Why me, why here, why now?

I am the resident anthropologist and (by default) principal historian of the hacker culture.

I didn't plan it that way. It just sort of happened. In 1991, when I picked up the editorship of the Jargon File, there wasn't anyone else who was both qualified for the job and interested in it. At that time, before the advent of the World Wide Web and mass Internet access, the hacker culture was an obscure collection of geeks that nobody outside it had noticed yet.

I was paying attention. I had been part of the hacker culture since 1976, a good fifteen years. For reasons of personal history (starting with the fact that I grew up on three continents and forgot two languages before I was 13), I think like an anthropologist; I watch the social machines around me as closely as the technical ones.

Editing the Jargon File taught me that the results of this kind of observation could be interesting. The questions people brought to me as a result of it stimulated the How To Become A Hacker document around 1995. Hackers everywhere embraced that document with gratifying speed. Then, things got really interesting. For reasons I describe in the book, I wrote the bits now collected in The Cathedral and the Bazaar during 1997-2001.

Being a historian is dangerous. Sometimes you find that you're shaping the future by explaining the past, by influencing the stories people use to organize and explain their behavior. Time played an interesting trick on me. The stuff I had written as descriptions of the hacker culture started to be seen as definitions of it. For this and some other reasons I found myself pushed from the position of a chronicler to that of an influence leader and even role-model. The explosive success of Linux had a lot to do with this; people were looking for explanations, and I provided some.

If you are from outside the tribe and need some objective evidence of how influential these documents have become, count the number of translation links in them. All those were contributed by volunteers worldwide who decided that the most worthwhile use of some of their time was translating my work. Or do some Google searches on my name or some of the document titles. You'll find they're linked everywhere and ranked highly.

Peter Salus is a noted chronicler of the history of the Unix operating system; his stuff overlaps mine somewhat. Otherwise there aren't a lot of other people who work this ground. Since 2000 there have been a handful of academic studies of open-source development, but they have tended to focus on economics and outcomes rather than cultural dynamics.

This site will collect the folklore, the humor, and the history that defines the hacker culture.