The Open-Source Software Movement established in the late 1980s was a radical reaction to the highly authoritarian and bureaucratic American technology industry which was dominated by proprietary, or copyrighted, software. The movement advocated for the use of open-source licensing for all software, meaning that source code, or the foundations of a software program, should be freely accessible to the public. This concept was first championed by self-described anarchist Richard Stallman, who argued that just as the idea of private property is refuted by some anarchists, so too should the idea of intellectual property. In making all software open-source and dissolving intellectual ownership over code, software would be “free, decentralized, anti-bureaucratic and anti-authoritarian,” (Imhorst, 2) a cornerstone of anarchism’s ideals that he argued would strengthen the technology industry, as power dynamics would dissipate and allow for more liberal participation in the creation of software by everyday people. This result is what Edward Tiryakian defines as dedifferentiation in Dialects of Modernity “the restoration of the potentiality of a unit...characterized by a greater homogeneity of the member units,” (Tiryakian, 90) or, a shift from a stratified to communal technology industry. The movement was successful, with the vast majority of code on the internet today being open-source. Therefore, it should be questioned: in what ways was American technology dedifferentiated and reshaped by the Open-Source Software Movement? To begin to answer this question, it is important to understand the conditions under which the Open-Source Software movement began. Only then can we juxtapose the environment of the pre-movement and post-movement technology industry, to discern its impact.
Although formally established in 1998, the Open-Source Software Movement was largely influenced by the actions of students taken in 1959 when MIT offered its first computer programming course. At that time, the university had a single IBM machine which was managed by what was colloquially referred to as “the priesthood,” or the professional IBM engineers who maintained and most importantly had access to, the machine. Any students enrolled in the programming course would have to provide their code to a member of the priesthood, who would then be tasked with physically executing the code. Steven Levy writes in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution about the restrictions students faced in this course, stating that “the stifling proliferation of rules permeated the atmosphere of the computation center. Most of the rules were designed to keep young computer fans physically distant from the machine itself, and the most rigid rule of all was that no one should be able to touch or tamper with the machine.” (Levy, 27) For several students, the frustration of not being allowed to work with the machine themselves drove them to write what later came to be known as “the Hacker Ethic,” a set of highly anarchist values and philosophies that those who work with software should follow. Namely, access to computers should be unlimited, total, and information should be free, authorities should be mistrusted and decentralization should be promoted. The hacker ethic is still referenced today, well into the 21st century, but it only began to gain prominence when it was used as the basis for the Open-Source Software Movement.
Richard Stallman, the champion of the Open Software Source Movement, was working in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1980 when his fervor for open-source began. As the technology industry had continued to expand in the 1970s and software subsequently became a lucrative product, more and more programmers leveraged the Copyright Act of 1976 to protect their code from being modified in any way to maintain intellectual ownership over the software, both to remain competitive and for financial compensation. For Stallman, this was the catalyst for an inconvenience that turned itself into a lifelong passion. While at the lab, Stallman had modified the code of one of the Xerox printers to electronically notify an employee when their print job was done; then, when the lab got a new printer with proprietary software, Stallman was unable to make modifications to the printer, which decreased productivity of him and his coworkers who would have to wait in the printing room for their print job. While only a minor hindrance, the experience convinced Stallman that people should be able to freely modify any of the software that they use, going so far as to say that it was a moral value for people to have absolute freedom to interact with information however they see fit.
Stallman’s dedication to the anarchist ideals of anti-bureaucratic and anti-authoritarian technology, further ignited by his blockage by proprietary software, led him to create the GNU operating system in 1983, an entirely open-source operating system intended to compete with Microsoft’s proprietary operating system, Windows. Along with creating GNU he also wrote the GNU Manifesto, which laid a philosophical basis for the creation of the GNU operating system, arguing that proprietary software divided users by not allowing them to help each other, such as someone fixing a bug in software that the original programmer did not catch. GNU was an act of resistance against proprietary software, but Stallman did not stop there. In 1985, he founded the nonprofit Free Software Foundation, which employed open-source software programmers and provided a legal infrastructure for open-source advocates, who at the time were facing severe pushback for their disregard of copyright laws. To that point, Stallman popularized the term “copyleft,” which was intended to protect a programmer’s right to modify, extend, and distribute open-source software. All of Stallman’s work culminated in the Open-Source Software Movement, which, at its inception, was sometimes referred to as the Free Software Movement. The GNU Manifesto, the Hacker Ethic, and anarchist ideals formed its substratum, and its proponents argued that proprietary software was unethical and unjust because it restricted a person’s access to information. Advocates, too, pointed out that when software is maintained and modified collectively, the result is often a better functioning, more beneficial product.
Such a communal attitude towards software development was a divergence from the structure of the proprietary-dominated technology industry at the time, or as Tiryakian describes of dedifferentiation “a process by which the member units renew their commitments to and involvement with the system as a whole.” (Tiryakian, 90) According to Stallman, every person should be able to participate in the system of software modification, as it is an issue of freedom and accessibility. According to Tiryakian, “dedifferentiation involves a dedifferentiation of social roles and social space,” (Tiryakian, 91) echoing the Movement’s sentiments regarding the eradication of roles within the technology industry, such as user vs owner. It is important to note that Tiryakian denotes differentiation as a “return to” something. While the Open-Source Software Movement did not dedifferentiate the technology industry as a whole and return it to a more equitable state, the industry was dedifferentiated by programmers returning to the highly anarchist ideals of their predecessors, who were concerned with the hacker ethic.
The Open-Source Software Movement was simultaneously successful and unsuccessful in its ambitions. On one hand, the movement brought the idea of open-source software as a morally superior alternative to proprietary software into social lexicon. It highlighted the many benefits of open-source, such as the collective brainpower of many programmers feeding into a program as opposed to just the “owner.” This idea inspired the creation of websites like GitHub, a software sharing repository with over thirty-seven million users. A great deal of popular software exists on GitHub and is maintained by dozens of different people. CocoaLumberjack, for example, is the most popular logging framework for iOS apps. It is freely accessible on Github, with 154 different contributors, none of whom are “intellectual owners” of CocoaLumberjack, or compensated for the contributions. In its success, the movement did dedifferentiate the industry--to an extent. As Tiryakian describes of dedifferentiation, the movement helped to restore the potentiality of programmers as a whole by highlighting the benefits of open-source, encouraging programmers to work together as a collective. However, the movement was unsuccessful in the scale with which it wanted to change the industry. A great deal of software is still proprietary, such as Mac OS, Google, Twitter, etc. This means that there is still a great deal of stratification in the industry; power is concentrated in the hands of a select few corporations who own the intellectual property to their software, and information thus remains inaccessible.
The Open-Source Software Movement’s attempts to reshape the industry and subsequently differentiate it, encouraged programmers to use open-licensing for their software, allowing other programmers to change and extend their code. This relinquished any intellectual ownership over the software, building upon anarchist ideals of decentralization, anti-bureaucracy, and anti-authority. In many ways, it did alter the industry, with open-source software being easily shared via various web platforms, though much of the software that exists today is still proprietary. Thus, the movement dedifferentiated the technology industry to an extent. The quest for open-source is still not over, as programmers like Stallman are still involved in making the case again proprietary software.
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Tiryakian, Edward A. “Dialectics of Modernity: Reenchantment and Dedifferentiation as Counterprocesses.” Social Change and Modernity, edited by Hans Haferkamp and Neil J. Smelser, University of California Press, 1992, pp. 78–94.
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