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A review by arquero
The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond
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"!