search

This directory gives you access to almost all of the contents of
my evolving book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Enjoy
— but be aware that I have sold O’Reilly the exclusive commercial
printing rights.

The papers composing this book (like their topic) are still
evolving as I get more feedback. I made extensive revisions and
additions for the first edition of the book The Cathedral and
the Bazaar, and expect to continue adding and revising in
future editions. Even if you’ve heard me do the stand-up version,
you may want to reread it.

These papers are not `finished’, and may never be. Publishing a
theory should not be the end of one’s conversation with the
universe, but the beginning. I welcome feedback, suggestions, and
corrections and will incorporate them into future versions.

If you like these papers, you will probably also enjoy my How To Become A Hacker FAQ
(also in the book).

Introduction

Here’s the XHTML. You can also
download the original XML or Postscript.

A Brief History of Hackerdom

My thumbnail sketch of the history of the hacker culture,
maintained since about 1992. I revised, expanded, and HTMLized it for
the O’Reilly collection of my essays. The definitive history of the
hacker culture remains to be written, probably not by me.

Here’s the XHTML. You can also
download the original XML or Postscript.

Translations

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Here’s the XHTML. You can also
download the DocBook XML or PostScript.

You can download RealAudio recordings of the stand-up version of
this talk from the Kongress (about the first 30 seconds is
missing). The original Real Audio recordings don’t play anymore, the
codec they were made with is obsolete. But here are 48kbs and 96kbs MP3.

Translations

.

Commentary and Argument

Forrest J. Cavaliere III has attempted to elaborate some of
CatB’s central ideas in Some Implications of
Bazaar Size. Randy Boring has replied.

Clay Shirky has expanded on the value of rapid evolution and the
design of systems that encourage it in an excellent paper, In Praise of
Evolvable Systems; also in View
Source: Lessons from the Web’s Massively Parallel
Development

The first critique of this paper to appear, When a
Bazaar is Not a Bazaar, was thought-provoking but (IMO)
basically wrongheaded. There is better
commentary available, and a very thoughtful critique in
Beyond the Cathedral, Beyond The Bazaar. The Linux Storm
attempts to situate this paper within a larger analysis.

If you think reading a ludicrously bad critique might be
entertaining, see Nikolai Bezroukov’s paper in First Monday. There
is a link to it in my
response.

Ko Kuwabara’s Linux: A
Bazaar at the Edge of Chaos comments perceptively on both CatB
and HtN, and further develops some analysis from a point of view
rooted in evolutionary biology and chaos theory. Kuwabara’s grasp
of economics is weak; he falls for the `path-dependence’ myth, and
seems to suffer from some neo-Marxist misconceptions about what
capitalism is. Fortunately these errors do not affect a really
excellent and illuminating discussion of how Linux bears on the
collective-action theories of Mancur Olson et. al.

Michael Truscello’s The
Architecture of Information: Open Source Software and Tactical
Poststructuralist Anarchism is (wait for it) a postomodernist
deconstruction of the politics of CatB. Astonishingly, the jargon and
the left-wing ax-grinding do not completely manage to smother every
last germ of sense in it, though they come very close.

There is even an insanely funny parody of CatB, The
Circus Midget and the Fossilized Dinosaur Turd. My sides hurt
after reading it.

Homesteading the Noosphere

In this paper, I examine in detail the property and ownership
customs of the open-source culture. Yes, it does have property
customs — and rather elaborate ones too, which reveal an
underlying gift culture in which hackers compete amicably for peer
repute. This analysis has large implications for anyone interested
in organizing large-scale intellectual collaborations.

Here’s the XHTML. You can also
download the DocBook XML or PostScript.

Translations

Commentary and Argument

Fare Rideau has developed some thoughtful
criticism of this paper (and The Cathedral and the
Bazaar) from an anti-IPR point of view. I incorporated some of
his analysis into the 1.9 version of the paper.

Russ Allbery has also commented
perceptively on the material.

I have written an essay of fame, ego, and
oversimplification to counter some misinterpretations of
HtN.

Lars Risan has written an excellent paper called The
Identity Games of Hacker Culture. He builds on some ideas in
HtN to propose an account of the social instincts behind
cooperative hacking that relates them to sexual selection and what
he calls “complementary identity games”. This is an impressive
piece of thinking and analysis, the first to my knowledge that
begins from my approach via evolutionary biology but goes genuinely
beyond HtN to propose explanations that were not implicit in my
model.

Pat Gratton has tried to fit the hacker psychology as described
in HtN into the conceptual scheme of Jane Jacobs’s Systems of
Survival; see his page on
Idealist Ethical Syndrome.

The Magic Cauldron

This paper analyzes the economics of open-source software. It
includes some explosion of common myths about software production
economics, a game-theoretical account of why open-source
cooperation is stable, and a taxonomy of open-source business
models.

Here’s the XHTML. You can also
download the DocBook XML or Postscript.

If you like these papers, you will probably also enjoy my How To Become A Hacker FAQ
(also in the book).

Translations

Jesper Laisen is working on a
Danish translation of this paper.

Sebastien Blondeel <[email protected]> is working on
a French translation of this paper.

There is a Spanish
translation.

There is a Japanese
translation by YAMAGATA Hiroo, the same person who did the
excellent Japanese translation of CatB.

There is a
German translation by Reinhard Gantar.

There is an Italian
translation.

There is a Russian translation.

Jesper Laisen is working on a Danish
translation.

Commentary and Argument

Fare Rideau has developed some criticized
this paper.

Related Papers:

Yochai Benkler’s Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm is very perceptive. Benkler’s paper informs me that my defense-cost analysis of the
development of property rights was anticipated by the economist Harold
Demsetz in the 1960s. This doesn’t surprise me.

In
Open Source as a Signalling Device – An Economic Analysis two
economists mathematically model the process by which successful
participation in an open-source project turns into a higher salary
for programmers. I predicted this effect in tMC.

The Revenge of the Hackers

In this essay, I continue the historical narrative into current
events.

Here’s the XHTML. You can also
download the DocBook XML or PostScript.

Afterword

This is the Author’s Afterword from the book.

Here’s the XHTML. You can also download
the DocBook XML or PostScript.

arrow
➧