Who are computer hackers? What is free software? And what does the emergence of a community dedicated to the production of free and open source software--and to hacking as a technical, aesthetic, and moral project--reveal about the fraught contemporary politics of intellectual law? Coding Freedom, an ethnographic account of free software development, examines how these hackers are at the forefront of fomenting a vibrant political culture of civil liberties online.

Free and open-source software (F/OSS) refers to non proprietary but licensed software, much of which is produced by technologists located around the globe who coordinate development through Internet- based projects. The developers, hackers, and system administrators who make free software routinely include the following artifact in the software they write:

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

See the GNU General Public License for more details.

While seemingly insignicant, this warning is quite meaningful for it reveals something important about the nature of free software and my subsequent representation of it. This legal notice is no doubt serious, but it also contains a subtle irony available to those who know about free software...