Homesteading the Noosphere

Raymond's companion essay to The Cathedral and the Bazaar, this one about the social dynamics of the open-source world — a gift economy operating on reputation and ownership rules that parallel and invert the norms of commercial software. Raymond argues the culture works because everyone understands its unwritten rules, and the essay is an attempt to write them down. For product direction the piece is useful as a case study in how cultures regulate themselves without formal hierarchy — a question that matters in any organisation attempting distributed autonomy. Read alongside his Cathedral essay as a pair. First Monday is open access; the essay is free.