Simply a Great Book | The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental...

brilliant but kind of sloppy | 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

gives a "blow by blow" about how "open source decentralized software development" CAN work, with a caveat

The title says it all,
however, the caveat is that if the "instigator" of the particular form of software does not have the "cache" or "credentials" in the open source community then the chances of a REALLY BIG item being developed is rather small. BUT, if the "item" can catch on, then it can be done better and faster than a "paid for development".

Simply a Great Book

I could not put this book down. In a nutshell: it's is about software and development models. Don't yawn just yet - this book definitely held onto my attention throughout. Eric Raymond has a great way of introducing the subject matter as he shares his first-hand experiences as a free software developer.
If you ever tried or thought about writing software, especially free (as in speech) software, you've probably heard of this book. A must-read.

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brilliant but kind of sloppy

To the author's credit, the book overall is provocative, very interesting, and somewhat compelling. Raymond makes arguments throughout about the benefits of open source over closed for the software industry. What's impressive about these arguments is how many of them are made independent of any open source ideology; instead he draws from political theory, economics, and game theory to illustrate how open source is actually in many cases the rational choice for a self-interested entity, and consequently inevitable (in his opinion). Raymond also paints a colorful picture of hacker culture that conveys the group's fascinating dynamic, while enough of his own character and achievements are revealed to suggest why he's so qualified to be speaking: his title essay is widely credited as a primary inspiration for the transformation of Netscape Navigator into Mozilla Firefox; he helped charter the Mozilla Public License; in "Revenge of the Hackers", he admits (without much modesty) that "by late 1993, many people (including myself) had come to think of me as the hacker culture's tribal historian and resident ethnographer"; etc.

But the book has weaknesses as well. Raymond frequently comes off as abrasively egotistical, and it's disconcerting how many typos you can find. Moreover, his system of endnotes is misnumbered in some places and completely confounding in others; I still don't understand it fully, though I've made corrections to some of the numbering mistakes and will be happy to pass them on. In addition, all of the examples he cites are dated by at least eight years, even in this revised text (though that's not to say they aren't still instructive). He keeps the most updated version of the text on his website at [...], where many of these criticisms may be addressed; I haven't checked.

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Good book but definitely not a classic

I felt the book had some good points and then other times I was struggling to get myself to pick it back up. Overall worth the read but not in my top 5 list by any means.

A Collection of Essays on Open Source

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a collection of essays originally meant for programmers and technical managers, written by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail.

I you like a deeper work on Linux development, I can recommend the book "Rebel Code" by Glyn Moody.

fetchmail, is an open-source software utility to retrieve e-mail from a remote mail server. It was developed by Eric S. Raymond from the popclient program, written by Carl Harris. Its chief significance is perhaps that its author, Eric S. Raymond, used it as a model to discuss his theories of open source software development in this book. Some programmers, including Dan Bernstein, getmail creator Charles Cazabon and FreeBSD developer Terry Lambert, have criticized fetchmail's design], its number of security holes, and that it was prematurely put into "maintenance mode". In 2004, a new team of maintainers took over fetchmail development, and laid out development plans that in some cases broke with design decisions that Eric Raymond had made in earlier versions.

The essays in the book describe open-source software, the process of systematically harnessing open develplment and decentralized peer review to lower costs and improve software quality. contrasts two different free software development models:

- The Cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of software developers. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples.

- The Bazaar model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, as the inventor of this process. Raymond also provides anecdotal accounts of his own implementation of this model for the fetchmail project.

The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (which he terms Linus' law): the more widely available the source code is for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, the more rapidly all forms of bugs will be discovered. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers.

When O'Reilly Media published the book in 1999, it achieved another distinction by being the first complete and commercially distributed book published under the Open Publication License.

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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. With major vendors creating acceptance for open source within companies, independent vendors will become the open source story in 2001.

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