Bibliography/The Cathedral and the Bazaar

= Bibliography/The Cathedral and the Bazaar =

Details

 * Title: The Cathedral and the Bazaar
 * Author(s): Eric Raymond
 * URL: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

Description
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.

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