Saturday, October 06, 2007
The Cathedral & The Bazaar
For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about Eric Raymond's classic essay, "The Cathedral & The Bazaar". From his abstract: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 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.This paper is one of the seminal works of the open-source software movement. I'm not sure exactly how old it is, but I first came across is some time in the late 90s. If you haven't already read it, you should take a look now.
I believe that it encapsulates not only the core beliefs and values of the open-source movement (who brought you Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox, PHP, Apache, MySQL, and a very large portion of the other core technologies that power the internet), but also defines the value system of the leading creative minds of our culture in general. Although they're not open-source or Free (with a Big F), the various user-generated content sites that have largely redefined the media landscape are more or less an extension of the bazaar model (MySpace, Facebook, Youtube, blogs, etc).
It's a short read, but highly thought provoking, whether you work with software or not. Think about how the points it raises could apply to your line of business- because I guarantee they do.
Read it here.
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