He confesses with a smile that he doesn't consider himself an expert on sex, but he recognizes that the unconventional choices he has made as a software engineer are analogous to the choices he's made in his romantic life as well. "I believe in love, but not monogamy," he says plainly.

Print story E-mail story   Backflip this article to find it again

Stallman's specific beliefs are his own, but the nonconformist, experimental nature that guides his work is shared by a not-insignificant portion of the coder community.

Stallman is often dismissed by mainstream software developers as an oddball who is not to be taken seriously -- so it wouldn't be surprising for defenders of the sexual status quo to do the same. But Stallman isn't unique in his hacker polyamority. Author and programmer Eric Raymond is both a leading evangelist of free software and a expert on geek anthropology whose credentials are second to none. "Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle variation than the mainstream culture," writes Raymond in "The New Hacker's Dictionary." "It includes a relatively large gay and bisexual contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to ... practice open marriage, or live in communes or group homes."

Of course, no one's been counting how many hackers frequent sex parties or calculating the percentage of open-source contributors who also enjoy open relationships, but there does seem to be a crossover. "This [alternative lifestyle] group is a healthy contingent of the hacker culture, and has been even more influential than its size would suggest," says Raymond.

At the very least, it's safe to say that not only are many open-minded open-source hackers unafraid of the anything-goes mentality of the experimental sex community, but that they also positively embrace it. There's even a crop of online open-source pornography, memorialized in J. Stile's hoard of erotic "Linux slut" images, which you can find on his Webby award-winning Stile Project. The overlap between the languages of programming and kink is a source of humor on a bondage Web site known to fans as the BSD BDSM Site. As an advertisement for the "Cat5 o' Eight Tails" reads, "Light and fast, perfect for the home or office where multitasking is vital. Eight individual strands to transmit your message interference-free."

This entire free software/free love scenario would seem to challenge the conventional wisdom that holds that there is something lacking in geek sexuality. According to stereotype, geeks are celibate, disinterested in pleasures of "the meat" or too socially awkward and unattractive to find partners. And sexual pioneers are supposed to be gutter-dwelling crackpots or beautiful porn stars. What reason could they have for mingling with bespectacled programmers who gripe endlessly about such problems as coding a free Perl script that will work flawlessly with a proprietary Oracle database?

Of course, most free-software advocates will tell you that conventional wisdom is no wisdom at all. For some of the select group of techies who have devoted themselves to free software and open-source projects, free love and creative sexuality are part and parcel of their dedication to communities that value openness, sharing and collective pragmatism.

"There's no causal connection between being into open-source software and being sexually adventurous. Let's dash the implication that open source causes bisexuality or anything else," laughs Eli Silverman (not his real name), a longtime programmer who worked extensively with the GNU Emacs text editor at a Silicon Valley company devoted to open-source development. He is also a self-described "pervert" whose collection of gray-market lesbian fisting videos is much admired in the sex community. Adds Ed, a queer Apache developer working in San Francisco: "Just because you know other freaks in open-source doesn't mean that being into open-source makes you a pervert."

And yet both admit that the ideals that motivate a person to get into open source or free software might also motivate them to be sexually experimental. Open-source "is not the textbook solution," Ed explains. "It's an alternative mode of economic production, and being queer or non-monogamous are alternative modes of having relationships. Perhaps people who can consider alternate modes of production are willing to consider other kinds of alternatives."

Another Apache developer who preferred to remain anonymous noted that while he isn't a part of the sex community, he does see how the mindsets of the two overlap. "I suppose the two groups do share a common sense of rebelliousness caused by marginalization by society, a marginalization due to deliberate choices made by the individuals involved."

Even as the craze for free software saturates the market, spurring stock market public offerings and inciting fear and trembling in industry giants, opting to go the free or open-source route is still difficult. Although lately free software hackers have been more likely than not to get rewarded for their labors with stock options from aspiring Linux companies, the usual result is more intangible, like getting to build communities or creating better code just for the sheer joy of it. Therefore, it is no surprise that mavericks and free thinkers are the lifeblood of open-source and free software development. And thinking outside the box is, of course, exactly what is required of anyone whose sexuality doesn't fit into cultural norms.

Yet the notoriously debate-prone open source and free software communities are as divided on the question of sexuality as they are on whether Debian or Red Hat is the better distribution of GNU/Linux. While people like Raymond and Ed see the communities as open to alternative lifestyles, others disagree.

Next page | "Computer people talk about two things: code and sex"
1, 2, 3