The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.' 'Quality was maintained not by rigid standards or autocracy but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days, creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. With each weekly release it would steadily become better and would continue to engaged its users (who were, more often than not, the sort of people who could directly contribute to improving the code). It was a totally new model of software development. It was free, open source and new updates were released every week. None of them were that connected up and they suffered from bad marketing. From Proprietary Unix to Open Source Linuxįor a short while in the mid-80s into the mid-90s, Unix went through a doldrums of different factions that competed with one another. This coincided with the move away from timesharing to personal workstations.

There were many who believed that the personal computer was the future of computing and that timeshare would be a thing of the past before long. This allowed email to become a reality, leading to the rise of the first bulletin boards.Īround the same time in the mid 70s, Apple was developing and selling personal computers. The intention was not to obscure but to liberate the user to get on with the valuable work of actually writing good software for the system that it could then run.įrom Multics came Unix, a standardised type of operating system that gave developers a common language and understanding, with frames of reference that everyone could use. Later, 'Multics' was written to hide a great deal of the guts of the system away from the user. They were as much a part of the experience as anything else, and a deep knowledge of how they worked was required. At first, they were open and available to view to the user. There were initially many various competing types of 'operating system'. You sit at a screen, and you get N hours of computer time to use. This is at a time when computers were essentially just rooms filled with equipment operated on a time-share basis. They wore white socks and polyester shirts and ties and thick glasses and coded in machine language and assembler and FORTRAN and half a dozen ancient languages now forgotten.' 'The Real Programmers typically came out of engineering or physics backgrounds.

Science fiction mailing lists brought people together as well, which just happened to be a common interest. They created their own slang, their own technical vocabulary amongst themselves, distributing dictionaries amongst each other to create something of a community with a dialect first. ARPAnet in 1969 brought a critical mass of hackers together.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond