This is a fascinating and deeply thoughtful account of the Open Source
phenomenon, why it works, and where it is going, by one of the "accidental
leaders" of the movement. Raymond has written a series of essays over
the last decade, examining the culture of open source software, the hacker
culture out of which it grew, how that very culture is the thing that
sustains it, and showing that it could be the way of the future.
It may seem heretical that the way to develop software is to make the
source freely available to anyone and everyone. Raymond eloquently exposes
the myths behind that thinking, and shows how and why Open Source can work
to everyone's benefit, developer and customer alike. (Everyone who doesn't
want utter and total world domination, that is.)
This is described as "a work in progress", and the latest
version of the various essays are available at Raymond's
site. This book version -- much easier to read in the bath or
on the train -- is frozen in 1999, so doesn't have all the latest
wrinkles: Y2K hasn't happened yet, for example. Never mind that. There's
lots of stuff in here to severely shift your paradigms, if you thought the
only way to make money from the software business was to sell bits. Read
this, and discover there is another way, a way that's better for
programmers and for customers alike.
Contents
- • A Brief History of Hackerdom. 1998
- From the early days of the 1960s, up to the the appearance of Linux in the early 1990s
- • The Cathedral and the Bazaar. 1999
- The difference between the closed source "factory" model,
and open source "service" model of software production,
and why the latter gives better quality software faster,
how it side-steps Brookes' Law,
and what kinds of software are best produced this way.
- • Homesteading the Noosphere. 1999
- An anthropological look at hackers, an explanation of their behaviour in terms of standard Property Laws, and the discovery of "The Hacker Milieu as Gift Culture"
- • The Magic Cauldron. 1999
- How to make money from open source software
- • The Revenge of the Hackers. 1998
- The success of the Open Source movement in the 1990s, and where it might go from here
