Over the past few days, I read The Cathedral & the Bazaar from my Safari Bookshelf. It was only the second book I have ever completely finished reading online. (The first was Stephen King’s Riding the Bullet, which of course had to be read online. I guess that makes The Cathedral & the Bazaar the first book I’ve ever read online when a printed copy was also available.)
[Aside: I’ve purchased and read other e-books, of course, but I don’t usually finish them. I find that I still don’t like reading books online. This is no fault of the e-books themselves, but simply the technology. Computer monitors, because they project light, are not as suitable for reading long texts as printed pages, which reflect light. Online news articles and other relatively short content are no problem, but book-length material can be hard on your eyes.]
I really enjoyed the author’s approach to the subject, the benefits of open source software. Eric S. Raymond, a well known Open Source evangelist (though some apparently prefer to think of him as an Open Source Jedi), leads the reader through a very analytical investigation of what Open Source is all about, how it evolved, what social norms it observes, and why it produces results that might seem counterintuitive to business people. The book contains a lot of detailed ethnograpical analysis, much of which builds a very strong moral case for Open Source.
The author, given his background, is far from impartial, but the book itself is remarkably objective. There are situations where it makes sense to keep the source a secret, Raymond concedes, but those are not typically for the reasons most business leaders cite. 
More than anything else, I enjoyed reading this book because it provided concrete inspiration for a course of action that I have been slowly drifting toward for a long time now. It’s time for me to get serious about “becoming a hacker,” as Raymond would put it. 
Fortunately, one of the appendices provides suggestions for doing just that. Ironically, I found that I have been going about it the exact opposite of the way Raymond recommends, which is to learn how to program first, how to use Unix (or Linux) next, and then learn HTML and other Web-related technologies. In my case, I learned HTML and Web-related technologies first, have been learning Linux over the past year, and am now feeling ready to start learning some programming languages. How was I to know that this approach was backwards?
One of the things Raymond recommends against, however, is learning proprietary languages, for obvious reasons. That is something I will certainly keep in mind as I delve into the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Programming, which seems to include a lot of information about Microsoft’s Visual Basic among the more worthy programming languages like C/C++ and Java. (Hey, I can always skip over the VB-specific chapters, right?)
Raymond says that a properly motivated, disciplined would-be hacker can expect to get a firm grasp of the basics in about 18 months (which, interestingly enough, is about the same amount of time it takes to become proficient in a martial art, which is another thing that Raymond and I share an affinity for). Applying that to my situation, if I start right away and remain diligent in my studies, I should expect to be a reasonably competent geek by the time I turn 30. That is, admittedly, a late start for someone seeking to become a hacker, but better late than never. I’ve been toddling toward geekdom ever since I bought my first computer; it’s time to make a solid commitment.
For me, then, the best thing to come out of Raymond’s book was a clear understanding of the roots of Open Source, because from those roots I can see where I can fit in as Open Source branches out. I don’t ever expect to make contributions on the same level as first-rate hackers like Raymond, but I identify solidly with his tribe and will do what I can to help it along.