The Cathedral & the Bazaar

Appendix C. Notes, Bibliography, and Acknowledgements

A Brief History of Hackerdom

Notes

Note 1

Levy, Steven; Hackers, Anchor/Doubleday 1984, ISBN 0-385-19195-2.

Note 2

Raymond, Eric S.; The New Hacker’s Dictionary, MIT Press, 3rd edition 1996. ISBN 0-262-68092-0.

Note 3

David E. Lundstrom gave us an anecdotal history of the “Real Programmer” era in A Few Good Men From UNIVAC, 1987, ISBN-0-262-62075-8.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Notes

Note 4

In Programing Pearls, the noted computer-science aphorist Jon Bentley comments on Brooks’s observation with “If you plan to throw one away, you will throw away two.” He is almost certainly right. The point of Brooks’s observation, and Bentley’s, isn’t merely that you should expect first attempt to be wrong, it’s that starting over with the right idea is usually more effective than trying to salvage a mess.

Note 5

Examples of successful open-source, bazaar development predating the Internet explosion and unrelated to the Unix and Internet traditions have existed. The development of the info-Zip (http://www.cdrom.com/pub/infozip/) compression utility during 1990-x1992, primarily for DOS machines, was one such example. Another was the RBBS bulletin board system (again for DOS), which began in 1983 and developed a sufficiently strong community that there have been fairly regular releases up to the present (mid-1999) despite the huge technical advantages of Internet mail and file-sharing over local BBSs. While the info-Zip community relied to some extent on ...