Added another research question. First four items in bibliography. An anonymously contributed observation about reputation incentives operating even when the craftsman is unaware of them. I show that they imply an underlying theory of property rights homologous to the Lockean theory of land tenure. Finally, I examine the implications of this analysis for conflict resolution in the culture, and develop some prescriptive implications.
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, I 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.