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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
## Phenomenology
@@ -79,3 +82,56 @@ with the gift economy model:
'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