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Book: The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
By Madanmohan Rao <madan@4Cplus.com>
The explosive growth of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server and indeed the Internet itself are testimony to the power of a style of networked collaboration called “Open Source,” based on the free sharing of source code so that others can improve on it. This free-flowing style of technology sharing has created unprecedented shifts in the power structures of the computer industry. The growth, development trajectories, cultural underpinnings, intellectual foundations, business potential and challenges facing the Open Source movement are superbly articulated in Eric Raymond’s landmark manifesto, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” This book is about much more than computer science; it is a must read for anyone interested in the future of not just the software industry but of intellectual property, work culture, human motivation, Internet-driven global peering, and new business models in the Information Age. Eric Raymond, author of email transport program Fetchmail, is widely regarded as an anthropologist, ethnographer, and historian of the Internet hacker culture. The Open Source revolution also owes some of its success to Raymond’s clear articulation of the power of the model, according to Bob Young, CEO of Linux distributor Red Hat. The author traces the evolution of hacker culture (not to be confused with media mis-portrayals as anti-social deviants) through three generations: the first U.S.-wide critical mass of PDP-based hackers networked via ARPANET (especially at MIT, CMU, and Stanford), the Unix/C programmers (networked via Usenet), and the PC-generation of hobbyists. Richard Stallman’s Free Software Foundation created and distributed free software like Emacs and GNU. The term Open Source (www.opensource.org) was formally invented in 1998, and attempted to overcome some of the anti-commercial connotations of the term “free software.” Unix’s promise of cross-platform portability got lost in bickering among half a dozen proprietary Unix versions. “The proprietary-Unix players proved so ponderous, so blind, and so inept at marketing that Microsoft was able to grab away a large part of their market with the shockingly inferior technology of its Windows operating system,” according to Raymond. In the case of Linus Torvalds’ operating system Linux, however, quality was maintained not by traditional autocracy or rigid standards or relatively isolated development (“cathedrals”), but by the naively simple strategy of releasing every week and getting feedback from hundreds of users within days (the “bazaar”), creating a sort of rapid Darwinian selection on the mutations introduced by developers. “Linus Torvalds’ style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise,” Raymond recalls. Through his own experiments with creating the Fetchmail utility, Raymond enumerates key principles of the “bazaar” style of open source software development: begin with a developer’s personal itch, re-use existing code where possible as a scaffolding, treat your users as co-developers, listen to customers, create a large enough base of beta-testers and developers, recognize good ideas from your users (which can be as important as having good ideas yourself!), and leverage the Internet to create communities of interest. The early growth of Linux synergized with another phenomenon: the public discovery of the Internet, which helped created global communities of developers and users of reliable, bug-free open source platforms. In fact, Raymond characterizes what he dubs Linus’ Law as: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” “An entirely sufficient case for open source development rests on its engineering and economic outcomes – better quality, higher reliability, lower costs and increased choice,” according to Raymond. The infamous “Halloween Memo” (internal Microsoft strategy document) itself pointed out that the intrinsic parallelism and free idea exchange in Open Source software has benefits that are not replicable with Microsoft’s licensing model and therefore present a long-term developer mind share threat. “Open Source peer review is the only scalable method for achieving high reliability and quality,” he says. Open Source is also “future proof,” and frees clients from the mercy of unscrupulous or inefficient proprietary software product developers – especially if the outside vendor goes belly-up. For better peer review and greater control over code and deployment, Open Source is unbeatable. “Closed source code is an unacceptable strategic business risk. When your key business processes are executed by opaque blocks of bits that you can’t even see inside (let alone modify), you have lost control of your business,” Raymond warns. One chapter is devoted to differences between resources in the material world on the one hand, and the software/infoware world on the other. “Widespread use of open source software tends to increase its value, as users fold in their own fixes and features. In this inverse commons, the grass grows taller when it’s grazed on,” Raymond contrasts. The hacker culture has some elements of a ‘gift culture,’ where participants compete for prestige by giving away time, energy and creativity. “In a gift culture, social status is determined not by what you control but what you give away,” observes Raymond. Raymond digs deeper into hacker culture to reveal variations in ideology and beliefs: anti-commercial, un-commercial, market-friendly, and pragmatic. “Not until the Linux explosion of 1993-94 did pragmatism find a real power base. The typical pragmatist attitude is only moderately anti-commercial, and its major grievance against the corporate world is not ‘hoarding’ per se but that world’s perverse refusal to adopt superior approaches incorporating open standards and open software,” according to Raymond. Linus Torvalds, for example, looked benignly on the growth of a commercial Linux industry, publicly endorsed the use of high-quality commercial software for specific tasks, and gently derided the more purist and fanatical elements in the hacker culture. Outside of Linux, other Open Source communities developed around languages like Perl, Tcl and Python. Typical styles of Open Source project management are ‘benevolent dictator’ (Linux), voting among co-developers (Apache), and ‘rotating dictatorship’ (Perl). One chapter is devoted to for-profit and non-profit business models of Open Source development. It is important for companies to identify which business models create niches where open source development can flourish. For instance, the Apache Web server was built by an Internet-connected group of Webmasters who realized that it was smarter to pool their efforts into improving one code base than to run a large number of parallel development efforts. Cisco open-sourced its print spoolers to effectively hedge against the loss of the software’s original developers. Netscape open sourced its browser code to prevent extinction at the hands of Microsoft; Apple has also open-sourced Darwin, the kernel which is the core of the Mac OS X operating system. Cygnus Solutions and Red Hat sell branded versions of bundled open source software with support contracts; the Linuxcare startup was funded to specialize in Linux technical support. Book publishers O’Reilly and Associates make money by “accessorizing” open source via sales of books about popular open source tools and languages. SourceXchange.com and CoSource.com apply a reverse-auction model to funding open source development. Independent software vendors like Computer Associates have announced that they will support Linux over much of their product lines. “Individual software technologies seem to go through natural lifecycle from rationally closed to rationally open,” Raymond observes. Open Source may not work very well, however, in standalone vertical market applications where network effects are weak (eg. lumbermill management software). Some companies may fear that giving away source code may reveal core competitive secrets – but in many infotech areas, product time cycles are so short that imitators will actually lose out to faster and better innovators. “Acceleration to Internet time makes this effect bite harder. If you’re really ahead of the game, plagiarism is a trap you want your competitors to fall into,” Raymond jokes. To ensure its thriving successes, the open source movement will have to understand its own functioning much better, nurture more catalytic insights and innovators, explore mixed business models, articulate and market itself more proactively, evangelize at CEO/CIO/CTO levels, leverage the performance of Linux, court the Fortune 500 clientele, improve its profile in the trade and investment press, engage in innovative guerilla marketing (as in the “No Microsoft Tax” campaign in the San Francisco Bay Area), and use open source licensing and certification aggressively. Looking down the road, Raymond predicts that open source development effort will increasingly shift towards the last virgin territory: programs for non-techies, with better interface design (not traditionally addressed by hackers). It will also dominate the ISP and business data center markets. “May the Source be with you,” seems to be a fitting conclusion to this excellent manifesto.
Eric Steven Raymond's Home Page
Other articles by Madanmohan Rao
Current Rating: [ 8.5 / 10 ]
Number of Times Rated: [ 4 ]
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