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+[[!meta title="The Cathedral & The Bazaar"]]
+[[!tag jogo software foss economics]]
+
+* [The Cathedral and the Bazaar](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/)
+* Author: Eric S. Raymond
+* ISBN: 978-0-596-00108-7
+* Publisher: O'Reilly
+
+## Review
+
+While Raymond has innumerous insights on the dynamic of the free software
+communities, he got political economy wrong, including, but not only by:
+
+* Choosing to focus on Lockean philosophical considerations.
+* Putting altruism as a mode of appearance for an egotistical reward strategy.
+
+Reading this book years after the "Open Source Revolution" has begun, the whole
+"Open Source X Free Software" debate looks even more important than what sometimes
+were put as a metaphysical, esoteric dispute. Going beyond the requirement that
+a software work is made available giving the "four freedoms", this debate puts
+basic questions about the underlying production process all how societies chose
+to divide labour and share wealth.
+
+More than ever before this debate has huge importance and implications, given
+our current state of affairs where economic models such as "freemium",
+"opencore" and [siren servers](/books/sociedade/who-owns-the-future) are
+privatizing and concentrating the notion of property, i.e, transforming even
+personal property in a "service": you don't own your gadget or content like
+music you purchase, because of DRM, EULAS and the inability to repair your
+stuff, see the iRepair movement.
+
+Raymond assumes that "the verdict of history seems to be free-market capitalism
+is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency" which, besides
+being an "end of history"-type fallacy -- as we didn't tried yet many, many
+possible economical systems, but only very few --, has wrong assumptions about
+what is "optimal", "cooperation" and "efficient": just look about resource
+depletion, absurd wealth concentration by the extremely rich and lack of
+basic dignity for most of human population, not to mention animal/nature rights.
+
+Capitalism is based in the need that something is scarce, if not naturally then
+let make it artificial scarce. So there's no way a capitalist business will
+sustain itself by giving everything free as in software -- as it's anyway out
+of question that it will give anything free as in beer.
+
+So while the bulk of Raymond ideas are revolutionary in the sense that capitalism
+needs to constantly revolutionize itself, fade away in diminishing returns or
+go to war mode -- when accumulated production is fanatically destroyed, it does
+not offers insights for the main issue of how to replace capitalism which by
+the previous definition is inequality-producing machine.
+
+Embracing open source as a capitalism moto sounds like being a hacker until
+page two, which is a prevailing ideology of the Silicon Valley elite, which
+sounds much more a meritocracy than hacker culture. We should question things
+instead of taking assumptions for granted.
+
+That's curious, because Raymond cites Buckminster's Fuller "ephemeralization"
+concept in the opening words of his "The Magic Cauldron" essay, which could
+be explored to a new dimension if economics and politics are understood also
+as technological apparatus we use to live better. An ephemeralization, as
+Raymond explains, is "technology becoming both more effective and less
+expensive as the physical resources invested in early designs are replaced
+by more and more information content" (page 115).
+
+So it's clear when Raymond makes assumptions he is actually making a choice on
+capitalist markets and conservative politics (I don't like to use the term
+libertarian: it causes confusions as it means different things on different
+cultures).
+
+If we change the assumptions, we can build different, new economies and
+politics with other different emergent properties, like those based on values
+of emancipation and solidarity. There are other Magic Cauldrons for the Free
+Software spell.
+
+## Ideas while reading the book
+
+* Hypothesis: sustainability of "Open Source" economic model in Brazil was mostly embraced
+  by the government, by an army of free lancers and by a small number of business; while
+  open source is widely used in the country, it's mostly on the free rider mode: everyone
+  using an open stack but develops unpublished code (either closed source os lazilly left
+  out of public sight) or "poor gifts" in the expression of Raymond himself.
+
+## Phenomenology
+
+* Linus Law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (page 30);
+  "debugging is parallelizable" (page 32).
+
+* Delphi Effect: "the averaged opinion of a mass of equally expert (or equally
+  ignorant) observers is quite a bit more reliable a predictor than the opinion
+  of a single randomly chosen observer" (page 31).
+
+* Brooks Law: "complexity and communication costs of a project rise with the
+  square number of developers" (pages 32, 49).
+
+## Freedom and hierarchy
+
+* Kropotkin is cited at page 52: "principle of understanding" versus the
+  "principle of command".
+
+* Conservative vision: "The Linux world behaves in many respects like a free
+  market or an ecology, a collection of selfish agents attempting to maximize
+  utility, which in the process produces a self-correcting spontaneous order
+  more elaborate and efficient than any amount of central planning could have
+  achieved." (page 52). Right afterwards he negates the existence of true
+  altruism.
+
+## Economics
+
+A very liberal point of view:
+
+* Homesteading the Noosphere: "customs that regulate the ownership and control
+  of open-source software [...] imply an underlying theory of property rights
+  homologous to the Lockean theory of land tenure" (65).
+
+* Open Source as a gift economy like a reputation game (81 - 83):
+
+    Most ways humans have of organizing are adaptations to scarcity
+    and want. Each way carries with it different ways of gaining social status.
+
+    The simples way is the _command hierarchy_ [where] scarce goods are allocated
+    by onde central authority and backed up by force. Command hierarchies scale
+    very poorly; they become increasingly inefficient as they get larger.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Our society is predominantly an exchange economy. This is a sofisticated
+    adaptation to scarcity that, unlike the command model, scales quite well.
+    Allocation of scarce goods is done in a decentralized way through trade
+    and voluntary coopreation.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Gift cultures are adaptations not to scarcity but to abundance. They arise
+    in populations that do not have significant material scarcity problems
+    with survival goods.
+
+    [...]
+
+    Abundance makes command relationships difficult to sustain and exchange
+    relationships an almost pointless game. In gift cultures, social status
+    is determined not by what you control but by _what you give away_.
+
+    -- 80-81
+
+He also explains that the reputation game is not the only drive in the
+bazaar-style ecosystem: satisfaction, love, the "joy of craftsmanship" are also
+motivations for software development (pages 82-83), which is compatible
+with the gift economy model:
+
+    How can one maximize quality if there is no metric for quality?
+    If scarcity economics doesn't operate, what metrics are available
+    besides peer evaluation?
+
+    Other respondents related peer-esteem rewards and the joy of hacking
+    to the levels above subsistence needs in Abraham Maslow's well-known
+    'hierachy of values' model of human motivation.
+
+    -- 82-83
+
+Cites both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche at page 88 when talking about "selfless"
+motives, besides their "whatever other failings", saying that both
+are "desconstructing" 'altruism' into unacknowledged kinds of self-interest.
+
+## The value of humility
+
+    Furthermore, past bugs are not automatically held against a developer; the fact
+    that a bug has been fixed is generally considered more importante than the fact
+    that one used to be there. As one respontend observed, one can gain status by
+    fixing 'Emacs bugs', but not by fixing 'Richard Stallman's bugs' -- and it
+    would be considered extremely bad form to criticie Stallman for _old_ Emacs
+    bugs that have since been fixed.
+    
+    This makes an interesting contrast with many parts of academia, in which
+    trashing putatively defective work by others is an important mode of gaining
+    reputation. In the hacker culture, such behavior is rather heavily tabooed --
+    so heavily, in fact, that the absence of such behavior did no present itself to
+    me as a datum until that one respondent with an unusual perdpective pointed it
+    out nearly a full year after this essay was first published!
+
+    The taboo against attacks on competence (not shared with academia) is even more
+    revealing than the (shared) taboo on posturing, because we can relate it to a
+    difference between academia and hackerdom in their communications and support
+    structures.
+    
+    The hacker culture's medium of gifting is intangible, its communications
+    channels are poor at expressing emotional nuance, and face-to-face contact
+    among its members is the exception rather than the rule. This gives it a lower
+    tolerance of noise than most other gift cultures, and goes a long way to
+    explain both the taboo against posturing and the taboo against attacks on
+    competence. Any significant incidence of flames over hackers' competence would
+    intolerably disrupt the culture's reputation scoreboard.
+
+    -- 90-91
+
+What about Linus behavior, then?
+
+    The same vulnerability to noise explains the model of public humility required
+    of the hacker community's tribal elders. They must be seen to be free of boast
+    and posturing so the taboo against dangerous noise will hold.
+    
+    Talking softly is also functional if one aspires to be a maintainer of a
+    successful project; one must convince the community that one has good
+    judgement, because most of the maintainer's job is going to be judging other
+    people's code. Who would be inclined to contribute work to someone who clearly
+    can't judge the quality of their own code, or whose behavior suggests they will
+    attempt to unfairly hog the reputation return from the project? Potential
+    contributors want project leaders with enough humility and class to be able to
+    to say, when objectively appropriate, ``Yes, that does work better than my
+    version, I'll use it''—and to give credit where credit is due.
+
+    -- 91
+
+## References
+
+* [Homesteading the Noosphere](http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/).