Viva open source software and the "bazaar"! Breathe freedom! Everything is secure, functional, productive, and at that absolutely accessible and free!

That is a rough characteristic of the mood in software industry of the last few years. Professional programmers, who know that there is simply no such thing as free lunch, got snowed under with absolutely free, but extremely valuable for business process products. There appeared new players in IP-industry.

Some explanation for the uninitiated. Traditionally software market trades in computer programs, i.e. executable code recorded on a material medium that makes computer processor perform necessary functions. Source code of the programs, usually written in a high level language convenient for human logics, is usually a secret of the company. This software is usually called closed source code software or simply "closed" software.

From the time programming appeared some programmers, later called hackers, designed computer programs and exchanged them with their colleagues. Gradually free software libraries appeared. That's the way free software appeared. Some hackers annexed source codes to their free programs. That started to be called open source software. At the beginning of the 1990s designing open source software became a practice with communities of programmers.

Economic effect of the open source code phenomenon appeared to be amazing. At the end of the second millennium thousands of highly qualified programmers started to absolutely selflessly depreciate their work and the work of their colleagues, destabilizing software market through designing open source software. The up to that time slumbering free resources of developers, beta-testers, debuggers, sympathizing users unexpectedly started a joint action, that provided free software of good quality to ordinary users, a headache to managers of software companies, and absolutely vague prospects of development to software market as a whole.

This most interesting phenomenon in modern economy, when a great number of specialists unite to develop the most complicated software in their spare time, and spend years on its development, debugging, functional expansion, became the subject of the study of Eric S. Raymond, who is an ideologist of the open source movement. He called the style of open source software development by some communities of hackers with non-predefined structure and the number of members a bazaar. "…the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches … out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles", wrote Eric S. Raymonds in his article "The Cathedral And The Bazaar". We'd like to point out that for this:

• hackers are not paid for their work;
• the software they develop is distributed free;
• users can introduce any changes into the products and go on distributing them in this way without paying any licenses;
• in case any problems in the service arise, users get free support from developers or other qualified users.

By the way, mass media represent hackers exclusively as people who destroy computer systems, break into programs, etc. In this article a hacker, just the same way as among programmers, is a programmer who writes, modifies and debugs programs in his spare time, no matter how these programs are used later. Eric Raymonds has even stricter requirements to candidates for the hacker title. "… you do not become a hacker by calling yourself a hacker -- you become a hacker when other hackers call you a hacker. A `hacker', considered in this light, is somebody who has shown (by contributing gifts) that he or she both has technical ability and understands how the reputation game works." [HN]

The abovementioned articles of Eric Raymonds "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" (further [C&B]) and "Homesteading the Noosphere" (further [HN]) cause a lot of violent discussion on the web and in press. As a rule the views of Eric Raymonds on hacker communities and the "bazaar style" are either supported, or violently criticized. We found it interesting that his works are the first attempt of a member and leader of the communities to not simply describe but analyze the laws of appearance and functioning of the communities, their customs (those who know such precedents, please let us know) and to start writing the code of hacker communities. In [HN] we read: "I have observed these customs in action for twenty years… They have several very interesting features. One of the most interesting is that most hackers have followed them without being fully aware of doing so. Indeed, the above may be the first conscious and reasonably complete summary ever to have been written down."

Thus we decided to start our speculation about free resources, their role in modern society, using the invaluable evidences of a witness and the person who first described the movement of hacker communities. You can ask, where do you see these free resources? For all the users including organizations of different kinds, developed and distributed free programs are free resources. For all programmers source code of free distributed programs and their documentation are free resources. For hacker communities and commercial companies hackers, who develop open source code software, are free resources. At last, hacker communities are free resources themselves, as samara systems, creating public benefits, i.e. free resources of the society.

We find it very interesting to approach the definition of possible ways of appearance and functioning of free labor resources communities on the example of hackers.

That's what we are going to do. Let's have a trip around the bazaar, described by Eric S. Raymond.

To begin with let us using Eric Raymond's articles make a general image of a member of hackers community, who develops open source code software and work in the bazaar style.

After we read [C&B] we come to something like the following. A member of open-source community has good technical training, is ready to cooperate, has good personal and communication skills, is ready to recognize good ideas of others, egoistic, although altruistic as well. Besides this he is both the developer and a user of the software, he designs to solve his everyday problems , that's why he works for a result - a well working program. Those who like details can read excerpts from [C&B] and [HN] on our quotation page. All the above traits are especially necessary to project leaders and project coordinators working in the bazaar style.

Thus we see if not an angel in the flesh, then at least the image of an ideal employee, who is most of all interested in the results of his work. We believe, any manager would pay dearly to get such an employee in his team. But let's stick to the point.

Imagine a hacker's habitat, which Eric Raymond has in mind (again from [C&B] and [HN]), before the hacker enters an existing community or before he organizes a community around his product. There are a lot of hackers concerned with similar problems, thus the problem, solved by the hacker's "program turns out to be typical for a large class of users". Another special feature of hackers' environment is the consequence of Unix tradition. "It is that a lot of users are hackers too."

Another special feature of hackers and their habitat is, according to Eric Raymond, their egoism and altruism at the same time. Let's clear it up.

Usually egoism is seen as selfishness, putting one's self first, postponing public interests and interests of other people. Altruism, just the opposite, means willingness to act selflessly for the benefit of others, regardless of one's own interests.

Can we say that hackers are egoists? - We think, yes. This statement can be supported by the fact that it's his own need for the program that starts his activity in designing it. According to Eric Raymond "we may view Linus's method as a way to create an efficient market in "egoboo" -- to connect the selfishness of individual hackers as firmly as possible to difficult ends that can only be achieved by sustained cooperation." [C&B]

The practice, when the hacker leaves the community after getting the necessary result, a program having the quality sufficient for the hacker's needs, is another evidence to egoism. That's what Eric Raymond writes about it: "One interesting measure of fetchmail's success is the sheer size of the project beta list, fetchmail-friends. At time of writing it has 249 members and is adding two or three a week. Actually, as I revise in late May 1997 the list is beginning to lose members from its high of close to 300 for an interesting reason. Several people have asked me to unsubscribe them because fetchmail is working so well for them that they no longer need to see the list traffic! Perhaps this is part of the normal life-cycle of a mature bazaar-style project." [C&B]

Let us now see the manifestation of the opposite feature of hackers - altruism. In [C&B] Eric Raymond quotes Gerald Weinberg's speculations from his book "The Psychology Of Computer Programming", concerning "egoless programming". Weinberg observed that in the shops where developers are not territorial about their code, and encourage other people to look for bugs and potential improvements in it, improvement happens dramatically faster than elsewhere. Further on Eric Raymond writes: "Weinberg's choice of terminology has perhaps prevented his analysis from gaining the acceptance it deserved -- one has to smile at the thought of describing Internet hackers as "egoless". But I think his argument looks more compelling today than ever." [C&B] Eric Raymond believes that, it is thanks to "egoless programming" as well, that Bell Labs, the MIT AI Lab, UC Berkeley became the home of innovations that are legendary and still potent.

In [HN] Eric Raymond writes, that the behavior of hackers, developing open-source software, is well typical to gift cultures. Eric Raymond thinks that Gift cultures are adaptations to abundance. On the level of common consciousness gift is associated with altruism. As an example of showing the gift culture he gives show business, philanthropy of multimillionaires, and a custom of Kwakiutl tribe in British Columbia, an eco-zone with temperate climate and abundance of food. This custom consists in the chieftan's inviting everyone who wants to and can come to the party. As a rule, the party is usually held in winter. The parties are repeated and long and include visits of the whole tribes and families to each other on occasions of wedding, different rituals, raising someone's status. During the parties everything the people have accumulated during summer and autumn with fishing, hunting a gathering on one of the richest coasts of the world is spent. This custom is called potlatch.

We agree with Eric Raymond in that the hacker community, designing open source software, rests on gift culture. Moreover we admire the insight of the author, who related the way the hacker communities appeared with the gift culture having such information to work on! Judge for yourself. None of the given examples from the sphere of programming can be related to the gift culture on the basis of abundance. The abundance hackers have is the based on the fact that there is "no serious shortage of the 'survival necessities' -- disk space, network bandwidth, computing power". But it's them, not computer programs that are objects of giving. Computer programs is just what both companies (which are by the way elements of exchange economy), that Weineberg considered in relation to the non-egoistic programming, and hackers lack. Otherwise their development would be pointless. However the programs are developed and given away for free. We believe, we have to elaborate on the essence of giving, to understand the situation.

Already in the time of Plato and Aristotle scientists spoke not simply about gift giving, but about different kinds of gift exchange, when a gift implies a counter gift or an away gift. No many scholars think, that gift-giving is for value and on a certain stage calls forth exchange. Let's see the custom of the Kwakiutl tribe mentioned by Eric Raymond. The description of potlatch in the group of tribes and peoples, dwelling on the southwest coast of America, Alaska and British Columbia, including Kwakiutl was found in the work of Marcel Mauss "The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies" (further [G]). Some extracts from this work are to be found on our quotation page. We have made the following conclusions from his work:

• the reviewed gift relations are absolutely irrelevant to altruism;
• potlatch can be looked upon as a way of providing wealth to the progeny, family, clan and tribe as a whole;
• the samara status in the tribe depends on the amount of goods, that belong to a person, family or clan and that they distribute. It is considered, that only spending and distributing goods one can prove the presence and amount of wealth one has;
• potlatch is supported by samara standards, including three duties: to give, to get, and compensate;
• "It is from the system of gifts, given and received in a period, that direct barter (through simplification and approaching of the time defined beforehand) and on the other hand purchase and sale (the latter by installments and for cash), and as a loan." [G]

And a few words from the author's conclusion: "Thus, among the four significant folk groups we have first found out potlatch in two or three of them, then we uncovered the main reason and standard form of the potlatch itself, and at last we and after that we found out an archaic form of barter in all these groups - a form of presented and received gifts. More than that, we identified the circulation of things in these societies with the circulation of personal rights. The scale, spread, importance of these phenomena allows us to imagine the complete order probably typical of a large part of mankind in the course of a rather long phase which still takes place with other peoples besides those we have just described. They allow us to understand that the principle of barter-gift may be proper to societies, that have started from the stage of "collective total delivery" (from clan to clan and from family to family), but haven't come to individual agreement, to market, where money circulate, to sale in its proper sense and especially to the idea of price, defined in a weighed and touched coin." [G]

Unfortunately, within the scope of this article we can't consider the gift topic, which can be dedicated a separate discussion, and the work of Marcel Mauss in more detail. We think it interesting, for example, to compare tabooes of hacker communities and tribes of British Columbia, Alaska and Southwest coast of America (as well as some Melanesian and Polynesian peoples).

For purposes of the article we find the following important. Economy, based on gift giving (at least in the variants, practiced by the above tribes and peoples, as well as communities of hackers, designing open source code software), is one of the forms of exchange (barter) economy. The gift giving itself is only a way of getting access to bound resources (material or ideal) of other people, communities, families, clans, tribes and even dead ancestors and redistribution of these resources. Thus in our research we'll use the following definition of gift-giving. Gift giving is a system of relations, allowing access to bound resources.

Thus, gift giving, perceived as a show of altruism, appears to be a demonstration of egoism. As among hackers giving a program free, its source code, information about ways to eliminate an error in the program and the like is considered to be altruistic, this altruism can be considered to be egoism in the extreme, as it is perceived just the opposite way and is welcomed everywhere. The idea, is not new and not original, it is enough to remember the remark of Eric Raymond himself in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar": "One may call their motivation "altruistic", but this ignores the fact that altruism is itself a form of ego satisfaction for the altruist."