In “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” Eric Raymond lays out an examination of the modern open source community. He unpacks its roots, its features, and examines why this apparently disorganized collective of developers works well enough to produce software for free as fast as the billion-dollar industry that has risen around computers and their general use. Raymond makes some insightful observations about what the passion and flexibility of the open source community. It’s clear that the service of dedicated volunteer developers is capable of producing some wonderful things, but I’m concerned that Raymond’s optimism about the modern state of open source overlooks a few corners that will always be held by industry.
There is definitely a power in the willingness of open source developers to commit massive amounts of their time just for the sake of their product. Raymond’s 4th and 5th principles demonstrate this well.
4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.
Anybody who wants to work on a project is working on it, and everybody working on a project cares about what they’re doing, because when they don’t want to work on it they leave. Labor is always allocated by zeal, and volunteer hours are as well-used as they can be. This is, in my opinion, the greatest strength and weakness of the open source community. Provided there are enough developer-hours to do the work, it will get done. Of course, if the world’s motley crew of open source developers isn’t at a critical mass, then all the world gets is a generation of arbitrary passion project.
Praise be Linus, today open source seems to be at or around the critical mass. You can get an open source version of almost anything, and most of the exceptions are really low-level hardware-interfacing things
To his credit, I don’t think Raymond wears rose-colored glasses with regards to the capabilities and limitations of open source, his discussion on Mozilla’s slow startup time should make that clear. But I think there are ways that the principles of software development work against the open source community.
Take the first principle, for example: “every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” Projects receive a massive boost in quality from the dedication of their developers. Products are designed by people who want to use them, who know what features they want, who are serious enough to buy into the idea that they’re trying to make art, whether their project is a web browser or a graphics card driver. Unfortunately, interests can only stretch so far. We have dozens of ambitious hotshots taking a stab at web browsers, shell scripts, and languages/compilers/interpreters, but there is a lot less excitement about building the next great laptop monitor driver. There are millions of little things on that go into the general-purpose operating systems world that slip through the cracks of a persons passions or are so big that they’ve never been effectively started from grassroots.
Decryptic 