[[!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 * 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". * Visão libertariana: "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). Logo em seguida ele nega a existência de um autruísmo puro. ## 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: satisfation, 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