The idea of collaborative effort and collective organization had long been a common practice in hacker and software development circles. Just as each of the hackers on w00w00 had pitched in to help Shawn Fanning refine Napster, groups of programmers often came together and formed communities around the development of “open source” projects like the Linux operating system. Far from being a case of “too many cooks in the kitchen” creating a muddled fiasco, open-source development proved that complete strangers could independently, and without much centralized coordination, come together to
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