A peek into the past

Well it's a good thing that I didn't try to fit "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" reading into my day yesterday...I definitely would not have finished it and be in any state of mind to reflect on it!  Mr. Raymond put a lot of information into this work--a pretty fair amount of technical information too--which introduced the impact of Linux on the computing world as he journeyed us back in time to his foray into working on (and eventually taking the reins of) an open source project that interested himself.

Raymond was an accomplished programmer who simply wanted a software package that allowed him to have more control over his email--and before long he was not only contributing to an existing OSS project, but would eventually take the project over and rename it to encompass his contributions to it.  I'm not sure that I would have gone to all that trouble--I surely don't have the time to even consider something like that at this point in my life--but it is a good thing that people like him do.  It would be hard to comprehend what life would be like were it not for those who invest their lives towards solving a plethora of problems.

I definitely liked his use of "cathedral" and "bazaar," and must admit that I wasn't sure what that would be referring to--and he actually explained that EARLY on.  The idea that the coding style of a bazaar (or a conglomerate of people working on many different things at once on a project that happily accepted and implemented most of their ideas) would be more effective than a cathedral style (a system of only a few "holy" people reverently working together on the project) seems impossible; however, (as Raymond points out) Linux has proven its point.

To be honest it was hard to vigorously digest his technical information, but he made it as interesting as possible.  I also liked his references by Dr. Brooks--I remember his articles from last semester and the timely announcement of Netscape becoming an open sourced project (I feel old now...I remember that happening) although I must admit that back then I didn't really understand the significance of that.  Perhaps the only complaint I would have over the article though....I did like the XHTML format (moving from page to page seamlessly) but I must admit that after a while I wondered "how long is this?"  It was a good article/short story but after a while I won't lie...I was glad to see the bibliography and acknowledgements pages :)