[colug-432] Learn How To Scratch Your Own Itch

[Rob Funk]

jep200404 at columbus.rr.com wrote:
> Read Eric Raymond's writings,
> starting with "The Cathedral and The Bazaar".

Let's not get too carried away. :-)

The original CatB essay was a late-90s polemic against the GNU style
of development, and was certainly influential, but I'm not sure it's
quite applicable today in the way it was intended. (I'm not even sure
it was relevant at the time in the way it was generally taken.) Some
of the other essays in the ensuing book may be a bit more relevant,
but I also think a lot of it was put in to pad out to book-length.

In any case, I'm not sure I'd recommend going much beyond that with
him; in the last 15 years or so he's become more inclined to
pronouncements that alienate large portions of the community, to the
point that he's really not representative anymore.

I'd recommend the multi-author collection "Open Sources: Voices from
the Open Source Revolution" (which does include an ESR essay, along
with Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds, and many more) over anything
from any single person. But that's dated too.

Here's one modern perspective to consider (which I don't 100% agree
with, but I don't 100% disagree with either):
  https://medium.com/@nayafia/i-hate-the-term-open-source-a65fd481