The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

by Eric S. Raymond

The success of any industry is almost directly related to the degree of freedom the suppliers and the customers of that industry enjoy.

Computer languages are called languages because they are just that. They enable the educated members of our society (in this case, programmers) to build and communicate ideas that benefit the other members of our society, including other programmers.

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet. 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. To the amazement of almost everyone, this worked quite well.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.

you often don’t really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once.

If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

Linux was the first project for which a conscious and successful effort to use the entire world as its talent pool was made.