The Cathedral and the Bazaar

,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 set forth in the Open Publication License, v1.0 or later. (The latest version is presently available at http://www.opencontent.org/openpub/.) Distribution of substantively modified versions of this document is prohibited without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. Distribution of the work or derivatives of the work in any standard (paper) book form is prohibited unless prior permission is obtained from the copyright holder. The O’Reilly logo is a registered trademark of O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those designations appear in this book, and O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. was aware of a trademark claim, the designations have been printed in caps or initial caps. While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available at: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/cathbazpaper/. 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 computer 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 consumers have enjoyed. Computer languages are called languages because they are just that. They enable the educated members of our society (in this ix 21 December 2000 17:17 The Cathedral 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 business 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 revolution. —Bob Young, Chairman and CEO, Red Hat, Inc. x 21 December 2000 17:17 Preface: Why You Should Care ✦✦✦ The book in your hands is about the behavior and culture of computer 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 I care?’’ The most obvious answer to this question is that computer software 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 tremendous 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 The Cathedral and the Bazaar define the computing infrastructure of the next century. For anyone who relies on computers, that makes it an important thing to understand. I just referred to the ‘‘open-source movement’’. That hints at other and perhaps more ultimately interesting reasons for the reader to care. The idea of open source has been pursued, realized, and cherished over those thirty years by a vigorous tribe of partisans native to the Internet. These are the people who proudly call themselves ‘‘hackers’’—not as the term is now abused by journal- ists to mean a computer criminal, but in its true and original sense of an enthusiast, an artist, a tinkerer, a problem solver, an expert. The tribe of hackers, after decades spent in obscurity struggling against hard technical problems and the far greater weight of mainstream indifference and dismissal, has recently begun to come into its own. They built the Internet; they built Unix; they built the World Wide Web; they’re building Linux and open-source software today; and, following the great Internet explosion of the mid-1990s, the rest of the world is finally figuring out that it should have been paying more attention to them all along. The hacker culture and its successes pose by example some fundamental questions about human motivation, the organization of work, the future of professionalism, and the shape of the firm— and about how all of these things will change and evolve in the information-rich post-scarcity economies of the 21st century and beyond. The hacker culture also, arguably, prefigures some pro- found changes in the way humans will relate to and reshape their economic surroundings. This should make what we know about the hacker culture of interest to anyone else who will have to live and work in the future. This book is a collection of essays that were originally published on the Internet; A Brief History of Hackerdom is originally from 1992, but has since been regularly updated and revised, and the others were written between February 1997 and May 1999. They were somewhat revised and expanded for the first edition in xii 22 December 2000 17:45 Preface October 1999, and updated again for this second edition of Jan- uary 2001, but no really concerted attempt has been made to remove technicalia or make them more accessible (e.g., dumb them down) for a general audience.

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