The Google Question: Is The Hacker Ethic Compatible With A For Profit Company?

http://fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-google-question-is-hacker-ethic.html

by mindcrime • 13 years ago

60 64 13 years ago

fogbeam.blogspot.com

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

What is the OP's definition of the Hacker Ethic?

yiransheng• 13 years ago

I believe the author [linked to wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic) when he used the term.

anon1385• 13 years ago

That this question even needs to be asked shows how much of the libertarian kool-aid people involved in Silicon Valley culture have been drinking. Of course a for profit company is not compatible with ethics (of any flavour). It's in the damn name: 'for profit' not 'for humanity'.

kryptiskt2• 13 years ago

Businesses are run for profit, that is true, but it doesn't say "for profit excluding all other considerations".

coldtea5• 13 years ago

No. It just happens.

mixedbit• 13 years ago

This is true for private companies. Public companies are owned by shareholders and I don't think many of them buy shares because company does some cool stuff, for example supports open standards. Shareholders want profit only, excluding all other considerations.

This does not include shareholders that are also employed by the company, they may choose to optimize for something else, not only financial profit.

etherael4• 13 years ago

The more desperate the need the higher the potential to turn a profit, so in a fashion, pursuing the maximum profit is fulfilling the needs of the market.

Giving people what they want.

Sure, there are sometimes negative externalities, giving people what they want isn't always what they need. At least sometimes, people want stupid things. But enormous world changing products and services which are profitable in line with the extent that they change the world for the better are certainly not necessarily a net negative for humanity, in fact I'd say it's closer to the reverse..

capisce2• 13 years ago

The most desperate needs are hunger and thirst, necessary to survive. Doesn't sound like an area were a lot profit can be made though. I'd say the highest potential to turn a profit is from those with the most money to spend frivolously.

coldtea5• 13 years ago

>The more desperate the need the higher the potential to turn a profit, so in a fashion, pursuing the maximum profit is fulfilling the needs of the market.Giving people what they want.

That's the "invisible hand", "selfishness turns out to good" political economy motto.

Which is unscientific BS.

If a company can lie, cheat, steal or sell people things that are bad for them, including making them want stuff they did not care about through misleading ads and manipulation marketing, they will do it.

cscurmudgeon5• 13 years ago

Who pays for your food?

PavlovsCat4• 13 years ago

The sun.

PavlovsCat4• 13 years ago

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" Mark 8:36

That we've come to equate "profit" with "financial profit" is telling, but I suspect it's a recent thing. And I agree that all humanity would profit if we focused more on sustainability, doing good work that makes sense, and even (gasp) solidarity -- the less focus on quarterly financial gain and trinkets, the better, the more we all profit :P

bargl• 13 years ago

I actually think Costco is a good example of maintaining a balance between a profit model (for many years he only got a salary of 350,000 a year). Although he took more from other area's, he pays his employees 11/hr starting off.

But to say that 'for profit' is not compatible with ANY ethics then you are 100% wrong. To be a profit company you have to set some ethics aside, but not all. I also work for a company who has a great ethical model. The best companies know how to balance a profit model with an ethic model in order to keep customers, employees, and yourself happy. If you have stakeholders then you are probably fucked...

As far as the OP, I think that there are "shades of grey" when it comes to hacktivism. The ideals of a hackers, need to become (IMHO) a little bit more flexible. I believe we need to push companies to be open in a practical way. If Google, ok let's be practical GitHub, release code that was a few versions old then they'd be allowing people to see what they do (to learn) and at the same time maintaining a competitive edge (which is part of what IP is "supposed" to be at it's heart).

ari_elle• 13 years ago

I think it's wrong to speak of a hacker ethic in such strict terms. I would not say somebody is instantly not a hacker if he holds the believe that it is alright to make a project openly available and sell a corporate version with specific features for example. Where to cross the line is up to each person, the extreme example being rms, who even refuses to use a computer where the BIOS isn't free (which many hackers would say is exorbitant).

Also there are quite many companies and business models around free software / open source software.

Additional examples (granted, some of them no big shots):

-) Canonical

-) Codeweavers

-) id Software (engines under GPL, older games -> source code available)

-) Mandriva / Novell

Also there are sometimes open source strategies for certain products (OpenOffice as Open Source Variant of StarOffice for example).

And what about the hosting providers and Linux / BSD support companies, which granted, aren't global players, but there is a vast amount of them.

Is FOSS compatible with Profit? Yes

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html

Is FOSS evenly compatible with profit compared to proprietary products? No, not with today's corporate and economical structures (and the strict copyright)

What goes against "Hacker Ethic" and what not? Debatable

Teapot• 13 years ago

-) DuckDuckGo https://duckduckgo.com?q=duckduckgo+about

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

Great examples. I almost mentioned Novell in my post, given their stewardshp of SuSE, but I haven't been paying a lot of attention to them lately, and wasn't sure if they'd been up to any weird shenanigans.

Canonical and Codeweavers and id are good examples as well. I should have thought of them.

IBM is an interesting case also. They certainly aren't a "pure play" F/OSS company the way Red Hat is, but IBM do contribute a lot to the F/OSS world, and they make a lot of knowledge available for free. But they also patent a LOT of stuff and pump out a ton of proprietary software. I'm on the fence about them.

cookiecaper• 13 years ago

FOSS, as it's defined by the FSF, is not really compatible with profit as it practically destroys the monopolistic benefit of copyright. Most people do not believe traditional uses of copyright are immoral, and therefore the strict adherence to freedom 2 as required by the GPL is simply meaningless deprivation of profit potential.

mmaunder2• 13 years ago

OP uses RedHat as some kind of shining example. I did an Oracle server installation for RedHat as a consultant a few years ago. They took 3 months to pay me - literally paid me on the 90th day.

The wikipedia article the OP links to reckons the Hacker Ethic is "access, freedom of information, and improvement to quality of life."

Interesting that "quality of life" is in there. Building a profitable company is just about the finest thing you can do to uplift a community's quality of life when you create sustainable jobs and those employees fuel other sustainable businesses in the community.

I run a profitable company and it often crosses my mind how the dollar that I'm spending at the mom and pop bakery has travelled around the world via happy customers and employees into my local community.

There's something else: I read about another startup dying today. They just ran out of cash. I really really hate to see great software and great ideas just die because the creators couldn't figure out how to sustain them. Well guess what, you sustain those ideas by turning them into a profitable business. Profitable companies are a great way to keep your idea alive and available for customers.

I make GPL'd software and I make money from it. 90% of my customers use my software for free. Running a for profit company lets me continue to create open source software and to create more of it. It also lets my customers use my open source software for free.

goldfeld• 13 years ago

Regarding quality of life, this may be my personal standard but I consider it highly relevant. I would think a company like RedHat would undergo a lot of pressure from big clients, and that does not amount to quality of life for me, especially in upper management roles.

Though obviously having the huge market of enterprise servers, which serves huge businesses, is why they have become a billion dollar company, I wouldn't want to become such a profitable company on those terms. The way their business model work, the companies that would be great to have as clients (say, small startups) don't need RedHat since they are in fact too good to work with--they can do it themselves. What's left (the billion dollar market) are the huge corporations who need stability and urgency above all. These must be a real pain to cater to. I say from the perspective of working for a company that serves Walmart with software.

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

OP uses RedHat as some kind of shining example.

I don't know that I'd call them a "shining" example, and I definitely would not say RH are perfect. They are, however, the best example I could think off at first blush (and second blush, as far as that goes) of a successful for-profit that seems to embody the hacker ethic.

That's a great way of looking at it, and pretty close to my own view. That's why I want Fogbeam Labs to one day be a large, profitable, influential business... not just to make a lot of money, but so we'll have the resources to do the things we want to do, and so we can do our part to support hackers and open access to knowledge and technology.

mmaunder2• 13 years ago

Awesome followup comment - I love your positive outlook! Best of luck to you and your team!!!!!

kryptiskt2• 13 years ago

I think the Hacker Ethic works just fine with a for-profit company. What it is incompatible with is bureaucracy, which is all about control and predictability, and successful companies tend to acquire one of those with time.

kushti• 13 years ago

Google never had The Hacker Ethic (only marketing buzz about it). So that't not a question )

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

That's definitely one take on it. But I feel like something has changed at Google over the past few years. At one time they seemed to really balance the whole "be a profitable public company" thing with "be hacker friendly" pretty well. Lately they seem to be displaying more typical "big, greedy, evil corporation" behavior.

Or at least it seems that way to me.

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

As another commenter pointed out, we're creating this huge straw man of what the "hacker ethic" is. I'd want a lot more clarification in this essay before I would be happy running off on a categorization party.

I was reading a commentary the other day that put it something like this: the technology community will pay a lot of lip service to libertarian ideas, but what they really want is the data. Assuming this is correct, then those companies that make gestures towards EFF and others do so because in most cases it provides more data to people. Google gives you email because it provides them data. The data is more valuable than the cost of running the service. Same goes for Facebook.

Tech companies want data -- and lots of it. They support various causes and make various statements because it allows them more access to data.

The subject of definitions is critical, because I think sometimes what we think we hear from these companies is what we want to hear, instead of what they're actually saying. Then we get surprised when their actions don't pan out the way we expected.

IgorPartola2• 13 years ago

No, Google wants ad clicks. Data is just a way to get there. There are other ways and they are/will be surely exploring them. Facebook wants the same thing. Apple wants to sell you hardware and some software. Microsoft wants to sell you software. 37signals wants to rent you software. Tesla wants to sell you cars. I want to garner your upvotes. This post is just a means to an end.

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

That's a fair point, DanielBMarkham. I would have loved to write more on that, but this post kinda hit me out of the blue at like 3:00 in the morning. I felt compelled to write and publish it, but needed to get to sleep, so I probably rushed it a a bit.

That said, the linked Wikipedia page[1] on the "Hacker Ethic" does a decent job of explaining it, and they definition(s) they provide are pretty much what I had in mind.

Definition (1) from the corresponding Jargon File entry[2] is pretty close as well.

If I get time later, I'll go back and write some more on this topic.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_ethic

[2] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker-ethic.html

DanielBMarkham2• 13 years ago

Words are slippery, and when talking about ideology and political actions they are even more slippery.

For instance, I never understood the word "hacker" as anything but a slam - a poor programmer who would "hack away" at his keyboard blindly in hopes of getting something to work. As far as I know, it still has that connotation in many communities (or an even worse one)

Keep up the good work. Those 3am articles are many times the best ones! :)

wslh6• 13 years ago

> Google certainly aren't as evil as 1990's era MS...

I don't agree. I think that Google is in the same level of evilness (or will be very soon).

They just released tons of code because it is not where they are making money. But they release their search engine code? The game rules are so obvious now (not only for Google) that it is incredible that we try to think about them in an ethical way. They do things, if they have a power position they shift they change the rules to maintain that power. Do you know how many times a Google Search API was deprecated? http://blog.databigbang.com/google-search-no-api/

Another argument that I reuse every time when people compare Microsoft to Google is that you could always reverse engineered software on your machine but on The Cloud you have lost those hacker rights. You can't reverse engineer web APIs. You can build a search engine yourself but your pagerank algorithm will not be the same. More food for thought http://blog.nektra.com/main/2012/06/01/reverse-engineering-a...

wslh6• 13 years ago

Nowadays few people on HN downvote without arguing.

wslh6• 13 years ago

Again. Downvoters must lose some of its karma like in SO.

rbanffy5• 13 years ago

> But they release their search engine code?

There is nothing unethical in not opening your competitive advantages. Besides that, you don't have a hundred thousand machines to run it on.

> You can build a search engine yourself but your pagerank algorithm will not be the same

You can base yours on the published paper. I suppose it would be as good as Bing.

> you could always reverse engineered software on your machine

And be patent trolled out of existence if you ever used it.

wslh6• 13 years ago

> And be patent trolled out of existence if you ever used it.

No, reverse engineering is legal, and projects like Samba or my company full reversing (4 products) of closed source Microsoft projects hasn't be sued. More on that: we have been contacted by Microsoft if we need something special that they can test for compliant on newer operating systems.

Try the same web scraping the google search engine (something more "benign" and they will show you a page saying that you can't automate the search process.

wslh6• 13 years ago

> There is nothing unethical in not opening your competitive advantages. Besides that, you don't have a hundred thousand machines to run it on.

You are quoting me out of context. My whole point was about the idea of Google being more benign than Microsoft in the 90s.

mindslight• 13 years ago

> There is nothing unethical in not opening your competitive advantages

So 90's Microsoft fit your ethics? Their competitive advantages being control of de-facto standard OS, file formats, etc ?

How quickly we relax after we've won the battle. I'm more scared of the worlds Google and Apple want to create than what Microsoft was doing (with the exception of the TPM).

wslh6• 13 years ago

>> You can build a search engine yourself but your pagerank algorithm will not be the same > You can base yours on the published paper. I suppose it would be as good as Bing.

Again out of context. The point of the criticism was: if the page rank is running on a machine where you have the control you can reverse engineer it.

If in 20 years Google decide that driverless cars with ads are the future and their search engine must be closed you loose your good search results (like we lost Google Reader BTW). In the Microsoft case I can always run Windows 3.1. My company even helped virtualize Internet Explorer 6 on Microsoft Windows 7 natively!

ps1: answering your reply, I just realized why Google is building driverless cars!

ps2: I am not a Microsoft fan.

IgorPartola2• 13 years ago

TFA is wrong. First, Red Hat is not "for profit", they are for profit. This publicly traded company would not exist if they were not making money.

Second, Google is killing RSS, on purpose, and for profit. Is this amoral? No, they have a license to do so, which is called capitalism and the free market. Capitalism is simply a way to align personal and collective incentives for profit with the common good. Generally, it is a great thing, but there are casualties. Products with a vocal user base will be killed because those products were not profitable and will hinder further growth of other products. Bourbon will be diluted, Google Reader will be discontinued. Is that amoral? If so, then all of capitalism is. Instead, you are asking for a society where as long as someone is using your product, you are obligated to support it and maybe even give it away for free. Raising prices equates to greed, and discontinuing products to evil. Apply this logic to your ventures and tell me if that really is the society you want.

raverbashing• 13 years ago

This is an example of loaded question.

Because it's assuming being for profit is fundamentally unethical (at least according to 'Hacker Ethic').

No, there's nothing wrong in being for profit, you can follow your ethic and make money, next question.

Unless like some you're so far removed from reality that you think any money making is bad or several other examples that fit the definition of mental disease.

mindcrime5• 13 years ago

Because it's assuming being for profit is fundamentally unethical (at least according to 'Hacker Ethic').

OP here... I don't at all assume that being for-profit is fundamentally unethical. As I said in the article, my own company, Fogbeam Labs, is a startup attempting to build a business around F/OSS software. I have no question that a company can, under at least some specific circumstances, manage profitability and at least some adherence to the Hacker Ethic, which is why I mentioned Red Hat.

What I question is this: is adhering to the Hacker Ethic (for some reasonable definition of "hacker ethic") generally compatible with building a for profit company? And if a company succeeds in doing both, can they keep both over a long period of time? Or is there something about the nature of companies that must pursue profitability, which intrinsically works to counter the Hacker Ethic?

firebrand392• 13 years ago

Glad that the fogbeam guy asked. Me always thought that Google was 'better' than, say, Microsoft and if google were to become just another 'evil' organisation, that would be troubling. So here is my take. The key word for me is organisation, not profit. Anybody who has been working for a big organisation for a while knows how dysfunctional and political they can be. Completely distracted from whatever 'official' goal they have, profit or not. There seems to be a natural live cycle to any organisation. Grandiosely, call it the Rome Syndrome. Start from honest and humble yet promising beginnings, growth and consolidation, peak power, decay and death. Some companies survive but get hollowed out and survive only in name (e.g. IBM).

In light of this, in order to not become 'evil', google has to work on its organisation. And they do, Rubin's and Huber's exit, spring cleaning etc.. Also, all the smart technology google has could allow them to avoid bloated bureaucracies, hence not becoming evil.

But they are no Uber-humans. So let's see.

Firebrand

hexagonc• 13 years ago

One obstacle to a company developing a "hacker ethic" is invention assignment clauses in employee agreements. There seems to be a fundamental tension between carefree experimentation and "everything you build which is even remotely related to our business belongs to us". If you are passionate about your job -- and many companies want you to be passionate -- and if you are a hacker/builder then sooner or later you're probably going to create something that falls into the purview of an assignment agreement. For example, let's say you work for a game company and in your spare time, hack up a new way to do game physics. Even if you don't work on the game physics team, even if the company is already committed to using a third party physics engine, they may argue that your engine belongs to them. You have to entrust the fruits of your hacking to their stewardship; even if they allow the code to be open-sourced, it will go under their public Github account, not yours.

I don't offer a solution to this problem; it is understandable that a company will feel you owe them something if you hack up something cool using the tricks and knowledge you gained while working for them. The more they encourage tinkering and play, the more they trade in creativity and innovation, the more they might suffer if an employee goes to another company with his/her hacks. I suppose it comes down to how much you trust the management of the company. A company can still have bad management, even if they mostly stand for hacker values. You may hack up a cool solution to a problem but the company may be unable to use it in a project because they are already implementing an inferior solution and are committed to a certain release date. Your hack might end up in a corporate purgatory; your company may refuse to use it in a product due to politics, "not invented here" syndrome of the team that would incorporate the hack, or competing priorities. However, the company will not allow you to take the hack to your next employer because they may claim you used company know-how to build it. The fear of litigation can be just as potent as the actual legal case for it. Even companies like Redhat or Mozilla may have trade secret/invention disclosure clauses that prevent employees from fully embracing "hacker ethics" even if they are better than most.

georgespencer• 13 years ago

> Even if you don't work on the game physics team, even if the company is already committed to using a third party physics engine, they may argue that your engine belongs to them.

Because it's trivial to argue that the ambient knowledge and literal intellectual property that went into developing such an engine were as a direct result of your employment. The conversation at the water cooler. The knowledge that Employee X is having a frustrating time with verlet integration and collision detection. The knowledge you built-up working with great people over the last 3-4 years etc.

capisce2• 13 years ago

But as soon as you leave you are free to do whatever you want, and the current employer also benefits greatly from the knowledge you gained at your previous jobs (which might be a large part of the reason they hired you in the first place). They shouldn't be able to claim ownership to the knowledge that's in your head.

cscurmudgeon5• 13 years ago

The answer: Yes, if the "Hacker Ethic" is pure unabashed self-righteousness.

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Yes, I think it is. There can be a balance. Just like Costco has shown that companies can be good to their employees and still profit. Problem is a lot of people just focus on the money and not on society. After all my years doing business, I've realized that businesses have an obligation if serving society. They only exist because society has allowed them to.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

The mantra of "profit" [1] and "capitalism" has become suffused with the same absolutism that has tainted so many religions, to their eventual detriment.

While expounding upon the virtue of the individual, it is simultaneously devaluing and grinding down an endless number of them.

It is really about the "select" individual. If you are not selected, you do not matter. And participation is no guarantee of selection.

Rather than the ostensible goal, look at what the proponent is willing to do to achieve it. Judge accordingly.

[1] also present, in somewhat different disguise, in many formally "not-for-profit" endeavors

The Google Question: Is The Hacker Ethic Compatible With A For Profit Company?

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