Previous
Next
Table of Contents
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
by Eric S. Raymond
$Date: 1997/07/10 19:21:38 $
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 FSF and its imitators 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.
Previous
Next
Table of Contents