The Cathedral and the Bazaar analyzes, in a series of essays, the Open Source movement that took place mainly in the 1990s.

Raymond (the author of fetchmail) does this by first providing a theory about the behaviour of hackers that he classifies as a gift culture (members are valued not by how much they can buy but for how much they give away to the community).

He also does a very comprehensive job of analyzing the open source movement and the software industry and even provides some guidelines for deciding whether a piece of software should be developed as closed or open source software:

"In summary, the following discriminators push towards open source:

(a) reliability/stability/scalability are critical

(b) correctness of design and implementation cannot readily be verified by means other than independent peer review

(c) the software is critical to the user's control of his/her business

(d) the software establishes or enables a common computing and communications infrastructure

(e) key methods (or functional equivalents of them) are part of common engineering knowledge." 

(I took the above quote directly from Raymond's website. I don't know if all the essays that make up the book are online, but you can find a lot of his writings there.)