Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric S. Raymond

Linux doesn’t just “develop” here; it mutates. Raymond’s word choice - “evolved” and “casually hacked” - is a quiet rebuke to the managed, credentialed myth of how serious software is supposed to be made. The intent is to normalize what once sounded like heresy: that a sprawling operating system can emerge from improvised collaboration rather than corporate command-and-control. “Casually” is doing double duty. It flatters the hacker ethos (playful tinkering as a virtue) while implying that the real magic wasn’t heroics, but frictionless iteration.

The subtext is a theory of legitimacy. Raymond is staking a claim that authority can be earned after the fact, through outcomes, not granted upfront by titles, budgets, or org charts. The “huge numbers of volunteers” line reads like a democratic boast, but it’s also a strategic reframing of risk: if everyone can touch the code, then bugs become communal property and improvements can arrive from anywhere. Coordination “only through the Internet” positions the network as an institution in its own right - a new kind of factory floor where norms, reputation, and version control replace managers and meetings.

Context matters: this is the late-90s moment when open source needed an origin story persuasive to businesses and skeptics. Raymond’s phrasing turns what detractors called chaos into a competitive advantage: decentralization as design, informality as scalability, and volunteerism as a production model that could out-run proprietary software’s bottlenecks.