The line appears in Macleod's rollicking new science fiction novel, "Cosmonaut Keep." In the year 2049 today's under-30 geeks are still hacking code. They're even still wearing the same faded T-shirts they always did, which still sport the logos of the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and that silly penguin. But these code-geek geezers are far from redundant -- their T-shirts are actually advertisements for their particular set of still very useful skills. After all, you never know when the Communist Party of the U.K. might need you to hack into some ancient system in the U.S. that's still running a 50-year-old copy of FreeBSD.

I'm a sucker for programmer jokes, and Macleod, a former hacker himself, makes plenty -- whenever he pauses to catch a breath in the midst of a plot that includes giant alien squid starship navigators, crypto, castles and dinosaurs. It's a dynamic mix, particularly when you add in the numerous references to Marxism-Leninism, libertarianism and Linux. Only Macleod, our greatest living Scottish libertarian Trotskyist cyberpunk science-fiction writer, could pull it off.

But I pulled up short when I read a scene in which some aging hackers hanging out in a bar complain because network troubles are denying them access to Slashdot -- in the year 2049. The strangely compelling image, along with a passing reference to a historical event known as "the Linux Jihad," filled me with nostalgia -- not exactly the sentiment usually inspired in me by science fiction.

As the year 2000 limps to a close, the days when Slashdot's name was at the tip of every tech pundit's tongue, and Linux's rise to world domination seemed a foregone conclusion, are suddenly long gone. The prominence of free software in the tech and financial press has sharply declined. I mean, you know the buzz is fading fast when media outlets become so bored that they can't even muster the energy to harp on the declining stock prices of Linux companies. Sure, the dot-com downturn is responsible for a lot of the deflation, as is the normal news cycle that treats yesterday's news as, well, yesterday's news, but was it really only a year ago that VA Linux was breaking all records for IPO debuts?

The funny thing is, Macleod's recapitulation of present-day hacker society as the cyberpunk science fiction past is a signal that, even while stock prices and media buzz are down, the cultural spread of free software and hacker social mores is alive and well. And that's not just because of the natural synergy between science fiction and programming. On the contrary, it's yet more fallout from the ascendance of the Internet. Free software hacker culture is at the heart of the Net, and now that the Net is at the heart of daily life reflections of that reality are popping up in all kinds of expected and unexpected places.

It's not just in science fiction novels written by former programmers that we find jokes about firewalls, cross-platform integration and Unix. The same kind of stuff is turning up in academic journals, interwoven with references to Derrida. And even though cynics are now busy decrying the end of open-source software as a business strategy, and are even going so far as to lament that the thrill is gone, the sense of fun that is at the core of hacking something new -- that got people hacking on things like Linux in the first place -- is still vital. You just have to know where to look for it, and right now, that place is not in Red Hat or VA Linux's quarterly earnings reports.

The Free Software Project
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