Two Bits

In Two Bits, Christopher M. Kelty investigates the history and cultural significance of Free Software, revealing the people and practices that have transformed not only software but also music, film, science, and education. Free Software is a set of practices devoted to the collaborative creation of software source code that is made openly and freely available through an unconventional use of copyright law. Kelty explains how these specific practices have reoriented the relations of power around the creation, dissemination, and authorization of all kinds of knowledge. He also makes an important contribution to discussions of public spheres and social imaginaries by demonstrating how Free Software is a “recursive public”—a public organized around the ability to build, modify, and maintain the very infrastructure that gives it life in the first place. Drawing on ethnographic research that took him from an Internet healthcare start-up company in Boston to media labs in Berlin to young entrepreneurs in Bangalore, Kelty describes the technologies and the moral vision that bind together hackers, geeks, lawyers, and other Free Software advocates. In each case, he shows how their practices and way of life include not only the sharing of software source code but also ways of conceptualizing openness, writing copyright licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing. By exploring in detail how these practices came together as the Free Software movement from the 1970s to the 1990s, Kelty also considers how it is possible to understand the new movements emerging from Free Software: projects such as Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that creates copyright licenses, and Connexions, a project to create an online scholarly textbook commons.

In this Ralph Compton western, home is a battlefield.... Buck Fletcher, infamous shootist, was once a boy raised in a cabin near Two-Bit Creek in Montana. Returning home to pay his respects at his parents' graves, Buck finds an unconscious woman in the woods—bleeding from a head wound. She might be the victim of a range war that’s brewing in the territory. Buck soon finds himself drawn into the escalating conflict—courted by one side, threatened by the other. What the feuding ranchers don't realize is that Buck's guns aren't for sale—and if anyone gives him trouble, he'll start shooting lead for free.... More Than Six Million Ralph Compton Books In Print!

"My family and I were in hiding. Suddenly I heard someone panting on the stairs . . . we didn't breathe. Who was coming now?"

Madams of brothels, houses of gambling, rampant government corruption—all these were found in a late 1800s Mormon community. This is the fascinating, well-researched, true history of Two-Bit Street—a street that became known throughout the world for its ladies of the evening and saloons that never closed. The American West’s wildest poured into this small Utah town after it was chosen to be the Junction City for the newly constructed 1869 transcontinental railroad. A history that spans three quarters of a century, this book shows how a pious people can be overpowered by an uncontrollable malignancy of lust. At times inspiring, this book also unveils the struggle between deep corruption and those who wanted this corruption to be destroyed. Infamous Twenty-Fifth Street in Ogden has been named as one of the ten great streets in America because of its past notoriety and its complete contiguous turn-of-the-century commercial architecture which remains as a witness of that colorful past. Lyle J. Barnes is the street’s original historian, and many other authors have quoted his history of Twenty-Fifth Street. With the fine additional research and writing done by Jean Barnes, this second edition makes Lyle’s best-selling history better than ever.

Richard Dunn reconstructs the lives of three generations of slaves on a sugar estate in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia, to understand the starkly different forms slavery took. Deadly work regimens and rampant disease among Jamaican slaves contrast with population expansion in Virginia leading to the selling of slaves and breakup of families.