Readings

The readings for Tuesday, March 21 are:

1. A Brief History of Hackerdom

2. The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Writings

In these essays, ESR discusses the Cathedral and the Bazaar:

No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here—rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches ... out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

In your this blog post, write a reflection that does the following:

1. Compare ESR's history of hackerdom with our previous accounts from Steven Levy and Paul Graham. How does ESR's hacker compare? How are they different?

2. Describe the difference between the cathedral model of software development and the bazaar style of software enigeering. Which models have you experienced? Which one do you prefer? Explain.

3. In his The Cathedral and the Bazaar, ESR enumerates 19 principles such as:

   1: Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

   and

   6: Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

   Select two principles and discuss your thoughts about them. From your experience with software development, are these principles true?

4. ESR ends The Cathedral and the Bazaar by saying:

   Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software ``hoarding'' is morally wrong (assuming you believe the latter, which neither Linus nor I do), 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.

   What do you make of this? Has open source or the bazaar model won? Is it the future of software development?