"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 (message), letter, a term paper, paper, an article (publishing), article, a pamphlet, and a s ...

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 R ...

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 and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

software development Software development is the process of designing and Implementation, implementing a software solution to Computer user satisfaction, satisfy a User (computing), user. The process is more encompassing than Computer programming, programming, wri ...

. 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 ...

" (1997). The essay examines issues of

project A project is a type of assignment, typically involving research or design, that is carefully planned to achieve a specific objective. An alternative view sees a project managerially as a sequence of events: a "set of interrelated tasks to be ...

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 archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, wh ...

roots of the gift culture in open source as contrasted with the exchange culture of

closed source Proprietary software is software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modi ...

software. Raymond also investigates the nature of the spread of open source into the untamed frontier of ideas he terms the

noosphere The noosphere (alternate spelling noösphere) is a philosophical concept developed and popularized by the biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky and philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Vernadsky defined the noosphere as the new s ...

, 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 social 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 ...

. He notes that a key motivation for open-source practitioners is their membership of and

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

within each project's "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'' and its

manga 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 history in earlier Japanese art. The term is used in Japan to refer to both comics ...

and

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

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"

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