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Cultures are adaptive machines.
The open-source culture is a response to an identifiable set of drives and pressures. As usual, the culture's adaptation to its circumstances manifests both as conscious ideology and as implicit, unconscious or semi-conscious knowledge. And, as is not uncommon, the unconscious adaptations are partly at odds with the conscious ideology. In this paper, we will dig around the roots of that contradiction, and use it to discover those drives and pressures. We will deduce some interesting things about the hacker culture and its customs.