To understand open-source warfare, it's instructive to revisit Eric S. Raymond's 1997 manifesto, The Cathedral and the Bazaar , in which he describes how a large community of open-source software hackers created the operating system Linux.
”Linux is subversive,” Raymond wrote. ”Who would have thought even five years ago [1991] that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet?” He likened the rise of Linux to the public marketplace of the bazaar. The programmers agreed to observe a few simple principles but were otherwise free to innovate and create. Raymond contrasted that style with the ”cathedral” approach to software, in which a single organization, using highly planned, sequentially structured steps, maintained tight managerial control over every aspect of the process.
Eventually, the open-source culture would triumph over the proprietary world, Raymond argued, not because it was morally right ”but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.”
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