Kelty, Christopher M. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2008. 378p. alk. paper, $23.95 (ISBN 978-0-8223-4264-9). LC 2007-049447.
Little did Christopher M. Kelty, an assistant professor of anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, expect to become an active member in the culture he set out to investigate—that of Free Software, or Open Source software. Kelty is an anthropologist, after all, not a coder. He struck out to research the phenomenon known as Free Software but ended up studying those who participate in the culture and, more important, the cultural significance of Free Software. Part history, part anthropological study, and part ethnographic study, Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software reveals the whys and wherefores of the Open Source culture and the geeks who inhabit and participate in it (and not necessarily by contributing computer programming skills and code).
For Kelty, Open Source, also Free Software, is both an end product and a culture. As a product, it is computer software for which the source code used to compile the application is freely available for perusal, consumption, adoption, and reuse (and free in terms of cost). As a culture, it describes the organization and customs of those who participate in the creation of the software. Unifying the culture and its product, Kelty identifies Free Software as a "recursive public," intentionally evoking the mathematical concept (recursion) commonly employed in computer programming. A recursive function is a programming routine that "calls" itself, the output of which is used by, or feeds, the calling routine, which, in a recursive function, is the same routine. Kelty desired to impart a sense of the profound depth of Open Source culture, which is far more than software code, and extends to legal and organizational issues, in addition to technology.
"Public" denotes that Open Source culture exists beyond (but also within; it is not insular) political, economic, and ethnic boundaries and that many individuals (entrepreneur, programmer, educator, librarian) coexist within this public. Technology is an instrumental component of this recursive public, for it is through technology that geeks, those who constitute this culture, express themselves. This is not to suggest that geeks are all one-dimensional programmers, but that the technology enables geeks to realize and form this culture in the first place, which they continue to develop and expand, by creating new code, drafting legal licenses, or authoring software manuals. Development and growth are vital elements in the Open Source culture.
Two Bits is divided into three parts. The first part, "The Internet," situates the people—the geeks—that constitute this culture. International in nature, Kelty demonstrates that geeks are generally very skilled, learned actors deeply engaged in Free Software who are not, as it might seem sometimes, blinded by ideology. Quite the opposite often; on average, geeks tend to be practical, unified by a common belief that technology is inescapable and malleable, to be put toward human uses. The second part, "Free Software," is essentially a history of open source software culture, but Kelty convincingly relates the discussion to how Free Software is a recursive public and something that can be witnessed from the earliest days of software collaboration (and the Internet). One aspect that reveals itself from the historiography is how Free Software is modular, intentionally flexible for future development and customization. Indeed, "openness and modifiability are core values" to Open Source software and geeks, and the third part, "Modifiability," addresses these values beyond software.
In it, Kelty expands the discussion to consider related endeavors: Creative Commons and Connexions, the latter is a project and community at Rice University to provide the space and means to collaboratively author textbooks for students of all ages. It can be related to the Open Access principle in scholarly publishing and MIT’s OpenCourseWare—both focus on sharing, at little or no cost, with the aim to further knowledge and learning. Connexions, though not strictly a software project, is a recursive public, akin to the culture of Free Software. The project shares many of the same issues that any software project might encounter: legal and licensing hurdles, collaboration challenges, and, of course, technological design issues. But the concept, like Free Software, calls upon the members of a community to engage and contribute, not only to sustain the endeavor but also to reach a point where it is self-sustaining by its community.
But Two Bits is only partly about geeks, code, technology, or software. It’s also about the cultural significance of those elements and how they’ve influenced, and will continue to impact, the ways people work, organize, collaborate, and even think. The reader, however, must come to his own "policy prescriptions," as such aims are beyond the scope of Two Bits, which Kelty acknowledges is more a work of history and anthropology "in the hopes that it is more lastingly usable." Kelty’s fine book provides an anthropological basis to investigate our own practices and community.
Not only do academic libraries, and their parent institutions, often rely on Open Source software solutions, but they also initiate and support a substantial number of Open Source projects, managing, therefore, the technological hurdles and legal pitfalls, and organizing and facilitating community collaboration and communication. Libraries are, if not historically, increasingly becoming recursive publics, especially as more and more institutions (libraries) begin to tackle the technological needs of libraries today: VuFind and Scriblio in the field of OPACS; Koha and Evergreen in the Integrated Library System sector; digital library and institutional repository software; and numerous other smaller projects. These are software applications and tools designed by libraries for libraries to be used in libraries, often by librarians, who then develop modifications, and so on. This is all very recursive, and infectious.
Along his way, Kelty found himself embroiled in the very issues he was researching—a participant in the Open Source culture, a geek of sorts. Not only did Kelty participate early on with Connexions, but also Two Bits, attractively published by Duke University Press, is available under a Creative Commons license at twobits.net.—Kevin M. Ford, Columbia College Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.