Table Of Content,title.21657 Page i Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Musings on Linux and Open Source by an
Accidental Revolutionary
,title.21657 Page ii Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
,title.21657 Page iii Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
Musings on Linux and Open Source by an
Accidental Revolutionary
Eric S. Raymond
with a foreword by Bob Young
BEIJING•CAMBRIDGE•FARNHAM•KÖLN•PARIS•SEBASTOPOL•TAIPEI•TOKYO
,copyright.21302 Page iv Friday, December 22, 2000 5:38 PM
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux
and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary,
Revised Edition
by Eric S. Raymond
Copyright © 1999, 2001 by Eric S. Raymond.
Printed in the United States of America.
Published by O’Reilly & Associates, Inc.,
101 Morris Street, Sebastopol, CA 95472.
Editor: Tim O’Reilly
Production Editor: Sarah Jane Shangraw
Cover Art Director/Designer: Edie Freedman
Interior Designers: Edie Freedman, David Futato, and Melanie Wang
Printing History:
October 1999: First Edition
January 2001: Revised Edition
This material may be distributed only subject to the terms and conditions
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is presently available athttp://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.)
Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is
prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.
Distributionoftheworkorderivativesoftheworkinanystandard(paper)
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theirproductsareclaimedastrademarks.Wherethosedesignationsappear
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Whileeveryprecautionhasbeentakeninthepreparationofthisbook,the
publisherassumesnoresponsibilityforerrorsoromissions,orfordamages
resulting from the use of the information contained herein.
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0-596-00108-8 (paperback)
0-596-00131-2 (hardcover)
[C]
,dedication.21536 Page v Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
To the Memory of Robert Anson Heinlein
For the many lessons he taught me:
to respect competence, to value and defend freedom,
and especially, that specialization is for insects.
✦ ✦ ✦
,dedication.21536 Page vi Friday, December 22, 2000 5:39 PM
Table of Contents
Foreword ix
Preface: Why You Should Care xi
A Brief History of Hackerdom 1
The Cathedral and the Bazaar 19
Homesteading the Noosphere 65
The Magic Cauldron 113
Revenge of the Hackers 167
Afterword: Beyond Software? 193
Appendix A: How to Become a Hacker 195
Appendix B: Statistical Trends in the 215
Fetchmail Project’s Growth
Notes, Bibliography, 219
and Acknowledgments
vii
22 December 2000 17:45
Foreword
✦ ✦ ✦
Freedom is not an abstract concept in business.
The success of any industry is almost directly related to the degree
of freedom the suppliers and the customers of that industry enjoy.
Just compare the innovation in the U.S. telephone business since
AT&T lost its monopoly control over American consumers with
the previously slow pace of innovation when those customers had
no freedom to choose.
The world’s best example of the benefits of freedom in business is
a comparison of the computer hardware business and the com-
puter software business. In computer hardware, where freedom
reigns for both suppliers and consumers alike on a global scale,
the industry generates the fastest innovation in product and cus-
tomer value the world has ever seen. In the computer software
industry, on the other hand, change is measured in decades. The
office suite, the 1980s killer application, wasn’t challenged until
the 1990s with the introduction of the web browser and server.
Open-source software brings to the computer software industry
even greater freedom than the hardware manufacturers and con-
sumers have enjoyed.
Computer languages are called languages because they are just
that. They enable the educated members of our society (in this
ix
22 December 2000 17:45
TheCathedral and the Bazaar
case, programmers) to build and communicate ideas that benefit
the other members of our society, including other programmers.
Legally restricting access to knowledge of the infrastructure that
our society increasingly relies on (via the proprietary binary-only
software licenses our industry historically has used) results in less
freedom and slower innovation.
Open source represents some revolutionary concepts being thrown
at an industry that thought it had all of its fundamental structures
worked out. It gives customers control over the technologies they
use, instead of enabling the vendors to control their customers
through restricting access to the code behind the technologies.
Supplying open-source tools to the market will require new busi-
ness models. But by delivering unique benefits to the market, those
companies that develop the business models will be very successful
competing with companies that attempt to retain control over
their customers.
There have always been two things that would be required if
open-source software was to materially change the world: one was
for open-source software to become widely used and the other
was that the benefits this software development model supplied to
its users had to be communicated and understood.
This is Eric Raymond’s great contribution to the success of the
open-source software revolution, to the adoption of Linux-based
operating systems, and to the success of open-source users and the
companies that supply them. Eric’s ability to explain clearly, effec-
tively, and accurately the benefits of this revolutionary software
development model has been central to the success of this revolu-
tion.
—Bob Young, Chairman and CEO, Red Hat, Inc.
x
22 December 2000 17:45
Preface: Why You Should Care
✦ ✦ ✦
The book in your hands is about the behavior and culture of com-
puter hackers. It collects a series of essays originally meant for
programmers and technical managers. The obvious (and entirely
fair) question for you, the potential reader, to ask is: ‘‘Why should
Icare?’’
The most obvious answer to this question is that computer soft-
ware is an increasingly critical factor in the world economy and in
the strategic calculations of businesses. That you have opened this
book at all means you are almost certainly familiar with many of
today’s truisms about the information economy, the digital age,
and the wired world; I will not rehearse them here. I will simply
point out that any significant advance in our understanding of
how to build better-quality, more reliable software has tremen-
dous implications that are growing more tremendous by the day.
The essays in this book did not invent such a fundamental
advance, but they do describe one: open-source software, the pro-
cess of systematically harnessing open development and decentral-
ized peer review to lower costs and improve software quality.
Open-source software is not a new idea (its traditions go back to
the beginnings of the Internet thirty years ago), but only recently
have technical and market forces converged to draw it out of a
niche role. Today the open-source movement is bidding strongly to
xi
22 December 2000 17:45
Description:"This is how we did it." --Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel It all started with a series of odd statistics. The leading challenger to Microsoft's stranglehold on the computer industry is an operating system called Linux, the product of thousands of volunteer programmers who collaborate ov
