After reading The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an essay written by Eric S. Raymond, I got some thoughts about OSS. I have to admit: I fell in love with Rocket League at a level of stopping doing this blog (this wasn’t typed by me, but it is indeed, a true reflexion typed by a good friend). Anyways. Even that I already admired OSS, after reading the article my perspective changed. OSS was not only the gift of geniuses to us, but was also a development method.
Fred Brooks established one of his hyphotesis in the Mytical Man-Month, which mentions that as the number of programmers grows lineally, the time for the project to be developed grows quadratically. But, in this essay, Raymond proves that this is not necessarily true. In fact: when the number of developers grows enough, time diminishes drastically.
Another big characteristic of OSS is the way people work with you. If you reward the people that work in the project, if you tell them that they are important and if you make them believe they are important, they will work incredibly good, even that they do not receive a real payment.
There are many topics covered in this essay, but these two are the ones I consider more important. I highly recommend reading it.
It was not that hard. Actually Open Source is really easy to explain. Open source software is software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance. The source part is something that only programmers see and use to improve that program by adding features to it or fixing parts that don’t always work correctly.
Their job is to protect and promote the work of developers. They also prevent the abuse of the ideals and ethos inherent to the open source movement.
