The Bazaar

Or, should that be bizarre or better yet, bizarro?!

The Trifecta of Startup Authors: ESR, Bob Young, and Guy Kawasaki
All gathered nicely into one amazing work:

Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here – rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

These are exactly the perfect times in which to revisit this amazing collection of thoughts if I say so myself. And I just did.

How many of us are using a Linux driven computer today? Most. It may be a notebook like my Samsung Chrome 3 running Ubuntu via Crouton or a server in the clouds holding your precious data, but Linux is everywhere. Thanks exactly to this Bizaar approach that ESR talks of in his landmark book.

Why do I call Eric “ESR”? Because I was using his amazing email application fetchmail before I discovered his book. In the world of open-source software back in the day [circa 1997] we often used our initials to mark our territory and “sign” our code. A simplier time for sure.

So, if you have never, or if like me it has been YEARS since last read, please consider doing so afresh. Today. I am.

#opensource #esr #bazaar