I was cruising digg and found an article by Linux.com author Nathan Willis that describes problems with people who desire personal ownership over open source projects. The article made reference to the concept of Cathedral Thinking, which is something I hadn’t heard of before.
Some quick searching revealed that this appears to be the result of thoughts from Eric Raymond in his book titled: The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary. (Amazon) I’ve been on a website kick again recently so quickly looked at the bordering keywords and found that other common terms were bazaar thinking and also magic pony thinking. Magic pony thinking actually relates directly to my interest in ethical carbon offsetting.
So I picked up cathedralthinking.com. I was happy that I was able to go from registration to a fully themed and setup wordpress blog within 45 minutes. This included the server side account creation, dns updating, mysql database and user creation along with downloading, installing, and configuring the blog, also putting in appropriate SEO and google analytics plugins. It is amazing how quickly one can build an internet destination these days.
I’m not sure what will be there yet, but I have a feeling that the use of the term may grow a fair amount. I’m going to set up a google alert on the three keywords and then just post quick summary/quotes along with an outbound link. Once some traffic has built up, I’ll monetize with Adsense.
This should dominate the keywords, but also hopefully help people get a better understanding of what it means to think in this way.