Cathedral and the Bazaar essays

Cathedral and the Bazaar essays In his essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond says: Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong...but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem. Probably the best way to begin, is by giving a little background into the man who wrote this quote. While researching this paper, the following quote was found. It seems to describe Eric Raymond well. Eric S. Raymond is a wandering anthropologist and troublemaking philosopher who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and has been wondering whether he should regret it ever since. He has been involved with Internet and part of the hacker culture since the 1970's. Several of his projects are now carried by all of the major Linux distributions. This includes fetchmail, and his contribution to GNU emacs. Also, his essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is considered to be the catalyst that lead to Netscape opening up its browser's source code. In some ways the first half of the opening quote is rather meaningless. It seems unfathomable that anyone could dispute the fact that the more people you have working on a problem, the quicker it will get fixed. If a company such as Microsoft could have 5000 employees working on the same problem at the same time, we would likely never see buggy software come out the door again. At the same time, one has to argue whether open source (OS) model is one that can be profitable. The software industry is a profit driven industry, so it is debatable that sharing on such a high level is beneficial for any industry that is driven by profit. However, large organizations are beginning to embrace the OS movement. There must be some benefit for an organization to open up some or all of their source co...