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Looking at the self-organization and success of the open source community of block chain from the perspective of hacker culture

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Open source brings trust, freedom and efficiency. The hackers mentioned in this article refer to genius inventors, problem solvers and technical experts. "Personal popularity within the community" is a key driver of the success of the open source communit

"Respect your ability. Cherish and defend your freedom." "-- Robert anson heinlein

Self-organization and success of blockchain open source community from the perspective of hacker culture

Article: li hua

Source: chain smell

Original book by Eric Stephen Raymond

In the block chain field, open source more often means that the code can be publicly accessible. Open source brings "trust". At a deeper level, open source is a way of developing software that is intended to bring "freedom" and "efficiency."

Open source isn't just about being able to see code, it's about being able to use it -- and that's the real magic, or power, of open source.

"The Cathedral and The Bazaar" is an excellent introduction to The culture of open source, also known as The declaration of independence of The open source movement. The author, Eric Steven Raymond, one of the leading leaders of the open source movement, tells us about the hacker culture behind the open source idea, analyzes why the marketplace model works, and summarizes some of the business models for open source development.

The Cathedral and The Bazaar.

This paper is an extract of the book cathedral and bazaar. Hopefully, this will help us think about how the blockchain open source community is self-organizing, and how that organization is likely to succeed.

Keep in mind that the open source community doesn't just open source code; it's a gift-culture marketplace that requires passion, intelligence, and hard work.

Cathedrals and bazaars by Eric Stephen Raymond

A brief history of hacker culture

For years, the Internet's original and dynamic advocates have pursued, implemented, and cherished open source ideas. These people are proud to call themselves "hackers." By hacker, I don't mean today's overused computer criminals, but genius inventors, problem solvers and technologists. A saboteur who USES a network to break into someone else's system should be called a cracker.

The origin of the hacker culture time can be roughly positioning in 1961, that year, the Massachusetts institute of technology has the first PDP - 1 (program data processor (1), the technical model railroad club this machine as their favorite toys, science and technology and developed a series of programming tools, slang and cultural atmosphere until today still discernible.

In 1982, Richard Matthew Stallman (also known in the open source community as "RMS"), an icon of MIT's AI lab, began reconstructing an entire UNIX clone in C and releasing it for free, known as the GUN operating system. GUN quickly became the focus of hacking. Indeed, for the next decade or so, stallman's free software foundation largely defined the public ideology of hacker culture.

Richard stallman

When Linus Benedict Torvalds began developing a free UNIX kernel for the 386 machine in 1991, he quickly found success and attracted Internet hackers, who helped him develop Linux: a full-featured UNIX with source code that was free and redistributable. This time, Linux and the Internet have brought hacker culture from the fringes of public consciousness to its current prominence, and it has begun to reshape the world of commercial software in its own right.

The most important feature of Linux is not technical, but sociological.

Before Linux was developed, everyone thought that if the software was as complex as an operating system, you had to have a small, tightly interactive team, with centralized management and rigorous processes, like a cathedral built by experts. This was and still is a typical development model.

Linux, on the other hand, has taken an entirely different path almost from the start, with its development more like the haphazard work of a large number of volunteers collaborating only over the Internet. In terms of quality, it doesn't have strict standards or a strong organization to manage them. It just follows a simple, somewhat naive strategy: publish every week and get hundreds of users' feedback over the next few days. Linux has created a Darwinian mechanism of natural selection, in which developers are selected for various software modifications.

To everyone's surprise, this approach works very well. By the end of 1993, Linux was on a par with many commercial UNIX systems in terms of stability and reliability and could support far more software than commercial UNIX, and some commercial applications were beginning to consider porting to Linux.

In the late 1990s, the center of hackerdom's activity was the development of Linux and the promotion of the Internet. When the Internet went mainstream, hacker culture began to gain respect and political influence. In 1994 and 1995, the Clipper proposal to bring strong encryption algorithms under the control of the United States government collapsed because of a massive outcry from hackers. In 1996, hackers mobilized a broad coalition that led to the repeal of the communications compliance act, which blocked government censorship of the Internet.

With the success of the communications compliance act, hacker culture has moved from history to the present.

2. Why does the bazaar model work?

In the Linux community, instead of the quiet, religious cathedralism of architecture, it is more like a chaotic bazaar, open almost to chaos, full of different plans and methods, and a stable and consistent operating system is born.

Why didn't the Linux world break apart in chaos, but grow stronger and stronger at a rate the cathedral builders could not have imagined?

In fact, the open source development marketplace model really works. Eric ramon sums up why the marketplace model works from Linux and the popclient open source project he runs:

Why is the average quality of original software in the Linux community so high? Because good software often comes from the individual needs of the developer. But in the cathedral mode, too many software developers don't need or love the software they're working on. They make programming a chore, just for a paycheck.

It is more feasible than elsewhere to find code written well enough by others from the tete-byte open source of the Linux world, and Shared code makes code reuse easier. One important characteristic of great programmers is "constructive laziness." it's much easier to start with a partially viable solution than from scratch.

With enough beta testers and developer partners, almost any problem in the software will show up quickly, and then someone will fix it. This is what the authors call the Linux law, and it explains the key difference between the cathedral model and the bazaar model:

From the point of view of cathedral builders, bugs are tricky and hard to spot, requiring months of careful scrutiny before any confidence can be given to release. And the longer the gap between releases, the more disappointment is inevitable if the release isn't perfect.

For market pattern is completely different, many users of open source projects is itself a hacker, because you can get the source code, the hackers can very effectively shorten the exhaust time wrong, as long as give them a little bit of encouragement, they will help you to find the problem, give advice and help to improve the code, these do a lot more faster than they are.

If you want to improve code quality quickly and eliminate errors effectively, treating users as development partners is the easiest way to deal with complexity.

Developers and testers have mismatched mindsets for programs, with programmers looking from the inside out and testers looking from the outside in. Open source breaks this dilemma, and since everyone has real source code, it's easy for both sides to develop a Shared expression and communicate effectively. In fact, a bug report that describes only externally visible symptoms is a far cry from an analytical bug report that relates directly to the source code.

"Brooks's law", "on a project has been postponed to increase manpower, more delay will only make the project", it points out the traditional software development on the organizational structure of the fundamental problem: as the growth of the number of developers, project complexity and communication costs increase as the square of the number, but work will only be a linear growth. In open source projects, peripheral developers actually work on discrete, parallel subtasks, and Brooks overhead is only found in the small core team.

That's the main reason why the Linux marketplace model works, and this approach to open source development is really Linus's smartest and most valuable achievement. This approach has allowed thousands of developers scattered around the world, in their spare time, to craft a world-class operating system just through the fragile collaboration of the Internet.

How to achieve success in the open source community

What are the prerequisites for the marketplace model to work?

First, obviously, you can't implement a marketplace model from scratch. From the very beginning, the developer community needed something to run and test. The program doesn't have to be great at this point, but it does have to be: 1. 2. Convince potential co-developers that the software can evolve into something great for the foreseeable future.

Second, in order to build a development community, you need to attract people and get them interested in what you're doing, so the personality traits of the project coordinator or leader are important; In addition, whether the coordinator has excellent original design ability may not be the decisive factor, but whether he can recognize the good ideas of others must be the most critical factor.

Next, and perhaps most importantly, the Linux open source community succeeds because it creates an efficient "egoboo" market. Egoboo is short for "ego boosting," which stands for "the promotion of an individual's reputation in a group" : Linux hackers are working on projects within the open source community, not for the classic sense of economic value, but for the intangibles of self-gratification and hacker prestige.

Some people call this motivation "altruism", but actually "altruism" itself is the external expression of the altruist's self-satisfaction, it is some kind of "egoism" which is not aware of. Therefore, the Linux world operation in many ways like a free market, or as an ecological system composed of many selfish individual, each individual in the system are the pursuit of their own utility maximization, in the process of the symbiotic, establish a self-correcting ability of natural order, this order is elegant and efficient than any centralized planning.

The egoboo market ties the self-interest of a hacker as firmly as possible to a difficult task and goal, and achieves the goal with the continuous cooperation of all.

The hacker culture is the real driver for creating an effective egoboo market that leads to the success of the open source community, so in the next section, we discuss the hacker's "gift culture," which presents a culture in which participants gain prestige/reputation in the competition by giving their time, energy, and creativity.

Most patterns of human organization are designed to accommodate scarcity and scarcity. The simplest form of organization is a command system in which scarce goods are distributed centrally and backed by force; The most common organizational model is the exchange economy, where scarce goods are distributed primarily through trade and resource cooperation. Most people have both and understand how they interact.

However, there is another organizational model that most people don't know much about: gift culture. Gift culture is not an adaptation to material scarcity, it is an adaptation to material abundance. Note that abundance makes command relationships difficult to maintain and exchange relationships meaningless. So in a gift culture, social status (the human race for social status has a natural drive, rooted in the human heart through evolution) is not determined by what you control, but by what you give.

Why is this gift-giving culture reflected in hacker culture as "gaining prestige"? The main reason is that the gifts given by hackers are very complicated, and their value is hard to evaluate compared with other gifts. In addition, while most gift cultures have compromises, such as clan alliances, there are no such compromises in open source cultures, meaning that there is no other way to gain status than peer prestige.

Therefore, the way to obtain social status in the gift culture and the particularity of hackers' gifts make hackers pursue popularity among their peers, which is the most basic incentive for them.

In addition to being an incentive, prestige is also a way to attract attention and cooperation, which is perhaps the only way in the pure gift economy; In addition, if the gift economy and the exchange economy and the command system are interconnected, then popularity may spread from one environment to the other, allowing hackers to gain higher status in the other.

This is the "prestige" drive of open source development itself, and the key to the success of the open source community.

Finally, it should be mentioned briefly that creative products gain more reputation than incremental improvements to existing software products. It is easier to fill gaps in the field than to compete with mature projects. Making a contribution to an existing project is easier to attract attention than starting a new one. As a result, open source projects tend to fill functional gaps in frontier areas (some of the most successful projects become category killers), and globally, "category killers" and "fill the gap" are the general trend in the development of open source projects.

Fourth, the profit mechanism of open source development

The marketplace model works for software development, but how can it survive in a real exchange economy? In other words, how does this model make money?

The first thing to note is that computer programs have two different economic values: sales value and use value. The sale value is its value as a tradable good, and the use value is its economic value as a tool, as a productivity multiplier.

There has been a tendency to assume that software has a batch-value feature, that is, that most developers are paid by the value of software sales, and that the investment in software development is proportional to the value of software sales. In reality, however, this understanding is false. The code written for sale is only the tip of the programming iceberg, and much of the work that pays programmers is "maintenance."

In other words, the software industry is largely a service industry, and value for use is the main driver of software development. In moving from closed source to open source, it is only the value of sales that is at stake, not the value of use that really matters.

If open source development is more efficient and faster than closed source development, as discussed earlier, we should be able to continue funding open source development solely on the basis of use value. In his book, Eric Outlines five economic models for open source development, and thinks there will be more to come:

Software is free, service charges.It is also described as delivering razors and selling blades. Open source can have a powerful market effect. Open source software is to capture the market for services. This is what Red Hat and other Linux publishers do: what they really sell is not the software, but the added value they offer.

The software is free and the brand charges.You can open source a software technology, keep its test suite or compatibility standards, and then sell brand certifications. If a company's product is certified, their implementation of the technology is compatible with other products certified by the brand.

The software is free and the content is paid for.Imagine a service like stock quote subscription, where the value is not on the client side or the server side, but in providing objective and reliable information, so you can sell content subscriptions with open source software. The market also expands naturally when hackers port clients to new platforms.

Charge now, free in the future.Distribute software source code under a closed license, but the closed terms have expired. The benefit of this model is that it convinces customers that the product is customizable and always available because they have the source code that the open source community can take over.

Occupy the market.Use open source software to establish or maintain a market position for proprietary software. The most common form is to open source client software to help sell server-side software.

Despite the widespread myth that hackers are hostile to the market, most hackers are happy to work with the business world. It is a delicate and interesting question to ask what is the real cause of hackers' dissatisfaction with direct-fee type licenses.

The first reason has to do with "equivalence," where most open source developers hope that no one will profit from a privileged position. The second reason has to do with unintended consequences. Restrictions on the use/sale/modification/distribution of software can cast a legal shadow over some activities, such as the release of open source software.

Last but not least, if a license is designed to capture sales value, it usually makes it legally impossible for a project to branch. This is something that hackers would never agree to, which is why Sun's community source license schemes for Java and Jini are generally rejected by the open source community.

No one in the hacker community wants to see a project split into competing development lines, and people don't want to use branch power until they have to, but if someone tries to take it away, that's a very dangerous sign.

These three reasons explain some of the terms in the definition of "open source" that express the common understanding of the hacker community and are key features of standard licenses such as GPL and BSD.

Five, hacker attitude

The culture of hacking and hacking has led to the open source movement, and understanding the spirit of hacking is key to understanding why the open source model works and how the open source community can succeed. And for anyone who wants to work and live in the future, it makes sense to know some hacker culture.

Another interesting thing is that the hacker spirit is not limited to the software culture. The nature of hackers is independent of what they do. People apply the hacker attitude to other things, like electronics or music, science or art. The hacker's attitude may include the following:

That the world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved. To be a hacker, you must have a basic sense of excitement about problem solving, honing skills, and intellectual challenges.

You have to believe that the creative mind is an incredibly valuable limited resource, that the thinking time of other hackers is so valuable that it's almost your moral obligation to share information, solve problems and give solutions to other hackers so that they can solve new problems.

Believing in boredom and boredom is not only bad, it is harmful.

Freedom is good. Wherever there is a tendency toward authoritarianism, you have to fight it so they don't oppress you and other hackers. Abusers of authority are strong on censorship and secrecy. They distrust voluntary cooperation and information-sharing. They prefer cooperation under their control. To act like a hacker, have an intuitive aversion to censorship, secrecy and the use of force or deception.

Attitude is no substitute for ability. To be a hacker, you need intelligence, practice, dedication and hard work.

Against these points, are you a hacker?

Eric Stephen ramon dedicated "cathedral and bazaar" to Robert anson heinlein, a great science fiction writer, and opened the book with a quote from heinlein.

It goes like this: "respect your ability, cherish and defend your freedom." Let's close this article with this sentence.

Silver block rhythm BlockBeats reminded, according to the circ and other five departments issued in August 2018 on the guard against in the name of the "virtual currency" "block chain" illegal fund-raising risk warning "file, please the public rationality block chain, don't blindly believe in reduction commitment, set up correct concept of money and investment philosophy, effectively raise the risk consciousness; To the illegal crime clue that discovers, can report to concerned branch actively reflect.

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