HN user
In 2002 there was an attempt to fork the Spanish Wikipedia. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/wikipedia-spanish-fork. There was a lot of internal pushback to the forking, but they did it. But the technical and economic issues of keeping a fork of Wikipedia up and running was one of the biggest obstacles. Wikipedia requires huge amounts of infrastructure (both technical and human maintained).
Oh here it is. The website was not launched when the presentation happened. Now it is. http://cryptocouple.com/
I recently went to a conference presentation that attributed this CS in joke as indicative of how the field is deeply gendered. This paper isn't by the researchers I saw, but speaks to that. https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3017794
I have found https://donottrack-doc.com [made by the NFB] to be helpful in thinking about data collection. If I have time at the end of this semester I'll be taking my first-year students through the first episode.
Although not short, Nathan Ensmenger's "The Computer Boys Take Over" is a fantastic history of the complicated and diverse roots of software. In the intro he states, like the comment above, that the history of software tend toward linear histories of hardware development. In his book however, he shows how management strategies, training centers, universities, corporations, and the programmers themselves attempt to control the meaning and production of software. The first chapter does a great job of summarizing this trajectory.