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The 'noosphere' of this essay's title is the territory of ideas, the space of all possible thoughts. What we see implied in hacker ownership customs is a Lockean theory of property rights in one subset of the noosphere, the space of all programs. Hence 'homesteading the noosphere', which is what every founder of a new open-source project does.

— Eric S. Raymond Homesteading the Noosphere (1998)

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More quotes by Eric S. Raymond

I publish this blog in part because I think it is my duty to speak taboo and unspeakable truths.

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997)

Barring the mythical portable-LISP-dialect-with-good-OS-bindings that has never existed, Python is about the most reasonable alternative there is for this kind of work.

Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1997)

At any sufficient scale, those who do not have automatic memory management in their language are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Eric S. Raymond (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.