Notes from "The Art of Unix Programming"

Some quotes from the book -

For this historical sketch, it will be sufficient to note the impact of the first one's central formula: “Given a sufficiently large number of eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”.

For most hackers and almost all nonhackers, “Free software because it works better” easily trumped “Free software because all software should be free”.

Being smarter than anyone else about important but narrow issues of software design didn't prevent us from being almost completely blind about the consequences of interactions between technology and economics that were happening right under our noses. Even the most perceptive and forward-looking thinkers in the Unix community were at best half-sighted. The lesson for the future is that over-committing to any one technology or business model would be a mistake — and maintaining the adaptive flexibility of our software and the design tradition that goes with it is correspondingly imperative.