Life & Wisdom Quote by Eric S. Raymond

Eric S. Raymond points to a fundamental shift in how complex software can be built. Linux did not arise from a tightly planned, centrally managed engineering effort. It grew from many hands making small, iterative changes, with coordination happening across mailing lists, patch exchanges, and shared archives. The emphasis on evolved signals a Darwinian process: contributions are proposed, tested in the wild, criticized, improved, or rejected, and the fittest code survives because it works, scales, or proves maintainable.

Calling the work casually hacked is provocative. It does not celebrate sloppiness; it celebrates an exploratory, bottom-up culture where tinkering, forking, and rapid feedback are normal. The casual beginning lowers the barrier to entry, inviting experimentation and diverse perspectives. What keeps this from devolving into chaos is transparency, social reputation, and a meritocratic review pipeline. Linus Torvalds and a network of maintainers act as selective filters, while the Internet amplifies peer review. Release early, release often and Linus’s Law (given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow) encapsulate the mechanism by which quality emerges from breadth of participation.

Coordination only through the Internet underscored the novelty in the 1990s: geographic dispersion was not a liability but a superpower. As bandwidth and tooling matured, this method proved faster at finding bugs, porting to new architectures, and integrating drivers than many proprietary shops. It challenged the assumption that only cathedral-style planning could produce robust systems, showing that a bazaar of contributors could match and surpass traditional UNIX vendors.

The statement also captures the cultural stakes of the open source movement ESR championed: openness as an engineering advantage, not merely an ethical stance. Linux’s evolution embodies a system where incentives align around learning in public, earning trust through code, and letting ideas compete on their merits. What began as casual hacking became a disciplined, self-correcting ecosystem precisely because the Internet made large-scale collaboration and scrutiny routine.