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arquero's review against another edition
3.0
I started this as another compilation of programming wisdom, with paradigms, techniques, and whatnot. It wasn't any of those. That whatnot happened to be a rabbit hole and it took me on a trip from the early days of the hackerdom to the modern notion of FOSS. Eric is serious about his subject and determined to prove that we should be serious as well.
He sets the stage by introducing a dichotomy of the cathedral and the bazaar. It's not merely waterfall vs agile. The bogey he challenges is Brooks' law, that exponential curve that spooks managers and dooms community-driven programming in the large to disarray. And Eric has his heroes to save the day. Throughout the book, he firmly clings to Linus Torvalds (who had recently released his OS) as a role model for the new age of open source. Yet Linus is not your usual solitary superhero, he is a community leader, a tribal chieftain, his superpower is communication and the routine art of code review. With smart management and clear rules of the game, Brooks' law is countered by Linus' law.
As I said Eric was determined to make the open source the next big thing in IT. So he builds theory and offers sociocultural and economic justification for his cause. Thus starts the second chapter and it is totally worth reading. He discusses the concept of code ownership in the open source, refers to John Locke, and uses the Anglo-Saxon land-ownership customs analogy. He vivisects the ethics and unwritten laws of the community and concludes that it's a gift culture and a reputation game.
Open source is cool, but is it sustainable? The third chapter is dedicated to different business models. I am less sure about the quality of this one. We surely have more open code available nowadays, thanks to GitHub but also big corporations (ironically) that are perhaps not afraid to show us the surface of the iceberg.
Now about the dark side. Linus himself has confessed that the Linux kernel grew too big and chaotic and that many bugs never get fixed. Apparently, Linus defies the Linus' law. Hackers happen to be more selfish than Eric envisioned. They contribute only when they have a use case, and when they do it's often just that, a hack.
P.S. This book is a compilation of articles Eric had penned earlier, and you can feel it. There is too much of him in his book, and he is just as militant as utopian, his anarchical sentiments get in the way just too often. He seeks prestige and acceptance in a virtual community and gives a ton of stupid advice to those who aspire to (e.g. do martial arts, listen to music, read sci-fi, and other peculiar details apparently drawing from his own experience). Perhaps I was late to this party, this book is not that challenging anymore, the open source is firmly established, Linus is a household name. We could probably congratulate Eric, but where is he? "Let the source be with you"!
He sets the stage by introducing a dichotomy of the cathedral and the bazaar. It's not merely waterfall vs agile. The bogey he challenges is Brooks' law, that exponential curve that spooks managers and dooms community-driven programming in the large to disarray. And Eric has his heroes to save the day. Throughout the book, he firmly clings to Linus Torvalds (who had recently released his OS) as a role model for the new age of open source. Yet Linus is not your usual solitary superhero, he is a community leader, a tribal chieftain, his superpower is communication and the routine art of code review. With smart management and clear rules of the game, Brooks' law is countered by Linus' law.
As I said Eric was determined to make the open source the next big thing in IT. So he builds theory and offers sociocultural and economic justification for his cause. Thus starts the second chapter and it is totally worth reading. He discusses the concept of code ownership in the open source, refers to John Locke, and uses the Anglo-Saxon land-ownership customs analogy. He vivisects the ethics and unwritten laws of the community and concludes that it's a gift culture and a reputation game.
Open source is cool, but is it sustainable? The third chapter is dedicated to different business models. I am less sure about the quality of this one. We surely have more open code available nowadays, thanks to GitHub but also big corporations (ironically) that are perhaps not afraid to show us the surface of the iceberg.
Now about the dark side. Linus himself has confessed that the Linux kernel grew too big and chaotic and that many bugs never get fixed. Apparently, Linus defies the Linus' law. Hackers happen to be more selfish than Eric envisioned. They contribute only when they have a use case, and when they do it's often just that, a hack.
P.S. This book is a compilation of articles Eric had penned earlier, and you can feel it. There is too much of him in his book, and he is just as militant as utopian, his anarchical sentiments get in the way just too often. He seeks prestige and acceptance in a virtual community and gives a ton of stupid advice to those who aspire to (e.g. do martial arts, listen to music, read sci-fi, and other peculiar details apparently drawing from his own experience). Perhaps I was late to this party, this book is not that challenging anymore, the open source is firmly established, Linus is a household name. We could probably congratulate Eric, but where is he? "Let the source be with you"!
tomrrandall's review against another edition
5.0
A must-read if you're interested in the culture and economics of open source software. The titular essay is the most famous, but the rest are also excellent.
ben_l_aficionado's review against another edition
4.0
It perfectly explains why open source software is powerful. The personal anecdotes feel a bit random at time.
iamleeg's review against another edition
3.0
Interesting reading, though it definitely needs revisiting in the DVCS world where forking is common and releases are rare; and in a world where the meaning of open source has become diluted. It's hard to tell what of ESR's anthropology is fact, what is wishful thinking and what is simply marketing.
erikars's review against another edition
This is a collection of essays which are all available online but nice to have in book form. The common theme through all the essays is explaining, from an insider's point of view, who hackers are and why open source software seems to work so well. Although ESR can sometimes brush off the commercial world (and even the academic world) a bit quickly, his essays feel right to me overall.
I think he is right about why open source software tends to be of such good quality (frequent small releases, users encouraged to submit bugs and become part of the developer community, peer review). However, I think it is going a bit far to say that the factors which make OSS good also make closed source bad.
One area where the analysis does seem to be right on is his discussion of why people contribute to open source. The short version is that people contribute to open source because they have a need or an interest in the problem, but they continue contributing in open source because they build up a reputation. This reputation is not for themselves, but for their code and other work. No one can be an open source coder for the reputation, but the reputation is the community's way of letting developers know that their work is being used and appreciated. One way to think of it is that reputation lets people know there is value is working for others, not just themselves.
Anyone who participates in code development should read this book.
I think he is right about why open source software tends to be of such good quality (frequent small releases, users encouraged to submit bugs and become part of the developer community, peer review). However, I think it is going a bit far to say that the factors which make OSS good also make closed source bad.
One area where the analysis does seem to be right on is his discussion of why people contribute to open source. The short version is that people contribute to open source because they have a need or an interest in the problem, but they continue contributing in open source because they build up a reputation. This reputation is not for themselves, but for their code and other work. No one can be an open source coder for the reputation, but the reputation is the community's way of letting developers know that their work is being used and appreciated. One way to think of it is that reputation lets people know there is value is working for others, not just themselves.
Anyone who participates in code development should read this book.
brunjact's review against another edition
informative
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
Expected more content of first person history. Although it has some, and much to my delight, most of the book feels like an economics lesson. Open source has grown much since 2001, date of the revised edition, and for that this book feels a bit outdated.
kartik's review against another edition
5.0
A must read to understand how open source works with examples on Linux, author's own open source project - fetchmail, GNU project, Netscape to Mozilla transition and more. Good comparison with Fred Brook's views in Mythical Man-Month and how being based on some assumptions, they do not apply to the bazaar model.
arunaugustine's review against another edition
3.0
Amazing book on why the open source model works, supported by frameworks more than: software is supposed to be free ideology. Gives insight into the hacker culture which is anthropologically mapped to "gift culture" where status is earned by what you contribute to the community rather than what you own which other's don't have. Overall offers an alternative view to life from the vantage point of hackers (just to be clear not crackers: who try to search for security vulnerabilities in systems and exploit them. The author compares them to guys who knows how to hotwire a car vs a an automotive engineer (more like hacker).
ferperales's review against another edition
4.0
¡Buen libro! Esta edición es una recopilación de varios de los ensayos más importantes de Eric S. Raymond sobre Software Libre y Open Source.
islomar's review against another edition
5.0
One of those "basis" books that you need to read at some point.