Those who have Eric S. Raymond’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar might notice a similarity between von Hippel’s concept of the lead user and Raymond’s statement that “Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer’s personal itch.” The difference, however, is that Raymond was writing in the late 1990s, while von Hippel began developing his initial insights in the 1970s, and summarized them in The Sources of Innovation in 1988. In other words, von Hippel anticipated the theoretical framework of FOSS by well over two decades.
Linux.com :: Portrait: Eric von Hippel, user innovation, and FOSS
