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Press Release: September 27, 1999

Landmark Open Source Manifesto To Be Published

SEBASTOPOL, CA -- He calls himself an accidental revolutionary. Or an Open Source software evangelist. Salon Magazine called him a "hacker guru". But everyone agrees that his cataclysmic work The Cathedral and the Bazaar was the shot heard around the world. It catapulted Netscape into releasing their browser as open source, put Linus Torvalds on the cover of Forbes Magazine and Microsoft on the defensive, and helped Linux to rock the world of commercial software. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is the manifesto of the Open Source revolution.

Eric S. Raymond, the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, defines the Open Source movement and challenges both Open Source developers and business executives to take a hard look at the business consequences of the Internet.

"The advent of the Internet is driving some drastic changes in the software industry. We usually think of dramatically lower communications and transaction costs as the Internet's major value (and challenge!). That's the noisy, well-hyped part of the Internet revolution," Raymond says. "But there's something else going on, as well. The Internet's engineering tradition, its native culture, and even its folklore are turning out to hold lessons that are going to be critical for the creativity and software-intensive economy of the coming century."

The Cathedral and the Bazaar not only made history, it maps the future. O'Reilly & Associates plans to bring out Cathedral and the Bazaar (together with other pivotal works by Raymond) for the first time in print, in hardcover, in late Oct. "Open Source isn't just a subject of interest to software developers. It's a reflection of the way the Internet is changing the rules for an industry that now affects virtually everyone, " says Tim O'Reilly, president and publisher.

The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary, includes a foreword by Bob Young and has received advance praise from a wide range of business leaders, hackers, and critics, including Guy Kawasaki, Tom Peters, Brian Behlendorf, and Linus Torvalds. Open Source is a crucial competitive advantage in the Internet age and The Cathedral and the Bazaar shines a light on the crest of this next technological wave.

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The Cathedral & the Bazaar
Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary

By Eric S. Raymond
Foreword by Bob Young, Chairman and CEO, Red Hat Inc.
1st Edition November 1999
Hardcover, 1-56592-724-9, 288 pages, $19.95 (US$)

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