Next Previous Contents
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
by Eric S. Raymond
$Date: 1999/08/08 02:21:32 $
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some 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 analogies with other self-correcting systems of selfish agents, and conclude with some exploration of the implications of this insight for the future of software.
Next Previous Contents