Cathedral and the Bazaar
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 unfat
additional bugs could be easily introduced by fixing an existing one. 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. One good point that Bezroukov does make in his paper is concerning Raymond's statement:When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. " Of course, Microsoft is not the only entity that would like to disagree with Eric Raymond and his view of why the OS model works. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. Someone has to have final say in the project development, especially when dealing with core aspects of the project such as a kernel. Rewriting, not fixing, is a more viable option here. The Apache HTTP Server is the most popular Internet server application today, also holding a commanding 50% Internet share. Raymond's web site states the following:Nikolai Bezroukov's article in First Monday, unfortunately, adds almost nothing useful to the debate. Microsoft has been releasing buggy software for years on the premise that it's ok, as long as it looks as thought it has potential to be a standard setter or useful product somewhere down the road. Consequently, OSS poses a direct, short-term revenue and platform threat to Microsoft -- particularly in server space. Even in the closed source world, you do not usually rewrite code rather than fix. There must be some benefit for an organization to open up some or all of their source code or else it wouldn't be happening. " Another major player in the technology industry that appears to support the OS movement is Hewlett Packard. Netscape cites "The Cathedral and the Bazaar as being pivotal in convincing Netscape management to release the Mozilla source code.
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Acceptance Essays
