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By Root 2118 0

it turned out that open source was better at resisting snakebites. What the Halloween documents really showed, in the end, was that open source had broken the lockstep between credibility and authorship. Distributed creativity defied an identification that had prevailed since piracy conflicts had forged it in the early Enlightenment. In fact, open-source programs were not only less vulnerable to viruses than Microsoft's, but faster to react to them. If delocalized authorship meant resilience and adaptability, as it now seemed to do, then the very fear that fudding conjured up might work against proprietary authors, even those as huge as Microsoft. Strong intellectual property in this realm created uncertainty of its own. Fudding was therefore suddenly futile at best. By the same token, the moment when open source proved itselfwas the moment when its biggest opponent recognized that the basis of credibility had shifted in this fundamental way. That was why the Halloween document had to consider resorting to an apocalyptic strategy of undermining the very infrastructure of digital networks. Only by challenging technical standards could authorship and credit be secured together again.

Aware of the threat, Raymond urged that open-source proponents respond by developing "trust" protocols of their own. They could not rely on openness itself. Instead, theywould have to develop a culture of named authors of credit, or "publishers of good repute" like O'Reilly or AddisonWesley in the world of print (implicitly, that of scientific print). This culture, he surmised, might "substitute for `trust' in an API-defining or- ganization."The resemblance of this strategy to criteria of trust that were proposed in earlier, predigital eras was remarkable. A digital world might not be so revolutionary after all: the battlefront would once again be between candidates for credibility in a piratical field.

In sum, the origins of the digital culture we now inhabit-the culture in which piracy is the defining transgression-were shaped by questions of creativity and community, and those questions were cast at the critical moment in terms of an ethos. That this was so was an outcome of the mid-century debates about telecommunications, patent monopolies, and the nature of science. Thanks to the practices from which those debates arose, the domestication of creativitywas alreadyvalorized and set against a conformist, corporate world of "media" long before digital hacking arose. More specifically, the practices out of which hacking did emerge were those of radio, telephone, and home piracy. Many among the early digerati were committed to libertarian ideals they found originally in pirate or ham radio. Phreaking formed a practical bridge between telephone exploration, on the one hand, and digital exploration, on the other. And the first home computer enthusiasts adopted both the cassette technology and the convivial customs of the home tapers. The effects were manifold, but issues of credit-of trust, authorship, and authenticity -were central to them. For example, expertise no longer went with professional identity. It was once again radically unstable, and peer opinions, abstracted from place and affiliation, were said to be the only guide to its true location. Where to find authoritative opinions, however, and how to tell them from the spurious, were of course pressing problems.

The corporate world tried to exploit these questions in various ways, of which fudding was one. Fud played on the uncertainties of (business) users to encourage a safety-first reversion to the association between authorship and credibility It worked for awhile, but seemed likely to fail against the distributed form of authorship that had arisen out of those mid-century pirate principles and established itself over the Net. Open source enjoyed "long-term credibility" because publics understood it to carry less likelihood of instability, lower vulnerability to attacks, and less chance of being cast adrift in the future.The ground had shifted-not just because of technological change,