Next on my commuting reading list while taking a break from fiction is “The Cathedral and the Bazaar”.
If you’ve not heard of it before, it’s perhaps the most famous account of the origins of open source development, and a look at the reasons it has swept like a wildfire across the software development landscape.
Amazon has the following to say about it;
The Cathedral and the Bazaar takes its title from an essay of the same name which Raymond read at the 1997 Linux Congress and that was previously available only online. The essay documents Raymond’s acquisition, re-creation and numerous revisions of an email utility known as fetchmail. Raymond engagingly narrates the fetchmail development process while at the same time elaborating upon the on- going bazaar development method he employs with the assistance of numerous volunteer programmers who participate in the writing and debugging of the code. The essay smartly spares the reader from the technical morass that could easily detract from the text’s goal of demonstrating the efficacy of the Open Source, or bazaar, method in creating robust, usable software.
I’ve known about this book for years, but have never got around to reading it - now I’m going to, and am actually looking forward to it.