The Cathedral and the Bazaar
- Author: Eric S. Raymond
- Publisher: O’Reilly Media
- License: Open Publication License, version 2.0
- URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
- Amazon: Buy from Amazon
Book excerpt:
Book cover
First official presentation at the Linux Kongress.
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. I discuss 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. I show that these models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. I then make a sustained argument from the Linux experience for the proposition that “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”, suggest productive analogieswith other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.