Closed society, open source: China's unexpected enthusiasm for Linux. (Technology and Culture).

IN SOME WAYS IT'S HARD TO THINK of anything more American than Linux. A Finnish computer programmer named Linus Torvalds created the operating system, but Thomas Jefferson would have loved it. When Torvalds finished, he simply posted the code online and asked other people to download it (for free), use it and improve it. Torvalds even registered the code under something called "copyleft," which legally precludes anyone from owning or controlling it. His idea, long nurtured by pockets of programmers around the world, was to promote software design based on wild, democratic ...