Why You Should Care
Eric
Steven
Raymond
Thyrsus Enterprises
esr@thyrsus.com
$Date: 2002/08/15 07:38:40 $
This is version 3.0
2000
Eric S. Raymond
Copyright
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify
this document under the terms of the Open Publication License,
version 2.0.
1.5
27 August 2000
esr
Minor revisions looking forward to second print edition.
1.4
25 August 2000
esr
First DocBook version.
1.2
25 Aug 2000
esr
This is the version that went into the first printed edition.
The book in your hands is about the behavior and culture of
computer hackers. It collects a series of essays originally meant
for programmers and technical managers. The obvious (and entirely
fair) question for you, the potential reader, to ask is: ``Why should
I care?''
The most obvious answer to this question is that computer software is
an increasingly critical factor in the world economy and in the
strategic calculations of businesses. That you have opened this book
at all means you are almost certainly familiar with many of today's
truisms about the information economy, the digital age, and the wired
world; I will not rehearse them here. I will simply point out that
any significant advance in our understanding of how to build
better-quality, more reliable software has tremendous implications
that are growing more tremendous by the day.
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.
I just referred to ``the open-source movement''. That hints at other
and perhaps more ultimately interesting reasons for the reader to
care. The idea of open source has been pursued, realized, and
cherished over those thirty years by a vigorous tribe of partisans
native to the Internet. These are the people who proudly call
themselves ``hackers'' -- not as the term is now abused by
journalists to mean a computer criminal, but in its true and original
sense of an enthusiast, an artist, a tinkerer, a problem solver,
an expert.
The tribe of hackers, after decades spent in obscurity struggling
against hard technical problems and the far greater weight of
mainstream indifference and dismissal, has recently begun to come into
its own. They built the Internet; they built Unix; they built the
World Wide Web; they're building Linux and open-source software
today; and, following the great Internet explosion of the mid-1990s,
the rest of the world is finally figuring out that it should have been
paying more attention to them all along.
The hacker culture and its successes pose by example some fundamental
questions about human motivation, the organization of work, the future
of professionalism, and the shape of the firm -- and about how all of
these things will change and evolve in the information-rich
post-scarcity economies of the 21st century and beyond. The hacker
culture also, arguably, prefigures some profound changes in the way
humans will relate to and reshape their economic surroundings. This
should make what we know about the hacker culture of interest to anyone
else who will have to live and work in the future.
This book is a collection of essays that were originally
published on the Internet; A Brief History of
Hackerdom is originally from 1992 but since regularly
updated and revised, and the others were written between February 1997
and May 1999. They were somewhat revised and expanded for the first
edition in October 1999, and updated again for this second edition of
January 2001, but no really concerted attempt has been made to remove
technicalia or make them `more accessible' (e.g. dumb them down) for a
general audience. I think it more respectful to puzzle and challenge
an audience than to bore and insult it. If you have difficulty with
particular technical or historical points or the odd computer acronym,
feel free to skip ahead; the whole does tell a story, and you may find
that what you learn later makes sense of what puzzled you
earlier.
The reader should also understand that these essays are evolving
documents, into which I periodically merge the distilled results of
feedback from people who write to comment on or correct them. While I
alone remain responsible for any errors in this book, it has
benefitted from a peer-review process very like that which it
describes for software, and incorporates contributions from people too
numerous to list here. The versions printed here are not fixed or
final forms; rather, they should be considered reports from a
continuing inquiry in which many members of the culture they describe
are active participants.
Finally, I must at least try to express my delight and amazement and
gratitude for the many people and the long chain of apparently
fortuitous circumstances that have led up to this book....
Some particular thanks are due for long-term friendship and
support for the work captured between these covers. Thank you, Linus
Torvalds. Thank you, Larry Augustin. Thank you, Doc Searls. Thank
you, Tim O'Reilly. You are all people I am proud to call friends as
well as colleagues. Most especially: thank you, Catherine Raymond --
my love, my wife, and my longest-time supporter.
I am a hacker. I have been part of the culture described in this book
for more than twenty years. In that time I have been privileged to
work and play with some of the most interesting and exceptional people
on Earth, solving fascinating problems and (on a precious few
occasions) creating something both genuinely new and useful. Too many
of those people to name here have taught me valuable lessons, about
our shared craft and many other things. The essays in this book are
my return gift to them.
These essays were stages of discovery for me as well, reports
from a fascinating journey in which I learned to see the long-familiar
in a new and deeper way. To my then and continuing astonishment, the
mere act of reporting this journey turned out to have a catalyzing
effect on the emergence of open source into the mainstream. I hope
the reader of my travel papers will catch some of the excitement of
that journey, and of the amazing prospects that are unfolding before
us today as mainstream business and consumers take their first steps
on the same road.