In 1998, when Netscape went open source and invited the computer tinkers and hobbyists to look at the code of its new browser, fix the bugs, improve the package, and redistribute it, specialized mailing lists exchanged opinions about its implications.52 Netscape's move rekindled the debate about the peculiar nature of the digital economy. Was it to be read as being in the tradition of the Internet gift economy? Or was digital capital hijacking the open source movement exactly against that tradition? Richard Barbrook saluted Netscape's move as a sign of the power intrinsic in the architecture of the medium.53Others, such as John Horvarth, however, did not share this optimism. The “free stuff"offered around the Net, he argued,
is either a product that gets you hooked on to another one or makes you just consume more time on the net. After all, the goal of the access people and telecoms is to have users spend as much time on the net as possible, regardless of what they are doing. The objective is to have you consume bandwidth.54
Far from proving the persistence of the Internet gift economy, Horvarth claimed that Netscape's move was a direct threat to those independent producers for whom shareware and freeware have been a way of surviving exactly those “big boys" that Netscape represents:
Freeware and shareware are the means by which small producers, many of them individuals, were able to offset somewhat the bulldozing effects of the big boys. And now the bulldozers are headed straight for this arena. As for Netscrape [sic], such a move makes good business sense and spells trouble for workers in the field of software development. The company had a poor last quarter in 1997 and was already hinting at job cuts. Well, what better way to shed staff by having your product taken further by the freeware people, having codedabbling hobbyists fix and further develop your product? The question for Netscape now is how totame the freeware beast so that profits are secured.55
Although it is tempting to stake the evidence of Netscape's layoffs against the optimism of Barbrook's gift economy, there might be more productive ways of looking at the increasingly tight relationship between an idealistic movement such as open source and the current venture mania for open source companies.56 Rather than representing a moment of incorporation of a previously authentic moment the open source question demonstrates the overreliance of the digital economy as such on free labor, both in the sense of not financially rewarded and willingly given. This includes AOL community leaders, the open source programmers, the amateur web designers, mailing list editors, and the netslaves willing to “work for cappuccinos" just for the excitement and the dubious promises of digital work.57
Free Labor
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