Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19

Re:Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19 by erikpukinskis on Monday May 23, 2016 @02:44PM (#11755892)

I would add Steven Levy's Hackers to the list if you want to go back to the MIT years, and Mitchell Waldrop's The Dream Machine if you want to go back to the DARPA years. Both of those were totally foundational to my understanding of the social history of what computer science is.

What I think is so important about history like this I still draw on those ideas all of the time. There are still so many opportunities to apply ideas from The Cathedral and the Bazaar . These foundational works can be "harvested" for a century before society is fully adapted around them.

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Re:Eric Raymond's 'The Cathedral and the Bazaar' Turns 19 by vintermann on Tuesday May 24, 2016 @05:06AM (#11759942)

If you go there, you also want to take something that covers microcomputers. There were many things in Cathedral and the Bazaar I rolled my eyes at, but the one thing that arguably hurt was that he downplayed and ignored microcomputer history ("their language was BASIC, so primitive that..." - no ESR, it was assembly! "vast disconnected hinterland" - no ESR, we had a huge network of BBSes and internet access via it). For lionizing Torvalds, you'd thought he'd notice that Torvalds taught himself assembly on the VIC 20.

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