The Cathedral and the Bazaar

I continue to become more interested in approaches to developing software the open source way. In our Ultralab community we are currently debating what constitutes true open source software, something Ultralab aspires to do, but we aren't there yet and there is lots yet to learn and comprehend.

I re-read the The Cathedral and the Bazaar, an interesting set of articles which explains Eric Steven Raymond's experience of modeling his own software development project on the Linux model of evolution. You might find it interesting too....

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.