The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Author:

Eric T. Raymond

Available at:

access to almost the entirety of the evolving book: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Description:

(adapted from Raymond‚Äôs own summary, posted at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_3/raymond/): Raymond anatomizes a successful open-source project that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. He discusses these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the “cathedral” model of most of the commercial world versus the “bazaar” model of the Linux world. The former approach reflects the existing structure of proprietary software makers, which employs large erections of closed code that can only be debugged in-house once the gravity of a given bug reaches a threshold high enough to deem its correction. The ‚Äúbazaar‚Äù model describes software development in the open source hacker movement, which allows for an entire community to offer editions and patches for bugs due to the code‚Äôs openness. Raymond shows that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. He then makes a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” suggests productive analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and concludes with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.