HELIOLITH

I just finished reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar (Wikipedia | O’Reilly ) by Eric S. Raymond (Wikipedia) . The original essay was released in 1997 and the book which includes 4 other related essays was released in 1999. I found it was a quite enjoyable and interesting read. The complete text of all of these essays (if you don’t mind reading electronically) can be found on Raymond’s own CatB Site. I first saw Raymond in the excellent documentary about Linux and Open Source Revolution OS.
I must preface my thoughts with a disclaimer that although the vast majority of the book resonated with me personally, after reading the Wikipedia entry on Raymond I linked above, I must profess I can’t stomach Raymond’s love of firearms, or his open hawkishness and writings of extreme prejudice. Apparently, although his book is considered quite a manifesto for the Open Source movement, he is quite a controversial character. I’m not shy of controversy, but I have next to zero tolerance for justifications for genocide dubbed as imperialism by necessity, and “racial psychometry.” It’s disappointing when you agree with someone so wholly on one issue to see them upside-down and backwards on something that matters even more- social justice. I’m glad I read the page on him at Wikipedia, because it’s easy for me to blindly revere those whose ideas I enjoy. I’d still love to meet the guy, though after praising him for his work, I’d certainly want to argue about imperialism and psychometry until we could come to an understanding of each other.

Having spent a good chunk of my own day writing code in Java for a class in Data Structures that I’m taking (using a stack to validate xml), the technical facets of his work were fascinating and timely for me. Even for a non-technically oriented reader, I think Raymond makes some great points. Perhaps the core meme of the main essay is that, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” which he attributes inspiration for to Linus Torvalds. He contrasts the small team hierarchical “cathedral” method of software development with a decentralized, globally networked approach, and discusses how intrinsic motivation of problem-solving is far more conducive to good programming than financial rewards. He shows examples of the Cathedral model both in the Open Source and proprietary worlds.

I feel that his arguments are very solid, and that he includes plenty of caveats and alternate perspectives to make a very reputable and well-balanced case. Others, like Nikolai Bezroukov, disagree quite completely, though after reading his critiques, I’m left with a sense that he is much more pedantic and some of his intelligent remarks are quite diluted by his openly hostile tone, as well as a clear misinterpretation of many of CatB’s central tenents.

Eric’s book is recognized by many as a crucial step in the evolution and definition of Open Source.

Eric Hahn, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Netscape, emailed me shortly afterwards as follows: “On behalf of everyone at Netscape, I want to thank you for helping us get to this point in the first place. Your thinking and writings were fundamental inspirations to our decision.'’

From Netscape’s decision to open up came Mozilla, and later Firefox. I credit Firefox with a major turning point in my own understanding and appreciation of Open Source and my own shift toward Linux.

It was interesting to read Eric’s take on the Halloween Documents leaked from Microsoft (to Raymond directly at first), showing the awareness of the competitive danger that some Microsoft employees recognized from Linux and Open Source.

There are philosophical axioms at the core of Raymond’s ideas. These are ideas that scale well to the rest of human society, business, and economics. He resists discussing such applications of the ideas in his book because to do so would dilute and complicate his message specific to software. Yet once you see truth in the essence of an idea, you recognize it as a friend, knowing that if we are moving toward a more just and better society, this is the path we must move toward in many areas. The following three paragraphs (from this chapter) is one of the core ideas in his book.

The network effects behind TCP/IP’s and Linux’s success are fairly clear and reduce ultimately to issues of trust and symmetry—potential parties to a shared infrastructure can rationally trust it more if they can see how it works all the way down, and will prefer an infrastructure in which all parties have symmetrical rights to one in which a single party is in a privileged position to extract rents or exert control.

It is not, however, actually necessary to assume network effects in order for symmetry issues to be important to software consumers. No software consumer will rationally choose to lock itself into a supplier-controlled monopoly by becoming dependent on closed source if any open-source alternative of acceptable quality is available. This argument gains force as the software becomes more critical to the software consumer’s business—the more vital it is, the less the consumer can tolerate having it controlled by an outside party.

There’s a flip side to this. Economists know that, in general, asymmetric information makes markets work poorly. Higher-quality goods get driven out when it’s more lucrative to collect rent on privileged information than it is to invest in producing better products. In general, not just in software, secrecy is the enemy of quality.

I call these shiny ideas because they are beautiful, not like sequins and mirrors, but solid and shiny like diamonds or steel. Their beauty rests in the way they are logical and rational on many levels. Moving away from the hoarding of information and the sharing of power is a great thing, but when you can show clearly why it’s as Raymond states, “a fiduciary irresponsibility” not to do so, then one has hope that the lowest-cost ultimatum of the corporate world might steer big business into one of the right paths after all. One can hope that the current success of this strategy will only increase in the future.