The Cathedral & the Bazaar

Preface: Why You Should Care

The book in your hands is about the behavior and culture of computer hackers. It collects a series of essays originally meant for programmers and technical managers. The obvious (and entirely fair) question for you, the potential reader, to ask is: “Why should I care?”

The most obvious answer to this question is that computer software is an increasingly critical factor in the world economy and in the strategic calculations of businesses. That you have opened this book at all means you are almost certainly familiar with many of today’s truisms about the information economy, the digital age, and the wired world; I will not rehearse them here. I will simply point out that any significant advance in our understanding of how to build better-quality, more reliable software has tremendous implications that are growing more tremendous by the day.

The essays in this book did not invent such a fundamental advance, but they do describe one: open-source software, the process of systematically harnessing open development and decentralized peer review to lower costs and improve software quality. Open-source software is not a new idea (its traditions go back to the beginnings of the Internet thirty years ago) but only recently have technical and market forces converged to draw it out of a niche role. Today the open-source movement is bidding strongly to define the computing infrastructure of the next century. For anyone who relies on computers, that makes it an important ...