[Miller] Miller, William Ian; Bloodtaking and Peacemaking: Feud, Law, and Society in Saga Iceland; University of Chicago Press 1990, ISBN 0-226-52680-1. A fascinating study of Icelandic folkmoot law, which both illuminates the ancestry of the Lockean theory of property and describes the later stages of a historical process by which custom passed into customary law and thence to written law.
[Mal] Malaclypse the Younger; Principia Discordia, or How I Found Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her; Loompanics, ISBN 1-55950-040-9. Amidst much enlightening silliness, the `SNAFU principle' provides a rather trenchant analysis of why command hierarchies don't scale well. There's a browseable HTML version.
[BCT] J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (Eds.); The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press 1992. An excellent introduction to evolutionary psychology. Some of the papers bear directly on the three cultural types I discuss (command/exchange/gift), suggesting that these patterns are wired into the human psyche fairly deep.
[MHG] Goldhaber, Michael K.; The Attention Economy and the Net. I discovered this paper after my version 1.7. It has obvious flaws (Goldhaber's argument for the inapplicability of economic reasoning to attention does not bear close examination), but Goldhaber nevertheless has funny and perceptive things to say about the role of attention-seeking in organizing behavior. The prestige or peer repute I have discussed can fruitfully be viewed as a particular case of attention in his sense.
[HH] I have summarized the history of hackerdom at http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-hist.html. The book that will explain it really well remains to be written, probably not by me.
[N] The term `noosphere' is an obscure term of art in philosophy derived from the Greek `nous' meaning `mind', `spirit', or `breath'. It is pronounced KNOW-uh-sfeer (two o-sounds, one long and stressed, one short and unstressed tending towards schwa). If one is being excruciatingly correct about one's orthography, it is properly spelled with a diaresis over one `o' -- just don't ask me which one.
[RP] There are some subtleties about rogue patches. One can divide them into `friendly' and `unfriendly' types. A `friendly' patch is designed to be merged back into the project's main-line sources under the maintainer's control (whether or not that merge actually happens); an `unfriendly' one is intended to yank the project in a direction the maintainer doesn't approve. Some projects (notably the Linux kernel itself) are pretty relaxed about friendly patches and even encourage independent distribution of them as part of their beta-test phase. An unfriendly patch, on the other hand, represents a decision to compete with the original and is a serious matter. Maintaining a whole raft of unfriendly patches tends to lead to forking.
I am indebted to Michael Funk <[email protected]> for pointing out how instructive a contrast with hackers the pirate culture are. Robert Lanphier <[email protected]> contributed much to the discussion of egoless behavior. Eric Kidd <[email protected]> highlighted the role of valuing humility in preventing cults of personality. The section on global effects was inspired by comments from Daniel Burn <[email protected]>. Mike Whitaker <[email protected]> inspired the main thread in the section on acculturation.