Literature Review: Open Source Software, Hacker Culture and their relation to Academia

[Erioldoesdesign]

Intro

The idea that code should be shared and collaborated on is strongly related to what is called “hacker culture,” a group of people concerned with the creative and self-directed use of computers and code. There are plenty of programmers who would not call themselves “hackers” but nevertheless participate in open source projects, sometimes with great enthusiasm. But the culture of hacking creates and maintains the values and practices that a lot of open source software is built upon. For various historical reasons, this is not named “open source culture”. This is because “open source” is a politically laden term, connected to “free software”. “Open Source” is sometimes used as equivalent to “Free Software” and sometimes used as opposed to it. Also, when looking at culture, both “Free” or “Open Source” focus on the software and the legal treatment of its code rather than the practices and values. Thus, particularly in sociological discourse, “hacker culture” is the more common label.

For our purposes it is relevant how hacker culture (and with that open source and free software) are related to academia.

Hacker culture’s value system mirroring academia

Hacker culture and Academia both use the idea of “meritocracy”: Fame and power rests with the people who contributed to the community's progress the most. Both cultures rely on sharing of information, imagine themselves as being part of a global community, and of progressing, step-by-step, to a greater goal. The “merit” that people have in their communities is tracked in publications for researchers and in code contributions for hackers; if their research or code is cited or used, it adds to their fame. Both cultures are, at the same time communitarian with their concerns for sharing, documenting and circulating knowledge, yet also very antagonistic and individualistic by harshly criticizing contributions by others with the justification that this is needed for both the progress of science and code, lest the objects of concern will be tainted with bad contributions.

Hacker culture’s origins in academic institutions

It is unsurprising that hacker culture and academia share similarities: hacker culture’s origins are at universities. Particularly MIT is relevant here, both as an institution in general but particularly its Model Railway Club and its Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Before home computers were widespread, universities were one of the places where computers were available—and linked to each other via the internet, mainly to other large research universities like Carnegie Mellon, and government research institutions. This allowed hackers to collaborate and socialize through computers. Today, collaboration with online platforms seems normal, but in the late 1970s and 80s it sparked new practices to work and to imagine oneself as part of a larger community.

Conclusion

In our research, people were occasionally frustrated with conflicts between open development and academia. Both systems do not match perfectly. This should not detract from their strong similarities in many areas: Their cultural values, particularly the idea of belonging to a community in which individuals gain merit are similar, which is plausible since early hacker culture was often based in universities.