The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

250 Pages·2001·0.93 MB·English

by  Eric S. Raymond

,title.21657 Page i Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Musings on Linux and Open Source by an
Accidental Revolutionary
,title.21657 Page ii Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
,title.21657 Page iii Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Musings on Linux and Open Source by an
Accidental Revolutionary
Eric S. Raymond
with a foreword by Bob Young
BEIJING•CAMBRIDGE•FARNHAM•KÖLN•PARIS•SEBASTOPOL•TAIPEI•TOKYO
,copyright.21302 Page iv Friday, December 22, 2000 5:38 PM
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux
and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary,
Revised Edition
by Eric S. Raymond
Copyright © 1999, 2001 by Eric S. Raymond.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
Editor: Tim O’Reilly
Production Editor: Sarah Jane Shangraw
Cover Art Director/Designer: Edie Freedman
Interior Designers: Edie Freedman, David Futato, and Melanie Wang
Printing History:
October 1999: First Edition
January 2001: Revised Edition
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is presently available athttp://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.)
Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is
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0-596-00108-8 (paperback)
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[C]
,dedication.21536 Page v Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
To the Memory of Robert Anson Heinlein
For the many lessons he taught me:
to respect competence, to value and defend freedom,
and especially, that specialization is for insects.
✦ ✦ ✦
,dedication.21536 Page vi Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
Table of Contents
Foreword ix
Preface: Why You Should Care xi
A Brief History of Hackerdom 1
The Cathedral and the Bazaar 19
Homesteading the Noosphere 65
The Magic Cauldron 113
Revenge of the Hackers 167
Afterword: Beyond Software? 193
Appendix A: How to Become a Hacker 195
Appendix B: Statistical Trends in the 215
Fetchmail Project’s Growth
Notes, Bibliography, 219
and Acknowledgments
vii
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Foreword
✦ ✦ ✦
Freedom is not an abstract concept in business.
The success of any industry is almost directly related to the degree
of freedom the suppliers and the customers of that industry enjoy.
Just compare the innovation in the U.S. telephone business since
AT&T lost its monopoly control over American consumers with
the previously slow pace of innovation when those customers had
no freedom to choose.
The world’s best example of the benefits of freedom in business is
a comparison of the computer hardware business and the com-
puter software business. In computer hardware, where freedom
reigns for both suppliers and consumers alike on a global scale,
the industry generates the fastest innovation in product and cus-
tomer value the world has ever seen. In the computer software
industry, on the other hand, change is measured in decades. The
office suite, the 1980s killer application, wasn’t challenged until
the 1990s with the introduction of the web browser and server.
Open-source software brings to the computer software industry
even greater freedom than the hardware manufacturers and con-
sumers have enjoyed.
Computer languages are called languages because they are just
that. They enable the educated members of our society (in this
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TheCathedral and the Bazaar
case, programmers) to build and communicate ideas that benefit
the other members of our society, including other programmers.
Legally restricting access to knowledge of the infrastructure that
our society increasingly relies on (via the proprietary binary-only
software licenses our industry historically has used) results in less
freedom and slower innovation.
Open source represents some revolutionary concepts being thrown
at an industry that thought it had all of its fundamental structures
worked out. It gives customers control over the technologies they
use, instead of enabling the vendors to control their customers
through restricting access to the code behind the technologies.
Supplying open-source tools to the market will require new busi-
ness models. But by delivering unique benefits to the market, those
companies that develop the business models will be very successful
competing with companies that attempt to retain control over
their customers.
There have always been two things that would be required if
open-source software was to materially change the world: one was
for open-source software to become widely used and the other
was that the benefits this software development model supplied to
its users had to be communicated and understood.
This is Eric Raymond’s great contribution to the success of the
open-source software revolution, to the adoption of Linux-based
operating systems, and to the success of open-source users and the
companies that supply them. Eric’s ability to explain clearly, effec-
tively, and accurately the benefits of this revolutionary software
development model has been central to the success of this revolu-
tion.
—Bob Young, Chairman and CEO, Red Hat, Inc.
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