Hackers not in the Cathedral

The way Linus Torvalds writes about his upbringing is in my opinion very digestible and interesting to read, even if it isn’t anything all too special. He has a certain way of writing such that his voice seems to pour out of the page - it’s dripping with his sardonic way of talking and his sarcastic humor. In terms of his actual upbringing, it bears a surprising number of similarities to mine, albeit with some big differences. Growing up, I was also exposed to computers at a very young age. My aunt is a computer programmer in Uruguay, although she works as an consultant and thus travels internationally quite frequently for work. As a child, she’d come and visit while she was working every year or so, and every few years she’d take a week or two off and have a longer vacation here (one of the perks of living in New York City). My aunt wasn’t a professor of statistics, but she told me a lot about her job and programming in general, and encouraged me to learn more about it. I was...

Open source can still make business sense today, even if it isn’t necessarily the most profitable choice (by %). As ESR has mentioned, by providing software for free, you can increase your market share more than proprietary software, and then sell add-ons / support / premium versions of the software in order to monetize the open source software. I think another element in favor of releasing open source software is the potential for it to be widely used by developers, who then encourage their companies to use it (and their companies will pay for an enterprise license / support). I believe winRAR used a similar model of selling, since it allowed users to use the free version of it indefinitely even though it warned them that they would have to buy a copy of it eventually (albeit not being an open source piece of software). I think that services instead of software as a business model is definitely a viable model, potentially even more viable than the traditional model of simply ...

I personally think that the greatest thing driving someone to participate in open source, above all else, is simply the need or want to create something (or improve/fix something) that they use. When people first start programming, and first start learning about open source software and the idea of free software, generally do not become ideologically fanatical about it and willing to contribute to open source purely because of their beliefs. For most people, their first contributions to open source are a small project that they’re proud of, or some fixes/features to a project that they use. It is only afterwards, as these people begin to use more open source software, and begin to contribute to more software that they begin to see the reasons that many programmers are fanatical about free and open source software. Once people see why so many programmers contribute to open source software simply to further the cause of open source software (and in some cases to further their reputation ...

In my experience, the bazaar is superior to the cathedral in terms of development models, simply because of the greater freedom allowed in it. While the advantage of a cathedral type system of open source software development should be that you have a small group of people that are able to intimately collaborate and decide the future of a project, allowing for more focused programming, the truth is that the bazaar has this too, just not officially. In any bazaar type open source project, you eventually end up having a few “power developers” who take an interest in the software to a far greater extent than anyone else, which leads to them developing more and naturally taking on a guiding role for the software, such that they build a community (which while open to all is of course dominated by “power developers”), in which they are able to plan for future features and the further development of the software similar to the “small group of mages” that are prevalent in cathedral developmen...