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The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Raymond is intelligent and literate, and makes his arguments about the benefits of open source in ways that are calculated to convince corporations that there's more money to be made with open code than closed in many situations. He's one of the relatively few people who can write first-hand accounts of long-running, successful open source projects, and can write authoritatively about the hacker community in the early days of the internet.
The essays make good reading, if you're into computers and software at all. Sometimes there are people who are good at something who nevertheless can't write about it. Bill Gates is probably a good example - he's good at what he does, but he sure as hell can't convey his knowledge. I've read Andy Grove's book about his management experiences, and I wasn't impressed by it either - again, it seemed like there was someone who knew how to do something but couldn't explain it (and haven't we all had teachers like that?).
Raymond is not only a gifted hacker, but an excellent writer as well. He manages to convey information about the culture one has to manage, which turns out to be very good way to teach someone how to manage it; or at least it was for me, anyway.
These essays are pretty much required reading, I would say, for anyone running a software company today. If you want to set up an open source project, there's no better information available. The early history of hacking is interesting and of course he's got a good handle on how and why Linux has been so successful.
The only difficulty I have in recommending the book, in fact, is that it's available at no cost on ESR's website. Yes, the essays are all material that's previously been available - indeed, I'd read several of them before. Supposedly they've been revised and expanded for the book - I'm not going to scan them line-by-line to check - but certainly the ideas expressed in the essays haven't changed from the web versions. Frugal readers might easily decide that free documents off a website make better reading than a purchased book.
On the other hand, a book is easier to read than a web page in most cases. And you can't give webpages as holiday presents to your pointy-haired boss who wants to keep your company's code totally closed. So perhaps there's a market for it after all...
The book contains the essays "A Brief History of Hackerdom", "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron", "The Revenge of the Hackers", and "How to Become a Hacker".
Pick this book up at fatbrain.
Despite having floppy copies of most of the stuff in here, I'll be getting it anyway. For several reasons.
1. ESR will be in Dublin on Thursday, and I don't feel like having him sign my Palm III.
2. I don't want to use my palm in the bath (so to speak).
3. It looks cool on the bookshelf.
I don't want to start that whole 'books vs virtuality' again, just thought I should mention that I enjoy both.
2. Money for ESR. Remember, this is a _gift_ culture. If he can't feed his family from books, he's going to find some other (possibly not programming) way to do it. Buy the book and kick a few bucks his way.
:)
I'm not sure I agree with 2. We should buy the book on its merits. If it was well written and interesting, then fine. But I think it is a little dangerous to buy something just because ESR wrote it.
What I get out of ESR's writing is that it is possible to live, make money and feed your family as part of the open source community. Guys like Alan Cox find coding jobs. ESR is living as a consultant and writer. If he succeeds, it shows the OSS model is a success. If we all run out and buy it just because ESR wrote it, it only shows that we really like Eric
(This isn't a flame, I just find hero worship kind of scary)
Dana
I heard ESR speak one month ago. He told everyone that the reason to buy the book was so you can give it to your boss as a gift. That works for me.
And my favorite sound bite would be "Oh Edmund! You killed him! How simply horrid!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It would be interesting to see this scenario played out in a court of law:
Judge: The defendant stands accused of soliciting money for sex. How do you plead?
ESR: Your honor, I plead not guilty! My family was starving! My septuplets were crying out from pain of hunger! It was either this or *shudders* accept that position at Microsoft.
Judge: I see your point. Case dismissed. You are free to go.
-A.P. (note for the humor-impaired: this was meant to be taken lightly)
--
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"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
I think it really depends on what your intentions for it are...*I* rather read it on the web, not cause of the money, but cause I spend most of my waking time infront of it, and I can read it while I monitor my servers, chat on IRC, read email, etc.
:)
But I do plan on buying it, as has been mentioned, so I can give it out for Xmas to PHBs and non-initiated...makes for a nice gift, supports the people that give their time to OSS, and makes people know what I support.
Besides...I like ESR
Vox
Pain is the gift of the gods, and I'm the one they chose as their messanger...
For the critical review of the key ideas of the book see:
e _catb.shtml
http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/second_look_on_th
Here is the abstarct of the paper:
Although this review is to a certain extent a reaction to publishing of The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (O'Reilly) this paper is to large extent can be considered as a continuation of my paper Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research. One of the important aspects of the first part of my paper was critique of the description of the Open Source software (OSS) as a revolutionary phenomenon and argumentation that it is better should be considered as another form of a scientific community. In this paper I would like to concentrate on the Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB) itself and try to provide an overview of the weaknesses of the paper (the idea of inapplicability of Brooks' Law, the idea that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow", the view of the source code as the best thing after sliced bread, etc.) as well the more coherent demonstration of the fact that that the bazaar metaphor is internally contradictive and that in some parts Linux can be considered belonging to the Cathedral model, while Microsoft can be considered belonging to the Bazaar model. Complex nature and pitfalls of status competition is discussed. Along with critique of CatB views, more objective picture of the status competition in the OSS environment is provided.
Contents
Introduction
Some vulnerabilities of the key ideas of the Cathedral and the Bazaar
Brooks' Law is no longer applicable in the Internet environment
"Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"
Does Linux belongs to the Cathedral model or to the Bazaar model ?
Does OSS development model automatically provide the best results?
What is really new in the Linux development model ?
Idealized description of the status competition in the Internet-based developer communities
Hierarchical structure and corresponding distribution of political power in the OSS environment
The possibility of unfair status hierarchies (favoritism)
Poisoning of the peer review process
The danger of overload and burnout
The fear of exclusion as a motivational factor
The possibility of wrong status achievement lines
The role of the press
- Nikolai Bezroukov
The good thing about putting the essays into printed form, is that they will reach an audience which wouldn't normally have access to them, or be interested in searching for them. I mean those people who aren't hackers / techies / web heads, or whatever we want to call ourselves.
With the recent publicity and interest in Open Source, people are starting to wonder what it's all about, so if they see a book about the origins of Open Source and the Internet written by one of the original hackers in the creation of the internet, they are quite likely to be interested in buying and reading it.
It will be good to set the record straight that the Web and Internet were created with Open Source software, and were not invented by Microsoft (as Bill Gates keeps trying to assert).
Most non-hackers will be amazed that something as cool as the Internet is based on Open Source software, that cost nothing but the programmers' time and is free to all who want to use it. Okay, we could argue that internet access is not entirely free as there is the ISP subscription and some also have to pay metered connection charges, but that's another debate.
J.
It was ESR's second essay in Open Sources, and you can read it here.
--
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The difference is that /. has NEVER tried to hide its bias, while ZD and other sites keep saying they are objective/unbiased....unbiased journalism is nothing but a myth, and like all myths, it's only belived by those who have no critical thinking abilities
Vox
Pain is the gift of the gods, and I'm the one they chose as their messanger...
I've read enough bad books to know that when I'm finished I don't want to spend another minute with it. If you want to read bad reviews, I'd suggest reading the little blurbs on Amazon.com. I know personally that I don't have time to write the length of reviews that Slashdot wants for a book I didn't like. If you want to, I suggest you go for it.
...when ESR writes the fourth essay? IIRC, it's titled "Weaving the Web of Indra?" (or something like that), but I cannot find on his website a reference to his intent to write it, anymore.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
While using the media, keeping them apart is no problem. But differentiating them in the after, while trying to deteremine meme origin, can prove difficult (for me too, at least)
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