Core characteristics of an open source project.

Early on in the free software movement, the characteristics of a project being open were simply tied to the licensing aspect of the code – is it under a license where one could see, modify, and distribute the code or not? At that time, that was novel in and of itself; recall from Chapter 1, The Whats and Whys of Open Source, the main challenge was proprietary software growth being antithetical to a hacker and maker culture.

I reread The Cathedral and the Bazaar [1] as I was writing this chapter, and when I did, I could sense the aha moment that Eric Raymond had as he looked at the early development of Linux. A given piece of software, in general, up to that point, was developed by a single developer or a small circle of developers, carefully built and aligned with what you would think of today as obsessive-compulsive tendencies; carefully constructed code, nothing other than perfected code released, and while feedback was appreciated...