"Homesteading the Noosphere" (abbreviated HtN) is an

essay An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal a ...

written by

Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...

about the social workings of

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

software development Software development is the process of conceiving, specifying, designing, programming, documenting, testing, and bug fixing involved in creating and maintaining applications, frameworks, or other software components. Software development invol ...

. It follows his previous piece "

The Cathedral and the Bazaar ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary'' (abbreviated ''CatB'') is an essay, and later a book, by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux k ...

" (1997). The essay examines issues of

project A project is any undertaking, carried out individually or collaboratively and possibly involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a particular goal. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of even ...

ownership and transfer, as well as investigating possible

anthropological Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including past human species. Social anthropology studies patterns of behavi ...

roots of the

gift culture A gift economy or gift culture is a system of exchange where valuables are not sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards. Social norms and customs govern giving a gift in a gift culture; although there ...

in open source as contrasted with the exchange culture of

closed source Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and inte ...

software. Raymond also investigates the nature of the spread of open source into the untamed frontier of ideas he terms the noosphere, postulating that projects that range too far ahead of their time fail because they are too far out in the wilderness, and that successful projects tend to relate to existing projects. Raymond delves into the contrast between the stated aims of open source and observed behaviors, and also explores the underlying motivations of people involved in the

open source movement The open-source-software movement is a movement that supports the use of open-source licenses for some or all software, as part of the broader notion of open collaboration. The open-source movement was started to spread the concept/idea of open ...

. He notes that a key motivation for open source practitioners is having a great

reputation The reputation of a social entity (a person, a social group, an organization, or a place) is an opinion about that entity typically as a result of social evaluation on a set of criteria, such as behavior or performance. Reputation is a ubiquitous ...

within the "tribe". In contrast, Microsoft's "embrace and extend" policy complexified and closed up Internet protocols with "protocol pollution."

Citations

"Homesteading the Noosphere" has been referenced in various papers, including: * ''The impact of ideology on effectiveness in open source software development teams'' * ''An Overview of the Software Engineering Process and Tools in the Mozilla Project'' * ''From Planning to Mature: on the Determinants of Open Source Take Off, Discussion paper 2005-17, Università degli Studi di Trento'' * ''Open borders? Immigration in open source projects'' * ''Public commons of geographic data: research and development challenges''

In popular culture

* In the Japanese novel series ''

Log Horizon is a Japanese novel series written by Mamare Touno and illustrated by Kazuhiro Hara. It began serialization online in 2010 on the user-generated novel publishing website Shōsetsuka ni Narō, being later on acquired by Enterbrain an ...

'' and its

manga Manga (Japanese: 漫画 ) are comics or graphic novels originating from Japan. Most manga conform to a style developed in Japan in the late 19th century, and the form has a long prehistory in earlier Japanese art. The term ''manga'' is u ...

and

anime is Traditional animation, hand-drawn and computer animation, computer-generated animation originating from Japan. Outside of Japan and in English, ''anime'' refers specifically to animation produced in Japan. However, in Japan and in Japane ...

adaptations, 300,000 Japanese players of a

massively multiplayer online role-playing game A massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) is a video game that combines aspects of a role-playing video game and a massively multiplayer online game. As in role-playing games (RPGs), the player assumes the role of a Player charac ...

suddenly find themselves transported into the game's world right as the game was being updated with an expansion pack by the name of , which the author named after Raymond's essay. The first chapter of the novel series also bears the same name.

References

* — also includes "

", " The Magic Cauldron" and "

Revenge of the Hackers Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is an American software developer, open-source software advocate, and author of the 1997 essay and 1999 book ''The Cathedral and the Bazaar''. He wrote a guidebook for the ...

External links

The essay readable on the web
including a revision-history, 1998–2000. 1998 essays American essays Computer science books Books about free software Essays about computing O'Reilly Media books Software development philosophies Software engineering papers Software project management Essays by Eric S. Raymond Works about the information economy {{essay-stub

Citations

In popular culture

See also

References

External links