GNU and Social Networking

I just finished reading Free as in Freedom, one of my first biographies. It offers a very good outlook on Richard Stallman, without whose efforts many of us won't be where we are today. What interested me most is the way Sam Williams brings the notion of community building aspects of free software even over the software engineering ideas. It got them the best code and best set of minds working on them. Brewing the largest passionate, experienced and brilliant community software ever saw, this collaboration played a tremendously important role in the upliftment of GNU. Even today, the people who understand software best are those who have spent a considerable amount of time playing with GPL'd source code. Social networking has been a part of human culture for ages. One that I can probably think of right now are the melas in India, where people from surrounding villages would gather around creating some sort of market offering ground to socialize and to create revenues for businessmen. Social networking is really important and has been dominating over lives long before Facebook or MySpace.