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The Cathedral and the Bazaar
by Eric S. Raymond
$Date: 1998/02/04 15:28:32 $
Original: http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
Parody: The Circus Midget and the Fossilized Dinosaur Turd
I anatomize a successful free-software 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.
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