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February 25, 2006
Brunelleschi be damned?
Is the epoch of the solitary master craftsman over? [sco/Flickr]
The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond
We're trying to understand the cultural and technological roots of the internet, and we've been reading testimony from people who have shaped it, people who see it as a work in progress that has hardly reached maturity. Our work at Open Source has us looking at blogs, which may seem a far cry from the sophisticated world of hacking described in Raymond's paper. The lessons that hackers brought to the fore, however-- about how to use the internet to facilitate the creation and dispersion of the most useful tools-- are similar to the principles of openness and collaboration that seem to unite bloggers.
Raymond's assertion may seem radical, idealistic, and unfounded, but it is as clear as it is beautiful: programs work better when their production is open to user modification from start to finish. Rather than treating a program like a work of fine art that can only be executed by a small team of experts, people ought to do just the opposite. Using Linux has his chief example, he explains that this radically open approach to programming showed the great potential of collaboration over the internet. The implication is that few problems are too big to be undertaken as long as there are enough people looking at them from every conceivable angle, fixing every little thing that they can, never more than a keystroke away from the Newer, Better version.
Posted by Henry Shepherd at February 25, 2006 11:08 AM
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