“The essays in this book did not invent such a fundamental advance, but they do describe one: open-source software, the process of systematically harnessing open development and decentralized peer review to lower costs and improve software quality. Open-source software is not a new idea (its traditions go back to the beginnings of the Internet thirty years ago) but only recently have technical and market forces converged to draw it out of a niche role. Today the open-source movement is bidding strongly to define the computing infrastructure of the next century. For anyone who relies on computers, that makes it an important thing to understand.”

complete text, translations, commentries, etc+ > http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

critique

• Nikolai Bezroukov > http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue4_10/bezroukov/index.html
• ESR's response http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/response-to-bezroukov.html
• “Fighting Raymondism: Software Realism vs Software Idealism” > further > http://www.softpanorama.org/OSS/index.shtml