Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Deirdre Saoirse, a former employee of Linuxcare and founder of a Bay Area users group for people who use the Python scripting language, feels strongly that people involved in open source can be just as conservative and closed-minded as any other part of the population. "Some of my female and/or queer and/or transgendered friends have felt very out of place in the Linux community," she says emphatically. "I've seen a lot of sexism and not a lot of openness to alternative lifestyles among the community as a whole, even in the Bay Area."
Goolie, a programmer who works on open-source community development projects at a San Francisco start-up, warns that an ability to connect open-source sensibilities and open-mindedness about sex "would take a particular type of coder, one who felt that open source gets at some basic, fundamental expression of humanity."
Richard Stallman, of course, is just this sort of person. Free software is not a business model for Stallman, nor is it a technically superior method for creating software. Stallman has made his point of view very clear -- he doesn't care if the software he uses is actually technically inferior; for him, free software is a moral imperative based on the principle that people who share code are ethically better people. His commitment to an unorthodox romantic life extends even into the realm of family.
He says he distrusts the idea of traditional families and criticizes the idea that having children is necessarily a positive contribution to an already overpopulated civilization. "As a child, I rebelled against parental authority," he recollects. In his view, traditional family structures are predicated on the opposite of freely-given love. His point of view is shared by many people in the queer community, where "family" often means long-term friends rather than biological relations, and having children isn't regarded as the logical outcome of marriage.
Like many social renegades, Stallman has had to create a home life out of his work and friendships. He remembers that back in the 1970s he flirted with the idea of joining a commune devoted to creating "families" who practiced polyfidelity (committed, but non-monogamous, relationships). But he was concerned that he wouldn't fit into any of the families.
Instead, he created his own family of sorts with his Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit devoted to the sharing and creation of free software resources and information. Rather than sharing food and shelter with a biological family, Stallman shares his famous GNU software with an international group of like-minded individuals.
When queer San Francisco network consultant Richard R. Couture created a Linux-based Internet cafe known as CoffeeNet, one of his wishes was "to create the kind of space where socializing and sexuality and an interest in computers could come together." And yet Couture, who also founded the Linux user group now known as the Linux Mafia, mourns the fact that Linux users seem so, well, straight. "People call me a pervert jokingly in the Linux cabal," he laughs. "It's because I'm openly homosexual and I sometimes enjoy freaking everybody out by commenting on sex. I do it to shock everybody. Sometimes, I just can't keep my mouth shut."
Couture's friend Rick Moen, also a network consultant and member of the Linux Mafia user group, contends that the connection between hacking and open sexuality goes back to the 1970s. In a free zine called the Node, published by San Francisco's now-defunct Kerista commune, he found a "mix [of] articles about computers and technology with pieces on polyamorous/community living and all sorts of other oddities. I read it whenever I could find it," he says.
"Geeks are introverts, we read a lot of science fiction, and we have bizarre socialization," says Muffy Barkocy, a non-monogamous bisexual working with Apache and Perl at Egreetings.com. She believes that a geek's stereotypical lack of socialization encourages a more experimental sexual life. "Because of our lack of socialization, we don't learn about the monogamous imperative. It just doesn't occur to us."
Barkocy's point about science fiction bears examination. Speculative fantasizing has always been a passion for geeks of any kind. For some free-software enthusiasts, there is a clear link between the bold visions common in science fiction and a tendency toward experimentation in both coding and sexual practice. Lile Elam, a member of Linux Chix, a women's Linux user group, suggests that many proto-free software geeks grew up imagining a world where societies weren't necessarily driven by the profit motive -- or by compulsory heterosexual monogamy. Elam adds that many hackers are also pagans -- yet another data point indicating an openness to alternative ways of living.
Adds Stallman: "A lot of programmers are science fiction fans, and there's a tendency in science fiction fandom to accept non-standard relationships." Science fiction is a genre sometimes known for its utopian musings on what a more liberated society than our own would look like. And reading about alien or unknown worlds can inspire fans to go beyond the realm of imagination and explore alternative realities and social arrangements in everyday life.
Not all free software geeks are science fiction fans, of course, nor are all open-source software developers likely to be ready to strip down and join a three-way at the drop of a Red Hat. But that's not the point. Part of the essence of the open-source and free software communities, ideally, is that they are open to experimentation of all kinds, both in terms of practical engineering -- the compilation of efficient code -- and social engineering -- the construction of new ways of being in the world. And these new ways of being are certainly not limited to the sexual variety. Open-source enthusiasts are likely to see applications for open-source strategies in a vast number of arenas, including politics, the creation of literature and even hardware design.
But when you get right down to it, sex is always near the top of the list.
"Computer people talk about two things: code and sex," says Barkocy. "You discuss alternatives to what your company can do with code, or alternatives to sexual norms."
