The Cathedral and the Bazaar
by Eric S. Raymond · first published 1999
27% recommend68% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
Accessible introduction to how open source development works, contrasting centralized and decentralized models and the politics of community projects; suits developers and founders wanting the open source mindset.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Open source provides the competitive advantage in the Internet Age. According to the August Forrester Report, 56 percent of IT managers interviewed at Global 2,500 companies are already using some type of open source software in their infrastructure and another 6 percent will install it in the next two years. This revolutionary model for collaborative software development is being embraced and studied by many of the biggest players in the high-tech industry, from Sun Microsystems to IBM to Intel.The Cathedral & the Bazaar is a must for anyone who cares about the future of the computer industry
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…Tracy Kidder. The best tale of hardware design I know. “Masters of Doom” by David Kushner. The best book on the early days of gaming, esp. about Carmack and Romero. Anything by Eric Raymond, esp. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
on “Ask HN: Examples of good technical writing?” ↗…your own biases before reading an attitude into someone else's message. > This is completely wrong. Nope, you are. Both in the technical/legal sense and the historical sense. Recommended reading: The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
on “Open Source is Not About You” ↗…Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs, by Abelson and Sussman On Lisp, by Graham A First Course in Database Systems, by Ullman and Widom The C Programming Language, by Kernighan and Ritchie The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Raymond
on “News.YC Library” ↗Hmmm, here's a list of books I really like: Memory as a Programming Concept in C and C++ by Frenck The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by McKusick/Neville-Neil Learning GNU Emacs by Cameron, et al. Practical Common Lisp by Seibel The C Programming Language by K&R The C++ Programming Language Stroustrup The Design and Analysis of Algorithms by Leviten Assembly Lang
on “Ask YC: What would you put on a hacker's bookshelf?” ↗Agree completely that slides without the presentation aren't worth much. The Cathedral and the Bazaar was originally an essay by Eric Raymond, not a book. Whatever other faults he may have, he got a lot of things right in that article, and in an eloquent, very comprehensible way. It was a great read…
…and is famous for quality; the crappy alternative, MySQL, which is in practice a product showing the sort of qualities you describe, was a one-company project for most of its history.) Go reread The Cathedral and the Bazaar http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ and note that it's been proven pretty much entirely correct in practice. (By the way, "agile" at its best is literally an attempt to port successful…
on “PostgreSQL: the good, the bad, and the ugly” ↗The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond. It's inspiring for embrace Open Source collaboration and also very useful for manage projects. In Guy Kawasaki's quote "The most important book about technology today, with implications…
on “Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?” ↗- The Pragmatic Programmer - The Practice of Programming - The Mythical Man Month - The Cathedral and the Bazaar - The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Introduction to Algorithms - Hackers and Painters Some of these do contain mixed language code examples, but they are expressed in a way to be agnostic. A problem…
on “Ask HN: What language-agnostic programming books should I read?” ↗Eric Raymond has some questionable beliefs in my opinion, and this is likely what OP is referring to. I'm a big fan of The Cathedral and the Bazaar. But currently Eric Raymond has come out as a climate change denier, a racist, and also has pushed some odd conspiracy theories.
on “Contributor Agreements Considered Harmful” ↗I'd say that being a hacker is more about an attitude, or state of mind, than it is about having read certain books, or knowing certain languages, etc. Now, if by "hacker" you just mean "developer" or "software engineer," then one could be a little bit more detailed, but there's still a lot of different areas to explore. That said, if you want suggestions for books, articles, links, etc: I'd su
on “Steps to become a good hacker?” ↗Learning Perl. C Programming Language. UNIX Programming Environment. Programming in Haskell. Code Complete. Practice of Programming. Cathedral and the Bazaar. Open Sources. Hackers and Painters. Joel on Software. Coders at Work. Just for Fun. SICP seems to be really well written so far, but it's not the kind of book you're going to read in one sitting.
on “Which programming book you just couldn’t stop reading from start to end?” ↗…bootloader). The OSI's official Open Source Definition aside (which is mostly a bunch of legalese) open source is a development model where different parties contribute code as needed. (Eric Raymond's the Cathedral and the Bazaar is a decent introduction: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...) Android never followed an open source development style. Each version was constructed in secret, then released…
on “Andy Rubin On Android’s Openness: Light On Community, Heavy On Open Source” ↗…self-organized coordination and collaboration managed indirectly through the object being worked on. cf http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy The most popular discussions of this I've seen are Eric Raymond's Cathedral and the Bazaar (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/homesteading/cathedral-baz...) and Coase's Penguin (http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.html).
on “Bumblebee software - Emacs succeeds despite "poor design"” ↗…They just see open-source software as something... 'fixed'. It's either good, or not. They don't realize that they can easily change it with some determination. On a sidenote, have you read about the "Cathedral and the Bazaar" [1], by Eric S. Raymond? I thought it was quite an eye-opener on the merits of open-source vs the closed-source alternative. [1] http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/rt...
on “Textmate2 Goes Open Source” ↗i highly recommend all of these: - "Cathedral and the Bazaar" - "Buddhism Without Beliefs" - "Mindfulness in Plain English" - "Godel Escher Bach" - "People's History of the United States" - "Debian Administrator's Handbook"
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in 2012” ↗