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On first blush this looks to be about money, but it is about power. Is power going to go to the information monopolies, or will it go to developers and users?.

Eric S. Raymond

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Eric S. Raymond
Age: 66
Born: 1957
Born: December 4
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Journalist
Lawyer
Programmer
Software Developer
Writer
Boston
Massachusetts
Eric Raymond
Eric Steven Raymond
ESR
Going
Monopoly
Users
Information
Money
Power
Firsts
Monopolies
Looks
Blush
First
Developers

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Being able to break security doesn't make you a hacker anymore than being able to hotwire cars makes you an automotive engineer.
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Of course, C proved indispensible to the developers of all its alternatives. Dig down through enough implementation layers under any of the other languages surveyed here and you will find a core implemented in pure, portable C
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Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (e.g., given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone).
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The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.
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Prototype, then polish. Get it working before you optimize it
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A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets.
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Lisp was far more powerful and flexible than any other language of its day in fact, it is still a better design than most languages of today, twenty-five years later. Lisp freed ITS's hackers to think in unusual and creative ways. It was a major factor in their successes, and remains one of hackerdom's favorite languages.
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Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.
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Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.
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The easiest programs to use are those which demand the least new learning from the user
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You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion.
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If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.
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For the first time, individual hackers could afford to have home machines comparable in power and storage capacity to the minicomputers of ten years earlier - Unix engines capable of supporting a full development environment and talking to the Internet.
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Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
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Berkeley hackers liked to see themselves as rebels against soulless corporate empires.
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The Wesnoth devs are good but not exceptionally so, and we're weighed down by a crappy implementation language (C++). Nevertheless our productivity, in terms of goals achieved per hour of work, is quite high.
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The combination of threads, remote-procedure-call interfaces, and heavyweight object-oriented design is especially dangerous... if you are ever invited onto a project that is supposed to feature all three, fleeing in terror might well be an appropriate reaction.
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And for any agents or proxy of the regime interested in asking me questions face to face, I've got some bullets slathered in pork fat to make you feel extra special welcome.
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Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one.
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With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.
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