Open Knowledge: Social Benefits of the Hacker Ethic

Bob Wadholm, Trinity Bible College & Graduate School, 2016

Should Christians support open knowledge? Open knowledge is non-proprietary knowledge in

digital or non-digital form, legally free to use, reuse, and redistribute.1 Knowledge, in this sense,
may be knowing how or knowing that. Works of open knowledge include open source software
and hardware, open educational resources, open access media, publications, data, and
informationknowledge of any kind that is given the freedom to be a public good.2 Open
knowledge has garnered much support, criticism, and research, but a basic articulated
philosophy is still lacking, despite insistence by advocates that actions of knowledge workers
should be based on philosophical grounds.3 As the number of knowledge workers increases in
our society, so too does the need to outline fundamental questions regarding the philosophical
bases of open knowledge work. I address this gap by sketching a three-fold philosophical
argument in support of open knowledge, involving ethical, ontological, and epistemological
bases for openness.
The philosophical bases of open knowledge center on what has been called the hacker ethic.4
Early electronics enthusiasts referred to themselves as hackers, a term meant to denote their
expertise through willingness to play with their chosen technology.5 This term has expanded in
recent years to encompass enthusiasts and experts of all varieties, and the term hacker has
also been widely misused with reference to persons who crack computing systems.6 I will use

Open Definition, Open Definition 2.1.

Open knowledge may also be considered a privately owned public goodpublic ownership and private
ownership are not necessarily exclusive categories.
3
Megan Conklin, "Motives and Methods for Quantitative FLOSS Research"; Karim Lakhani and Robert
Wolf, Why Hackers Do What They Do: Understanding Motivation and Effort in Free/Open Source
Software Projects; Audris Mockus, Roy Fielding, and James Herbsleb, Two Case Studies of Open Source
Software Development: Apache and Mozilla; Daniel German, Software Engineering Practices in the
GNOME Project; Niels Jrgensen, Incremental and Decentralized Integration in FreeBSD; Phil Malone,
An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies, Practices and Opportunities; George
Siemens, Knowing Knowledge.
4
Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic.
5
Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed.; Johan
Sderberg, Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software Movement.
6
Rob Koper, Open Source and Open Standards, 357; Eric Raymond, The New Hackers Dictionary, 3rd Ed.
2

hacker here only in its positive denotative sense. According to Steven Levy7 and Pekka
Himanen,8 there was an identifiable ethical basis for hacking in those early years that focused on
the universal freedom of information. Hackers were motivated by a belief that information is
fundamentally a public good.9 The hacker ethic called into question, not the ownership of
personal goods, but the idea that beneficial information and knowledge can or should be owned
only by a single individual or company.10 There are social repercussions of knowledge
ownership: knowledge is not possessed in a social vacuum. Knowledge itself ought to be (as an
ethical imperative) jointly and cooperatively owned, grown, and distributed to protect the
freedom of what is known, as well as the freedom of the knowers (that is, their freedom to
know and to act on their knowledge). Open knowledge is a reformulation of the problems of
power and knowledge in a social context. Open knowledge ideology is an attempt to redefine
who is allowed to know what, to question the fundamentality of personal ownership of
knowledge, and to replace solely private power over the world through knowledge with public
power over the world through knowledge.11

The Ethics of Open Knowledge

Hackers offer several ethical arguments in support of the public ownership of knowledge. First,
the greatest good argument asks, given the creation of knowledge, what is the greatest good
that can be done with it: to make it free or to make it proprietary?12 When dealing with the
greatest good, we must ask ourselves what is best for society as a whole and not just for
individual creators or corporations.13 What is best for individual owners of knowledge might also
be good for society, but it is argued that it would be better for society for the knowledge to be
shared: a good world might contain proprietary knowledge, but the best world would not. This is
because what the knowledge accomplishes can be greater if it is shared, as this allows for cocreation and more diverse possibilities for innovation. If knowledge is assigned personal
ownership that denies public ownership, the knowledge is not able to have an effect on society
7

Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 40-45.

Pekka Himanen, The Hacker Ethic.
9
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 40-45.
10
Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed., 43-45.
11
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, 16.
12
Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed., 46.
13
Phil Malone, An Evaluation of Private Foundation Copyright Licensing Policies, Practices and
Opportunities, 5.
8

as great as if it had been publically owned.14 In short, knowledge shared is a greater good for
society than knowledge made proprietary.
We might ask: What if the knowledge itself or the public sharing of that knowledge were not
good (for instance, due to unintended consequences regarding its use)? Might the sharing of
knowledge sometimes be worse for society? For instance, what about knowledge of how to
successfully rob a convenience store, knowledge of government secrets, or knowledge of how
your friends talk about you behind your back? Would sharing these be better than not sharing?
Would the good of sharing outweigh the bad results, and end in greater good for society at
large? While it makes sense to focus on the good of society and not merely on the individual
when discussing the ethics of open knowledge, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge
that there might be greater harm to society as a result of sharing (at least in some limited cases,
such as those mentioned). Universal access to all knowledge might not be best.
However, it seems that there may still be some weight behind the central thrust of the greatest
good argument:
If an instance of knowledge would in fact benefit society more if it were shared, and
If knowledge creators ought to promote the greater good for their society,
Then knowledge creators ought to share their socially beneficial knowledge.
In this case we would need to know (or be convinced) beforehand that a given piece of
knowledge will increase the good of society by sharing it.
The second major argument given in support of public ownership of knowledge focuses on
psychosocial harm. This argument is the claim that obstruction of knowledge causes
psychosocial harm because: 1) less people can use the knowledge; 2) no users can adapt or fix it;
3) others cannot learn from it or base new work upon it (the knowledge is lost to society); and 4)
this damages social cohesion, because it does not allow knowledge to disseminate throughout
the whole of society.15 This is a step farther than the greatest good argument. Closed knowledge
is not merely less good than open knowledge; closed knowledge harms society, as it breaks our
ability to be one as a society. Social unity requires all members to have equal and universal

14
15

Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed., 46.
Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed., 46.

access to knowledge. To proprietize knowledge is to put up barriers in society, to count oneself

as separate from the whole. Personal hoarding of knowledge causes social disunity and
inequality.
But what about hoarding of other kinds of goods? Hackers are (by and large) not opposed to
personal ownership (and perhaps even hoarding) of physical goods, so why stand in opposition
to personal ownership of mental goods? We will address the question of knowledge as an
economic good in the next section, but for now we should note that there is a distinction being
made here between physical goods and knowledge. Without this distinction, the hacker ethic
would call for public ownership of all goods, both physical and mental (which it does not).
The golden rule is the third argument offered by hackers in support of public ownership of
knowledge.16 Following Christs injunction to love my neighbor as myself, if openly sharing my
knowledge benefits society, then openly sharing my knowledge may be a form of love for my
neighbor. How does this argument differ from the two earlier arguments? The greatest good
and psychosocial harm arguments make knowledge sharing an ethical necessity, while the
golden rule argument does not. In that sense, the current argument is weaker, but in another
sense it may be more persuasive (and require less evidence to move forward). The golden rule is
not an ethical mandate to always love everyone in every way possible all the time. I might
always give all of my food to my neighbor, but I might not, and still be ethically in the right. But
if I love my neighbor, and they require food, and I have food to share with them, I can show my
love to my neighbor by sharing my food. Substitute knowledge for food, and you have the
golden rule argument. Knowledge sharing is a way to love our neighbor, which we must do, but
it is not the only way to love our neighbor (and sometimes it might not be good to love our
neighbor in that way). The golden rule argument has obvious ties with Christian ethical
formulations, and provides a way into the hacker ethic for Christians on the basis of their own
deeply held beliefs.17 Christian hackers may support open knowledge out of an ethic of love for
neighbor.

16

Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed.; Niklas
Vainio and Tere Vadn, Free Software Philosophy and Open Source, 3.
17
Timothy Jore, The Christian Commons: Ending the Spiritual Famine of the Global Church.

The Metaphysics of Open Knowledge

Let us turn our attention now to the metaphysics of open knowledge. To economists, knowledge
is taken to be a good, that is, a property that can be shared, owned, bought and sold, something
that we can distribute or can exclude others from accessing.18 Knowledge itself, if it includes
something like belief, can be owned in the sense of being your belief or my belief, but how can
such a belief be distributed or made exclusive on the basis of monetary exchange for instance?
What kind of ownership are we talking about? Access may be bought or sold, in addition to any
rights associated with ownership, such as the right to use for ones own purposes, including
modification and further distribution of the original belief. It is in this sense that knowledge is
said to be an economic good, and individual bits19 of knowledge to be numbered among the
furniture of the universe.
Unlike goods of the physical variety, such as chairs, knowledge is non-rivalrous; it does not
become less of the original owners as it is shared among multiple owners.20 As it is given, it is
not subtracted; the value of the knowledge may become greater or less as a result of being
shared, but the knowledge itself is not diminished. When a physical good is sold from a shop,
money may be exchanged for it, and the new owner may take possession of the good from the
previous owner. Often, the previous owner no longer has rights to access or use or modify the
good after selling itit is no longer her property. The original owner of the chair no longer
possesses the chair. In contrast, when a person shares their knowledge with someone, even as
the result of a monetary exchange (such as occurs in colleges and universities as professors
receive monetary compensation for sharing what they know with their students), the original
knower is not giving up possession of their knowledge as they give it away or sell it. A professor
retains their knowledge even as they share it with others (in fact, they may even grow in
knowledge as a result of their sharing). Knowledge does not naturally go away as it is shared,
unlike physical goods. This is true even in an environment of communal or public ownership. If
there were a collection of physical goods commonly owned by many people, each person in the
community would be a kind of rival to each other person for every individual good, in the sense
18

Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons; Geoff
Mulgan, Tom Steinberg, and Oman Salem, Wide Open: Open Source Methods and Their Future Potential,
16; David Bolier, The Growth of the Commons Paradigm, 34-35.
19
A bit of knowledge would be the smallest divisible unit of knowledge.
20
Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons.

of there being a non-infinite amount of goods to go around, and each of those goods would be
finite.21 Given a single chair that is commonly owned, each owner is a rival of every other owner.
Because the chair is limited in spatio-temporal extent, it cannot be fully used at all times by all
peopleit is a rivalrous good. Knowledge, though, if it has no spatio-temporal extent, may
potentially be multiply owned, and fully used by all people at all times.
This brings us to a further point regarding knowledge as a goodit may be either excludable or
non-excludable.22 A knowledge creator may exclude all, some, or none from their knowledge,
and they may exclude on the basis of monetary exchange, physical ownership of a good that
codifies and externalizes that knowledge (for instance, a book), locality or means of access to
the knowledge, membership in a group or club, or in a multitude of other ways. But knowledge
need not be exclusiveit may be made open for others to access, distribute and modify.
In sum, knowledge is a good that is non-rivalrous and is either excludable or non-excludable. On
first hearing, this may seem to be an economic rather than a metaphysical discussion, that is,
until we recognize that the nature of knowledge includes its being non-rivalrous and excludable
or non-excludable. The material codification or physical externalization of knowledge may be
rivalrous, but not the knowledge itself. The nature of knowledge is such that if there is at least
one being that knows, the knowledge is non-rivalrous: with only one being in existence, there
are no other rivals for that knowledge. Given more than one being that can know, sharing the
knowledge does not make it less (sharing part of knowledge does not take that part away from
the original). Given infinite beings, sharing the knowledge infinitely does not make it infinitely
less knowledge for each knower to share. It is because there are no rivals for knowledge that
knowledge can be shared and still be fully ones own to enjoy and use.
While non-rivalry seems to be a necessary feature of knowledge, exclusion may be conditional.23
But why exclude? One must make a living, and some occupations seem to require exclusion in
order to ensure the livelihood of the original knower. But the knower may also provide the gift
of ownership to another person, whereby that knowledge is shared, even while the knowledge
remains their own. This is where the metaphysical nature of knowledge comes together with

21

Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons.
Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons.
23
Elinor Ostrom and Charlotte Hess, A Framework for Analyzing the Knowledge Commons.
22

the ethics of knowledge ownership. Should all knowledge be made non-exclusive (i.e. open)?
The hacker ethic calls for such a move, but upon what grounds?
The hacker ethic traditionally grounds the non-exclusivity of knowledge on the idea of
freedom.24 Socially beneficial knowledge should be freed from the tyranny of exclusion.
Exclusivity is exercised as a power over others, and ensures enslavement of knowledge and
knowers: the knowledge cannot be known, and the potential knowers are kept from the
benefits of freely knowing. Luciano Floridi argues that fundamentally, all is information, and all
information has a right to freedom.25 Similarly, Richard Stallman claims that knowledge has
rights of its own, and those rights must be acknowledged even by its creator or owner.26 A slave
may lack rights to reproduce, to do work for others, to move about freely; knowledge that is
made exclusive is in a similar stateothers cannot use it, reproduce it, or distribute it. But
unlike a human slave, knowledge has no self-will, and no self (at least, in the human sense of the
word), so what would freedom mean in this case? Free to do what?
We might say Free to be itself. Free to be knowledge.27 And the hacker would add Free to be
knowledge for others.

The Epistemology of Open Knowledge

If knowledge is made free to be itself, we should know what it is in order to inform us of its
freedoms and its rights (if indeed it has freedoms and rights), and this brings us to the
epistemological aspects of open knowledge. What makes knowledge open? The difference
between open and non-open knowledge is the ability to access and act on that knowledge (to
use it, modify it, share it, sell it, etc.). The greater the ability to access and to act on knowledge,
the greater its openness. Let us assume that knowledge is something like justified (or
warranted) true belief (perhaps as the result of a reliable belief-forming process, and perhaps
the belief reliably tracks with the truth). If that is so, non-open or proprietary knowledge is in its
nature exclusion of others from access to beliefs, to truth, and/or to justifications (or warrant)

24

Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed, 86.
Luciano Floridi, Information Ethics: On the Philosophical Foundation of Computer Ethics, 47-53;
Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information; Luciano Floridi, The Ethics of Information.
26
Richard Stallman, Free Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed.
27
Capurro, 2006 183
25

for those true beliefs. Even given access to non-open knowledge (for instance, illegal access), a
person could not legally act as if they knewwe might say that they do not have rightful
ownership. If knowledge is non-open to person A, A cannot know (because they cannot access
the knowledge) or A cannot act as if they know (because they do not have ownership of the
knowledge). A is excluded from having or acting on non-open beliefs.
But what gives you the right to exclude others from your beliefs? Perhaps ownership of those
beliefs (the right to privacy). But what gives you the right to own those beliefs? Perhaps because
your own mental processes created those beliefs, or provided justification, or discovered the
truth. Your mental work may allow you some form of ownership of the resulting knowledge. But
your ownership of beliefs does not naturally and necessarily exclude others from ownership,
since knowledge may be either excludable or non-excludable by nature, and the beliefs may be
multiply owned and still be non-rivalrous. Excluding others from our beliefs is a choice we make.
How shall we choose?
If we exclude some members of society from accessing beneficial knowledge, we limit
knowledge; we limit its benefits to society, and its potential to be knowledge for society. Social
progress28 requires knowledge progress and the freedom to understand and share that
knowledge.29 Societies cannot progress without either creation of new knowledge or greater
access to old knowledge. For society to exist, both private and public domains of knowledge are
necessary30necessary because it seems that society requires multiple minds, and thus some
sense of privacy within those minds, yet for there to be society, there must be overlap of
knowledge, which requires public knowledge.

Conclusion
In times past, societies have been productive as a result of knowledge acting on nature and/or
knowledge acting on machines. In our current society, our primary source of productivity has
28

I am not saying here that knowledge progress is always socially progressive; for instance, one might
progress in knowledge of how to be a more effective tyrant. Nor am I equating social progress with
technological progress: we may be merely building better bombs and not a better society. By social
progress, I mean from a Christian perspective, that is, the enacting of Gods kingdom on earth and in his
community.
29
Rufus Pollock, Open Data: Openness and Licensing.
30
Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software; Corynne McSherry, Who Owns
Academic Work?: Battling for Control of Intellectual Property.

become knowledge acting on knowledge,31 but knowledge is only able to act on knowledge if it
is open: openness is the basis of wider intellectual innovation.32 If we follow hackers in
supporting the freedom of knowledge, this does not mean that Christians must create only free
knowledge, or that we must lose all personal ownership of knowledge. But we might listen to
Jesus command to love our neighbor in a new way, a way that benefits our neighbor and our
society. Our choice of ownership may be made on the basis of love, and our love may be given in
the form of shared knowledge. It does not make us less to give more, but it may make society
more. We have the freedom to make our knowledge free.

31

Manuel Castells, End of Millenium.

Christopher Kelty, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software, 361; Richard Stallman, Free
Software, Free Society: Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, 2nd Ed.
32

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