Biella Coleman recently finished her dissertation in Anthropology after studying Free Software communities for most of a decade. It's quite a read and offers a unique insight from a Debian outsider how Open Source communities work and thrive. A very interesting conclusion that has been made is the idea that crises such as the one around the Vancouver prospectus are necessary if painful, but are for the merit of the community. It's a hefty read, difficult and full of antropological jargon, but a very interesting work.