Enlighting, Stimulating and Entertaining | The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by...

Is it time for Linux ? | The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary | Eric S. Raymond

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	• The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary Eric S. Raymond O'Reilly Media, Inc., 2001 - 241 pages average customer review:based on 50 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great Book !

Raymond does a very good job of explaining the pros of the open source model. His work is a little weak in explaining the other side. In the essay "The Magic Cauldron" He asks what are the payoffs ? He does only a moderate job of portraying the strengths of the closed source approach.

Having read "The hiistory of the Internet" several times I thought that the chapter "A breif History of Hackerdo" would be a yawn fest but it was very interesting. I would still disagree with many of the conclusions Raymond draws, especially about the economics and business case of open source but I found his analyisis of the motivations of hackers very interesting. In all I liked the work very much.

The work is very well written and well thought out. It gives the strengths of the open source approach very well. It also gives a lot of insights into "Hackerdom" and "Hackers"

If you are interested in a book on Open SOurce This is a very good read.

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Enlighting, Stimulating and Entertaining

This book exposes a meta-level experience that one didn't even know one was having in this game of software development.

It takes a couple of re-reads before you really get it, but it's truly eye-opening stuff.

Highly recommended

Is it time for Linux ?

This books starts off with a very good history of the development of the Linux operating software. This open source development process started the author thinking about the two software development methods, the Cathedral method, where a large corporate structure hires programmers to develop software, keeps the source code secret, and charges large amounts to recoup it costs, not from the original product development, but from the expected legacy problems, technical support, bug fixing, software updates, etc. On the other hand the bazaar method, encourages open source software. Open source software encourages a programmer or group within the hacker community to gain ascendancy, to possess and maintain and steer the software to keep it relevant. The Author's point is that with most business models in the future the Cathedral method (read Microsoft) will not be able to compete with the Bazaar method (read Linux). In the Cathedral method the programmers must be hired, the bazaar method the hackers are attracted to a problem, become more dedicated, revisions and bugs are handled at internet speed. The author tells of many real-life business experiences companies have had adopting the open source method. The middle of the book explains the hacker ethic and how the hacker community operates. The reader learns the true meaning of "hacker" v.s. "cracker" and the true meaning of free software. The author predicts that open source software will make deep in-roads into the Fortune-500 companies. That their investments in hardware and records may be dependent on one software company's decision to continue supporting that software revision is the problem. Open source software would provide a proliferation of hacker communities willing to constantly update older software. The author appears to know his stuff and progressively throughout the book the author lets it leak out that he is one of the hacker community and is a player/spokesman in this software battle I found this book a real eye-opener, can Microsoft's workforce continue to support software like Windows 2000 with 60 million lines of code, as opposed to Linux taking advantage of a worldwide army of hackers reporting bugs, writing patches, and keeping hardware drivers updated. Time will tell.
This book was enough to prompt this reader to obtain a copy of Linux just in case..

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A classic.

Eric Scott Raymond is described as "An Accidental Revolutionary," as he took a leading role in analyzing and documenting the changes and growth of the Open Source (or "Free Software") movement that he, as a programmer, is part of. He's one of the "famous" people in hacker culture.

This collection of essays by ESR gives the reader a glimpse into the world of Hackers (good programmers, not to be confused with people who break into computers, those are "crackers"). He goes into how and why it works, what the pros and cons of open source vs. closed source software is, and predicts where things will go in the future.

Because this book is separated into individual essays that he has written, it's easy just to go through and read what you want. But to any person who is playing a part, or who wants to play a part in the hacker world, the whole thing is a must read. It gives you a lot to think about when it comes to the open source world, and builds up a great respect and understanding of the people pioneering it.

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Good book, very excellent points

It's a very good book, it's a book that I'd recommend to all the (major) hackers that I know. I'm sure that this is quite obvious, in that this book is mainly good reading for hackers or hackers-to-be, but I would just like to restate that you would most benefit from this book if you also already have an open source project, or is thinking of open sourcing a project that you have running.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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