Notes for Eric S. Raymond The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

Key concepts: hacker, open-source software.

Related theorists: .

FOREWORD
Bob Young

Less freedom and slower innovation the outcome of legally restricted access to knowledge entailed by non free software licenses.

(x) 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.

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE

Tremendous implications of understanding how to build better, more reliable software bases arguments favoring free, open source software.

(1) The most obvious answer to this question [why you should care] is that computer software is an increasingly critical factor in the world economy and in the strategic calculations of businesses. . . . 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.

Descriptive definition of open-source software.

(1) open-source software, the process of systematically harnessing open development and decentralized peer review to lower costs and improve software quality.

Conception of hacker as enthusiast tinkerer who pursue open source ideas.

(2) The idea of open source has been pursued, realized, and cherished over those thirty years by a vigorous tribe who proudly call themselves “hackers”--not as the term is now abused by journalists to mean a computer criminal, but in its true and original sense of an enthusiast, an artist, a tinkerer, a problem solver, an expert.

Raymond, Eric S. The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. Sepastopol, CA: O'Reilly, 1999. Print.