As said in the video, my close friend Kalle Dalheimer introduced me to the open source movement (both philosophical and technical) in the mid 90s of the last century and he even bought me this book. I had the pleasure to meet Eric when he was in Germany and read a lot from Volker Grassmuck (most in German) as well, who worked on the open source idea at that time.

My feeling is that you need to at least read some of the essays in The Cathedral And The Bazaar if you want to understand what fundamentally changed since the late 90s in the web and with collaboration and opening up sources and ideas to the public. Most ideas of mass collaboration and decentralized communications and development have their roots in the open source movement.

Since at least 2001 I was thinking and talking and even working on and about the idea of porting open source to other creative processes. Today I see that this happened. And when I started blogging back in 2003 it was mainly because I was intrigued by the collaboration and openness and knowledge-sharing.

Yes, the cluetrain manifesto was for many of us important. But this book was first - and cluetrain wouldn't have been possible without The Bazaar....

And I have to admit further (if you let me do some advertising) that my own (only German) book about selling and story telling was heavily inspired by reading all this open source stuff...