October 2005
Beginner to intermediate
302 pages
10h 1m
English
Content preview from Producing Open Source SoftwareBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. Getting Started
The classic model of how free software projects get started was supplied by Eric Raymond, in a now-famous paper on open source processes entitled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar.” He wrote:
Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.(from http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/)
Note that Raymond wasn’t saying that open source projects happen only when some individual gets an itch. Rather, he was saying that good software results when the programmer has a personal interest in seeing the problem solved; the relevance of this to free software was that a personal itch happened to be the most frequent motivation for starting a free software project.
This is still how most free projects are started, but less so now than in 1997, when Raymond wrote those words. Today, we have the phenomenon of organizations—including for-profit corporations—starting large, centrally-managed open source projects from scratch. The lone programmer, banging out some code to solve a local problem and then realizing the result has wider applicability, is still the source of much new free software, but is not the only story.
Raymond’s point is still insightful, however. The essential condition is that the producers of the software have a direct interest in its success, because they use it themselves. If the software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, the person or organization producing it will feel the dissatisfaction in their daily work. ...
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