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| Saturday, 04 September 2010 |
| Books for the Practicing Programmer |
Eric Raymond
The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary
1999 (O'Reilly); 268 pages
The book to read on the methodology and culture of open source. The three key chapters in this book are:
- The Cathedral and the Bazaar - Raymond discusses how open source projects work, using his own work on fetchmail as an example, and includes a number of takeaway lessons about software development in general;
- Homesteading the Noosphere - an explanation of the sociology of open source projects, including why people participate, what the unspoken rules of open source projects are, and how these two things are related to each other; and,
- The Magic Cauldron - comparative advantages of open and closed source projects, and reasons for moving to open source.
Beyond distinguishing between open and closed source software, The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a good summary of a software development model which is an alternative to the standard team models used in proprietary development (RUP, XP, etc.). Raymond does not bring this up, but it seems that we are not applying the lessons of open source development to improve our non-open source projects.
Raymond is a good writer, and the book is fun to read. My one criticism is that, because it was assembled from a series of essays, there is some duplication between chapters.
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