My pal Biella Coleman is a geek anthropologist whose recently awarded PhD was given for a thesis on nerd culture, with special emphasis on free and open source projects. Biella's just released a fantastic paper on ethical dilemmas in Debian, called THREE ETHICAL MOMENTS IN DEBIAN, which you can download for free:
The third ethical moment I investigate is crisis. As the number of developers in the
Debian project has grown from one dozen to nearly one thousand, punctuated crises routinely emerge around particularly contested issues: matters of project transparency, internal and
external communication, size, openness, the nature of authority within the project, the role of
non-free packages, and the licensing of Debian. Many of these crises have an acute phase in
which debate erupts on several media all at once: mailing lists, IRC conversation, and blog
entries. While the debate during these periods can be congenial, measured, rational, and
sometimes peppered with jokes, its tone can also be passionate and uncharitable, sometimes
downright vicious.During these moments, we find that while developers may share a common ethical
ground, they often disagree about the implementation of its principles. Though the content of
these debates certainly matters (and will be discussed to some extent), my primary focus is on the
productive affective stance that these crises induce. I argue these are moments of assessment, in
which people turn their attentive, ethical being toward an unfolding situation and engage in very
difficult questions. In this mode, passions are animated and values are challenged and sometimes
reformulated. Crises can be evaluated as moments of ethical production in terms of not only their
functional outcomes but also their ability to move people to reflexively articulate their ideals–an
important condition of possibility for further action. Such dialogical and conflicted debate
reflects the active engagement of participants who renew and sometimes alter their ethical
commitments. Thus, crisis can be vital to establishing and reestablishing the importance of
normative precepts.