Success Quote by Eric S. Raymond

Raymond is smuggling a moral argument into what reads like a technical postmortem: the “critical factor” isn’t genius code or venture backing, it’s a value system with a delivery mechanism. By pairing “give the sources away for free” with “in accordance with the hacker ethic,” he frames openness not as charity but as discipline - an identity-based commitment that reliable builders choose even when they could hoard advantage. The line quietly reframes “free” as a strategic virtue: you don’t merely release code, you invite scrutiny, forks, patches, and reputational stakes.

The subtext is classic Raymond: markets and meritocracy can align if you remove friction. Open source succeeds because it turns distribution into collaboration, and collaboration into quality control. “Able to distribute them over the Internet” is the other half of the fuse. The ethic existed before the web; the network turns it from a campus-scale tradition into an accelerant. He’s pointing at a historical hinge moment: once sharing is cheap and instantaneous, the old software model - scarcity, controlled access, gated updates - starts to look less like professionalism and more like needless drag.

There’s also a quiet polemic aimed at skeptics who treat openness as naive. Raymond casts it as pragmatic realism: when the cost of copying approaches zero, the competitive edge moves upstream from possession to participation. The sentence is doing ideological work while wearing the sober mask of “critical factor,” arguing that culture plus infrastructure can beat hierarchy plus secrecy.