Quotes from Eric S. Raymond

Linux evolved in a completely different way. From nearly the beginning, it was rather casually hacked on by huge numbers of volunteers coordinating only through the Internet.

You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse)

It's not all that important that you be able to originate brilliant ideas... The more important talent is to be able to recognize good ideas from other people.

Alchemists turned into chemists when they stopped keeping secrets.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).

The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user

For purposes of examining the software market itself, it will be helpful to sort kinds of software by how completely the service they offer is describable by open technical standards, which is well correlated with how commoditized the underlying service has become.

Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

In a future that includes competition from open source, we can expect that the eventual destiny of any software technology will be to either die or become part of the open infrastructure itself.

The free market, in its widest libertarian sense including all un-coerced activity whether trade or gift, can produce perpetually increasing software wealth for everyone.

If you're really ahead of the game, plagiarism is a trap you want your competitors to fall into!

When you feel the urge to design a complex binary file format, or a complex binary application protocol, it is generally wise to lie down until the feeling passes.

As with buildings, it's easier to repair superstructure on top of a solid foundation than it is to replace the foundations without trashing the superstructure.

Seymour Cray, designer of the Cray line of supercomputers, was among the greatest. He is said once to have toggled an entire operating system of his own design into a computer of his own design through its front-panel switches. In octal. Without an error. And it worked. Real Programmer macho supremo.

One thing I understood from the beginning is that the press almost completely tunes out abstractions. They won't write about ideas without larger-than-life personalities fronting them. Everything has to be story, drama, conflict, sound bites. Otherwise, most reporters will simply go to sleep — and even if they don't, their editors will.

Yes, the success of open source does call into some question the utility of command-and-control systems, of secrecy, of centralization, and of certain kinds of intellectual property. It would be almost disingenuous not to admit that it suggests (or at least harmonizes well with) a broadly libertarian view of the proper relationship between individuals and institutions.

nobody who can think should ever be forced into a situation that bores them.)

Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.

There is a critical difference (Ryan observes) between saying, "I'm giving you this reward because I recognize the value of your work", and "You're getting this reward because you've lived up to my standards." The first does not demotivate; the second does.

The nightmare scenario is one in which corporate monopolism and statist power-seeking, always natural allies, feed back into each other and create rationales for increasing regulation, repression, and criminalization of digital speech.

Brook's Law: "Adding more programmers to a late project makes it later.

The ARPAnet/PDP-10 culture, wedded to LISP and MACRO and TOPS-10 and ITS and SAIL. The Unix and C crowd with their PDP-11s and VAXen and pokey telephone connections. And an anarchic horde of early microcomputer enthusiasts bent on taking computer power to the people.

The verdict of history seems to be that free-market capitalism is the globally optimal way to cooperate for economic efficiency; perhaps, in a similar way, the reputation-game gift culture is the globally optimal way to cooperate for generating (and checking!) high-quality creative work.