At the recent OFA conference I met someone who has brought her copy of Coding Freedom to Harvard to get it signed by the author, Gabriella Coleman, who is a professor in the department of Anthropology.

I've read a lot of history of open source but never from the perspective of an anthropologist, never as part of a serious academic exercise.

I just finished the book and I'd recommend it. It's a bit academic and dry at times, but maybe it's the sort of book I should have on my bookshelf to review the dense parts now and then. Coleman discusses a number of philosophers such as John Stewart Mill. She covers liberalism in the traditional sense of the word:

• “protecting property and civil liberties
• promoting individual autonomy and tolerance
• securing a free press
• ruling through limited government and universal law, and
• preserving a commitment to equal opportunity and meritocracy” (page 2)

Open source itself is politically agnostic, she emphasizes, despite Microsoft's attempts to label it as communist.

She talks about how open source challenges traditional notions of intellectual property.

She has a great quote from Bill Gates who said, about software, in 1976, “Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid?… One thing you do is prevent good software from being written.” (page 66) This is ironic, of course, because if you fast forward 50 years, lots and lots of good software has been written without the authors getting paid.

There are a couple chapters dedicated to the history and governance of Debian, which I wasn't very familiar with. Debian is even more oriented toward free software than I realized and has a rigorous onboarding process for new developers.