Open Source Sex

By Annalee Newitz, Salon. Posted May 31, 2000.

At a recent San Francisco sex party, I found myself kneeling rather rapturously at the feet of three charming naked men whose level of arousal seemed unimpaired when our conversation suddenly shifted from pornographic fantasies to the implementation of the Web server program Apache on offshore computers. While people began to have (safe) sex on the mattress next to us, and I continued to caress my companions with a lascivious wink, I found myself in the surreal position of discussing the nature of social freedom in the software industry while wearing sexy lingerie. I don't mean to imply that the conversation about code itself was somehow erotic for us, but rather that our sexually liberated environment seemed as good a place as any to chat about something else we all had in common -- our love for free software.

Free software is software in which the underlying source code to a program is made freely available to the general public. It's a development methodology that sharply contradicts the way companies like Microsoft or Oracle do business. At first glance, the idea that free love and free software would come together as smoothly as so many sex-party comminglers might seem odd, but the scene really wasn't that unusual. As my own regular participation in both the party scene and the world of free software frequently demonstrated, free software hackers aren't all that uncommon in the "sex" community, a group that includes people in open relationships, queers, S/M or kinky fetish fans, and anyone else whose sexual proclivities fall outside the mainstream.

Coders suffer an unfortunate reputation for living disembodied, asexual lives; they are maligned for being passionate only about their computers and often deemed incapable of non-virtual lust. But the stereotype doesn't hold true -- the geeks I know are getting some, and not infrequently with utter disregard for conventional social mores. Most intriguingly, that subset of geeks who are passionate about free software may well be leading the way: Some of the same free software programmers who eagerly experiment with new methods for developing software are also gleefully dallying with alternative ways of developing sexual relationships.

The people at this particular sex party -- a private, monthly event that many of us attend regularly -- were in search of freedom, or at least a relief from social convention. They saw no need to constrain themselves to a sexual status quo just because the boring majority doesn't know how to have fun. Likewise, many advocates of free and open-source software describe themselves as nonconformists, rebels or as just generally more open-minded than your average person. In terms of software, that means that they delight in engaging in practices that challenge the staid old proprietary capitalist way of doing software business.

The ideals that underlie free and open-source software are applicable to more than simply coding and business -- they get at the very nature of what constitutes human community. Free software is a shared resource that nobody can selfishly hoard; open-source software is an alternative form of production that involves groups of people who work together rather than in competition with each other.

When programmers see that software production is dramatically improved in a shared, non-competitive, free environment, wouldn't it be natural for them to apply what they've learned from coding to what they practice in their everyday lives -- including their sex lives? And the logical extension of free and open-source software in the realm of sex would certainly include publicly shared sex at a sex party, for instance, alternative ways of building relationships (such as queer sexuality) and non-monogamy (or, to put it another way, non-proprietary sexual affection).

One need look no further than Richard Stallman, the most prominent advocate of free software, to see how technological and sexual experimentation can merge. Stallman has both awed and frustrated the open-source and free-software communities with his incendiary opinions about why developing free software is not merely pragmatic, but also morally imperative. But his intransigence isn't limited to code. "I've been resistant to the pressure to conform in any circumstance," he says. And that includes sexual conformity.

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