net
fiction.\footnote{%
How net literature---{}``hyperfiction{}'' and {}``new media poetry{}''---relates
to poetic practices rooted in programmer's cultures is discussed in
more detail in my (German) paper \cite{cramer:netzliteratur-thesen}.
} Free Software may be seen simultaneously as 

\begin{itemize}
\item a freely accessible, ever-growing body of code---a text archive;
\item recursive (i.e. self-applied) text processing, since available text
is used both as a source \emph{and} as a building tool to create new
code;
\item text processing even through the \emph{medium} of text, because Free
Software development infrastructures mostly depend on mailing lists
and command-based version control systems.
\item a {}``hacker{}'' culture which advocates freedom of information
and codes its politics into the legal texts of the copyleft.
\end{itemize}
The coded copyleft might be the clearest interstice between Free Software
as a net culture and Free Software as net text. Both these aspects
already come into play when Free Software is being written. Free Software
development is typically achieved by self-organized volunteer projects
whose members communicate and collaborate via the Internet. The development
work consists of:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Writing program source text


This involves evaluting of available Free Software source code for
possible inclusion and adaption. It also involves picking---and compiling---the
coding tools which themselves are Free Software source text. 

To accomodate its own needs, Free Software has developed the arguably
most sophisticated writing tools for the distributed authoring of
text. Particularly outstanding is the \emph{Concurrent Versioning
System} (CVS) \cite{cederqvist:cvs} which allows authors to take
portions of text---regardless whether it is written in programming
language or in natural language---over the Internet, work on them
at home, and synchronize the changes with the revisions of other collaborators
any time. CVS-based writing might be the technically most radical
departure from the typewriter-and-mail paradigm in text editing to
date.

\item Writing documentation text


Documentation is both internal and external to the program source
text when the latter contains annotations and separate reference documentation
is being written. 

Free manuals remain a political issue within Free Software development.
A number of companies base their business model on giving away the
software under free licenses and charging for documentation and support.\footnote{%
Among those companies are \emph{O'Reilly} publishers, \emph{Sendmail
Inc.}, \emph{VA Linux}, \emph{Scriptics}, \emph{Helix Code} and \emph{Eazel.}
All of them \emph{}are involved in the development or documentation
of critical components of GNU/Linux operating systems. 
} In the ideal case however, a second textual recursion occurs within
in Free Software which is common in all modern knowledge systems since
Diderot's and d'Alembert's \emph{Encyclopédie}:\footnote{%
I thank Wau Holland for pointing this out to me in a prepatory meeting
for the first \emph{Wizards of OS} conference. 
} The text teaches the reader all steps which were necessary for its
creation so that all the information it contains may be re-applied
to itself. 

\item Communication over mailing lists, bugtracking systems and IRC


Free Software development teams almost exclusively constitute themselves
and communicate over the Internet, in mailing lists and on IRC servers.
Interpersonal communication therefore is a third layer of text which
regulates the design of both program and documentation source text.
It operates as a cybernetic feedback loop for the development process.

\item Writing legal text


Free Software is legally defined. It is software under certain licenses,
i.e. legal documents. The most common types of copyleft include the
GNU General Public License \url{http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html},
the BSD License and the Perl Artistic License. Whether program source
text is free solely depends on whether it is copylefted. Legal text
therefore is the fourth layer of text regulating the entire flow of
text generated in Free Software projects. 

\end{enumerate}
Free Software is thus a highly sophisticated system of recursive text
generation for a public pool of knowledge. It is text code created
from text code with text-coded tools and textual communication over
networks. The types of texts processed in Free Software are extremely
diverse: They include executable binaries,\footnote{%
Which can be read as {}``text{}'' if text is linguistically and
semiotically defined as a finite number of discrete signs chosen from
a finite set of signs. In computing, {}``text{}'' is rather colloquially
understood as code from natural-language alphabets as opposed to binary
code. Being a philologist, I refer to the prior concept of {}``text{}''. 
} text written in programming languages, text written in natural languages
for documentation, text written in natural languages for communicating
and steering development, and legal texts defining the fair-play rules
of the recursive textual processing. 


\section{Objections}

Both the Free Software engineering and the net artistic camps are
traditionally skeptical about attempts to read Free Software in terms
of the net arts. The objections were particularly voiced when the
Linux kernel was awarded the Golden Nica in the {}``net{}'' category
of \emph{Ars Electronica} 1999. At the \emph{Wizards of OS} conference
in the same year, the net artist Alexej Shulgin argued that Free Software
is {}``functional{}'' while \emph{Net.art} is {}``non-functional{}'',
self-sufficient code.\footnote{%
According to \cite{bosma:net-art}, the label \emph{Net.art} was coined
in 1996 by the net artist Vuk Cosic and has been associated with a
particular generation of net artists since (involving, among others,
Cosic himself, Heath Bunting, Olia Lialina, Alexej Shulgin, jodi and
I/O/D).
} 

I do not find this point viable from an analytical perspective, since
the division between {}``functional{}'' and {}``non-functional{}''
is purely arbitrary and subjective. I/O/D's \emph{Web Stalker} \cite{iod:web-stalker},
an experimental Web browser and well-known \emph{Net.art} work, is
arguably more {}``functional{}'' than the teddy bear desktop emblem
\emph{xteddy} which is contained in all major GNU/Linux distributions.
Moreover, the dinstiction between {}``functional{}'' Free Software
and {}``non-functional{}'' \emph{Net.art} falls back into late-romanticist
notions of the absolute artwork versus lower craftsmanship. It also
neglects that with its multiple self-applications of text, the development
and use of Free Software is to a large extent its own purpose. No
other operating system is as open and seductive to be used as an end
to itself as GNU/Linux.

Just as arbitrary as the distinction between {}``functional{}''
and {}``non-functional{}'' software is that between program source
code and poetry. To date, all attempts to formally define poetry and
poetic language have failed. The decision whether a text is poetry
will always be up to the reader. The notion of {}``program code{}''
versus {}``poetry{}'' was first put into question by the French
poet and mathematician François le Lionnais, who co-founded the Oulipo
group with Raymond Queneau. In 1973, le Lionnais released a volume
of poetry written in the programming language Algol. The practice
has been revived in the 1990s by people who write poems in the Perl
scripting language. 


\section{Conclusion}

Read as a net literature and a net culture, Free Software is a highly
sophisticated system of self-applied text and social interactions.
No other net culture has invented its computer code as thoroughly,
and no other net culture has acquired a similar awareness of the culture
and politics of the digital text.

Much \emph{Net.art}, net literature and critical discourse about them
has focused on the aesthetics and politics of desktop user interfaces.
In its focus on code, Free Software shows that net cultures are about
more than just what is between people and the network. To date, it
remains a rare example of electronic literature which does not confuse
the Internet with web browsers.

{\footnotesize (Acknowledgement: This paper was written using the
Free Software programs \LyX{}, \LaTeX{}, bibtex, bibtools, pdflatex,
latex2html, lynx, XEmacs and GNU Ghostscript on an office and a home
PC running Debian GNU/Linux with reiserfs, XFree86 and larswm. Thanks
to Ronda Hauben for some corrections of the section on Free Software
history.)}{\footnotesize \par}

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\end{document}
