Emergent culture

From Carls wiki

A piece of hardware or software attracts a certain (loosely defined) group of people, who collaborate (either intentionally or unconsciously) to create an emergent culture or emergent community, i.e. the totality of people's moods, thoughts and interactions. The derived products created with or in relation to the hardware or software, could also be considered to be part of its emergent culture.

Part of being "emergent" means that the outputs of the culture aren't always directly predictable from its inputs.

I do not pretend to be unbiased in the following examples.

Operating system cultures

Windows

The big, mainstream culture. So widespread that people don't even have to know that they're part of it.

The operating system itself is sold by licenses, and a user must own a license to the system before being legally allowed to run it.

Windows is often associated with viruses, worms and malware of different sorts. Users are either unaware of this, aware of it but frustrated, or hardened, paranoid and cynical.

The online Windows market is one of deceit, money and subterfuge. Many ad makers for applications specifically target inexperienced users by making their ads look like Windows dialog boxes in the style of the currently most popular default Windows theme. The applications themselves often have to do with security or performance.

While there are plenty of free and open applications, people are still prepared to hand out money for the operating system itself, the flagship Microsoft Office application, or other area-specific apps. That is, unless they are content with going to the nearest file area and downloading the things illegally but for free. Measures and countermeasures between corporations and consumers have emerged.

DRM measures and Palladium are on the rise, further decreasing the breathing space of customers.

Linux

To a large extent a counterculture to Windows, but also a celebration of FOSS itself, of diversity and freedom, and being able to control one's own computer more freely.

The culture is (at least from the outside) viewed as being largely equivalent to the Free and Open Source Software movement. People using Linux used to be more technically savvy by necessity; there were times when the OS didn't fill any purpose except for tinker-happy types. Nowadays Linux in all its flavors is slowly moving into the mainstream, some distributions more so than others.

Parts of the culture are still a bit impatient with inexperienced users. There may still be an expectation on users to go find answers themselves, though this information can be hard to find and comprehend at first.

(Other examples: BSD, Mac OS, Perl, Python, Ruby)