Two bits: the cultural significance of free software Author : Christopher M. Kelty Publisher : Category : Page : 23 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : Reuse and modification are also the key ideas that projects modeled on Free Software (such as Connexions and Creative Commons) see as their goal. Creative Commons has as its motto “Culture always builds on the past,” and they intend that to mean “through legal appropriation and modification.” Connexions, which allows authors to create online bits and pieces of textbooks explicitly encourages authors to reuse work Page : 24 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : Modifiability is an imperative for building infrastructures that can last longer. Page : 24 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : Long-settled, seemingly unassailable practices—like the authority of published books or the power of governments to control information—are suddenly confounded and denaturalized by the techniques of modifiability Page : 39 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : James Boyle has also noted the recursive nature, in particular, of Free Software: “What’s more, and this is a truly fascinating twist, when the production process does need more centralized coordination, some governance that guides how the sticky modular bits are put together, it is at least theoretically possible that we can come up with the control system in exactly the same way. In this sense, distributed production is potentially recursive. Page : 89 Date : 12/09/2009 Highlight : polymaths might better be described as Feyerabendians than as pragmatists (and, indeed, Sean turned out to be an avid reader of Feyerabend) Page : 93 Date : 12/09/2009 Highlight : My favorite transhumanist is Eugen Leitl (who is, in fact, an authentic transhumanist and has been vice-chair of the World Transhumanist Association) Page : 103 Date : 12/10/2009 Highlight : Frank Hecker, a sales manager, made the link between the developers and management: “It was obvious to [developers] why it was important. It wasn’t really clear from a senior management level why releasing the source code could be of use because nobody ever made the business case.”2 Hecker penned a document called “Netscape Source Code as Netscape Product” Page : 237 Date : 12/17/2009 Highlight : James Boyle, author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens Page : 290 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : Coleman, “The Social Construction of Freedom”; Page : 290 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks extends and generalizes some of Weber’s argument. Page : 292 Date : 12/03/2009 Highlight : Geeks are also identified often by the playfulness and agility with which they manipulate these labels and characterizations. See Michael M. J. Fischer, “Worlding Cyberspace” for an example Page : 299 Date : 12/10/2009 Highlight : On the history of software development methodologies, see Mahoney, “The Histories of Computing(s)” and “The Roots of Software Engineering.