While it feels obvious today that we want to freely share the things we make, the early success of open source captivated scholars and economists because it defied everything we thought we knew about how and why people create. Open source developers were frequently characterized as “hobby” developers (most famously in Bill Gates’s 1976 “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” which we’ll get to later), because the assumption was that only companies could make “real” software. Even Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian’s Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, a 1999 book widely regarded as
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