by Eric S. Raymond! Here is the link to the book!
Following are the notes I took for myself while "studying" the book..
Following are the notes I took for myself while "studying" the book..
- Beginning of the Hacker culture can be dated back to 1961, the year MIT acquired the first PDP-1.
- First transcontinental, high-speed network is the ARPANET - was built by Defense Department.
- Hacker culture spread with ARPANET.
- ARPANET..
- a network of DEC machines
- most important of them is the PDP-10
- Operation System: TOPS-10
- Assembler: MACRO-10
- GNU Emacs is from those days!
- Mice, windows, icons invented in Xerox: 70s - 80s.
- Unix was invented by Ken Thompson in Bell Labs, same year ARPANET 's birth (using a DEC PDP-7).
- Dennis Ritchie invented C for use in Unix. Prior: Operating Systems were written in Assembly.. DR & KT realized an Operating System can be written in a high language.. high language being C.
- In 1978, Unix has been ported to several machines.
- By 1980 C & Unix spread to universities. Hackers considered Unix "home".
- First personal computer marketed: 1975.
- Apple founded: 1977.
- The language for the personal computers was BASIC.
- By 1980, there were 3 cultures:
- TOPS-10 & LISP
- Unix & C
- PC & BASIC
- 1982.. Stallman started writing a clone of Unix in C, available for free, called GNU.
- .. also founded FSF: Free Software Foundation.
- By 1990 's.. Workstations were threatened by low - cost, high - performance personal computers.
- Individual hackers were affording personal computers..
- But where was the software? Unix was expensive, and was not distributable.
- 1991.. Linus began developing a free Unix kernel with FSF toolkit, called it Linux.
- by 1993, it was quite stable.
- smaller Unix vendors died..
- Berkeley System Design (BSD) made Unix free - meaning offered sources.
Linus & Linux Mentality
- Release early, release often.
- Delegate all you can.
- Linus Torvalds did not start from scratch..
- .. (re)used Minix code.
- .. eventually all Minix code was re-written.
- Finding the problem is the bigger challenge compared to understanding (and fixing) it.
- Smart data structures and dumb code works better than the other way around.
- Treat beta testers as your most valuable resource, and they will become your most valuable resource.
- Make sure you understand the concept of the problem right!
- Brook 's Law: Adding developers to a project makes it later..
- .. if this was the whole picture, Linux would be impossible!
- Linux was the first project for which an effort to use the ENTIRE world talent pool was made.
- Human beings take pleasure when a task is..
- .. not boringly easy..
- .. not too hard to achieve.
- Open sources success teaches us: "play" is the most efficient mode of creative work.
Open Source
- Open Source software is..
- .. freely redistributable..
- .. evolve and modified to fit change in needs.
- Variations in open-source software culture:
- Very anti-commercials: Commercial is evil! Must end!
- Somehow anti-commercials: In general ok, but some companies are evil..
- Un-anti-commercials: Commercial is ok, just like open better..
- Stallman / FSF was very anti-commercial, they defined "Free Software"..
- .. which "Open Software" avoids.
- FSF 's license terms - GPL - expresses Stallman 's attitude..
- .. not everyone in the hacker community agreed..
- .. including Torvalds, who endorsed commercial software for specific tasks.
- Open Source by decades:
- 70 's .. Toys & Demos
- 80 's .. Internet Tools
- 90 's .. Operating Systems
- 00 's .. Applications (for non - techie such as KDE - GNOME - GIMP etc..)
Hacker Culture Values
- Software should work as good as "have been led to expect"..
- beta and experimental is allowed.
- must at least start!
- New work is respected more compared to duplicated work except duplicating functionality of closed software and serving the community.
- Work that makes into major distributions is prestigious where majors are:
- Red Hat
- Debian
- Suse
- Hard, boring work (debugging and documentation) is more respected than fun and quick fixes.