The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Open source provides the competitive advantage in the Internet Age. According to the August Forrester Report, 56 percent of IT managers interviewed at Global 2,500 companies are already using some type of open source software in their infrastructure and another 6 percent will install it in the next two years. This revolutionary model for collaborative software development is being embraced and studied by many of the biggest players in the high-tech industry, from Sun Microsystems to IBM to Intel.The Cathedral & the Bazaar is a must for anyone who cares about the future of the computer industry or the dynamics of the information economy. Already, billions of dollars have been made and lost based on the ideas in this book. Its conclusions will be studied, debated, and implemented for years to come. According to Bob Young, "This is Eric Raymond's great contribution to the success of the open source revolution, to the adoption of Linux-based operating systems, and to the success of open source users and the companies that supply them."The interest in open source software development has grown enormously in the past year. This revised and expanded paperback edition includes new material on open source developments in 1999 and 2000. Raymond's clear and effective writing style accurately describing the benefits of open source software has been key to its success.
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308mentions
270people
2007–2026years
24% recommend71% neutral5% critical
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What Hacker News says
- >It would require coordination with hardware and software vendors, and some sort of coherent leadership
Time for a Cathedral and the Bazaar refresher?
https://web.archive.org/web/20250307173133/https://www.catb....
- I recommend folks give “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” a read. Another good book is “Negotiating Rationally” (see below).
If the core developers/maintainers are putting in thousands of hours over several years, and a patch comes along, it is rightfully at the discretion of those doing 80-95% of the work.
But as negotiating rationally discusses, we value our work more than others—and there’s some emotional attachment. We need to learn to let that go and try to find the best solution, and be open to the bigger picture.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Negotiating-Rationall...
- Man I read that during my formative years as a computer guy and it helped me big-time make the switch from MacOS to Linux. That and "The Cathedral and the Bazaar."[1] I don't know how well that one stands up to the test of time though. I'm going to re-read your link now.
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
- I can recommend reading "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" if you're interested in learning more about the philosophical and economic underpinnings that existed in the early days of open source, which still largely hold true today.
- Yes. I was a bit sloppy in using 'VSCode' to refer only to the thing distributed at code.visualstudio.com but also treating derivative works of what Microsoft calls 'Code - OSS' in their GitHub repo as defective (more limited) derivatives of 'VSCode'.
> The MIT license represents a different view on the social and technical goals of open source software. It's much simpler than the GPLs and only has one obligation for the user/redistributors: display a copyright notice. It's not as copyleft as the GPLs.
The MIT license is a tool used for a range of purposes, not an expression of values. It doesn't 'represent a view' about how software should be developed or distributed in the same way that documents like, e.g., the FSF's account of the four fundamental software freedoms, the OSI's Open-Source Definition, or the Debian Free Software Guidelines do. It sits at a different layer. Moreover, all of those documents incontestably include MIT-licensed software among the licenses that embody their values-- none of those organizations or movements they participate in exclude permissively licensed software.
That some source code is distributed under the terms of the MIT license only tells us a little bit about the way and extent to which it is or isn't aligned with the values and touted benefits of either the free software movement or the open-source movement. There are individuals (and organizations, if you count the contributor bases of large, relatively organized software projects) who are interested in software freedom and/or open-source development but averse to copyleft, but permissive licenses don't themselves exclusively support only one set of values and goals or constitute a statement of allegiance to other doctrines (and neither do copyleft licenses).
And that's part of what makes statements of values and ideas that go beyond licenses per se, like the ones I cited but also books like Free Software, Free Society and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and the many shorter online documents one can find at FSF.org, EFF.org, sfconservancy.org, or even the OSI's policy advocacy work valuable: they transmit the things that copyright licenses cannot. They are reminders that adopting software and software development practices means making choices about entering into concrete relations of power, dependency, collaboration, and competition. The F/OSS licenses are instruments in service of meaningful choices about those things. And that's exactly the way that my recourse to things like the Open-Source Definition and the FSF's article What is Free Software was not to make a merely verbal dispute, arguing about what words mean, but a move to ground this discussion in the range of first-order values for which F/OSS licenses are instruments. That's something equally relevant and equally worth doing whether the licenses in question are maximally permissive (like the technically-not-a-license of donating a codebase to the public domain), strong copyleft licenses like AGPLv3, or something else like LGPL or MPL.
- For non-management related things: "Mythical Man-Month, The: Essays on Software Engineering" by Frederick Brooks Jr.
"Code Complete" by Steve McConnell
"The Design of Design" by Fred Brooks
"Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of Software Engineering Manager" by Michael Lopp
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary" by Eric S. Raymond
"Assessment and Control of Software Risks" by Capers Jones
"Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" by G.J. Sussman et al.
"The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas
"A Philosophy of Software Design" by Jhon Ousterhout
Amazon developer best practices series : https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09PV4J7TR
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