FastCompany: Inspired by Work: An Interview with Eric Raymond

“Most of the gurus who describe the changing nature of work
agree on some basic points: People do their best work when they’re
motivated by a sense of purpose. More and more work is becoming
teamwork, and small, committed teams tend to do the best work. In a
world of email, Web pages, and instant messaging, it’s never been
easier to work closely with people you’ve never met and who live in
places you’ve never visited. Put simply, we are developing some
radically new answers to some of the most fundamental issues about
work: why people work, how they work, and what they expect from
their work.”

“Eric S. Raymond, 41, has been thinking differently about
work — and working differently — for the past 15 years. He is a
provocative writer, an engaging speaker, and an accomplished
hacker. Most of all, he’s an influential evangelist for perhaps the
most important new phenomenon in software. Raymond is a
visible and vocal advocate of open-source software — a radically
different approach to software development that has produced, most
famously, the Linux operating system, the Apache Web server, and
the Perl scripting language.”

“What distinguishes open-source programs from other computer
applications is that the core technology — the underlying source
code — is totally visible and freely available to anyone who wants
it. There are no patents, no trade secrets, no
intellectual-property protections whatsoever. That’s because no one
person or company “owns” the software. A global, volunteer army of
programmers create the software. These people work hard to fix bugs
and develop new features mainly because they want to.”

Complete
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