The Cathedral & The Bazaar

If you are anywhere closely related to the field of computers and the internet, chances are you would already know about the open source movement. Finally a book that recounts how the open source war was won and how it was destined to change the world.

It all started with a bunch of odd statistics. Microsoft stood threatened by a bunch of programmers collaborating over the web under a certain hacker named Linus Torvalds. A majority of websites were being powered by a similar loosely held group calling itself apache. The internet itself was developed in pretty much the same way.

The author went about testing these statistics in a scientific manner. He ran an open source project called fetchmail and analysed his experiences. Central to his argument is that a "bazaar" model of software debugging and improvement is inherently superior to a "cathedral" world of commercial software enterprises.

The book presents several other interesting essays - about a brief history of hackerdom, about hackers - about their attitudes, their culture - a "gift culture" where participants compete for prestige by giving time, energy and creativity away

In writing it, Eric Raymond has helped demolish many myths about hackerdom and why you don't need extensive technical background to begin your journey in this exciting field. Newbies to this field would love the FAQ presented in the essay " How to become a Hacker"

The author is one of the most articulate voices in the open source world. However it is his ability to project these experiences in other realms of human experiences that captures one's imagination. At the risk of making this longer, here is a choice quote from the book

Two and a half years after the first version of this essay, the most radical thought I can offer to close with is no longer a vision of an open-source-dominated software world; that, after all, looks plausible to a lot of sober people in suits these days.

Rather, I want to suggest what may be a wider lesson about software, and probably about every kind of creative or professional work. Human beings generally take pleasure in a task when it falls in a sort of optimal-challenge zone; not so easy as to be boring, not too hard to achieve. A happy programmer is one who is neither underutilized nor weighed down with ill-formulated goals and stressful process friction. Enjoyment tracks efficiency.

Relating to your own work process with fear and loathing (even in the displaced, ironic way suggested by hanging up Dilbert cartoons) should therefore be regarded in itself as a sign that the process has failed. Joy, humor, and playfulness are indeed assets; it was not mainly for the alliteration that I wrote of "happy hordes" above, and it is no mere joke that the Linux mascot is a cuddly, neotenous penguin. It may well turn out that one of the most important effects of open source's success will be to teach us that play is the most economically efficient mode of creative work.

Eric Raymond (The Cathedral and the Bazaar)