Abstract
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some 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, representing 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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Eric Raymond is the co-founder of the Chester County InterLink (CCIL), which provides free Internet access to the residents of Chester County, Pennsylvania. He is the editor of The New Hacker’s Dictionary (MIT, 1991, 1993) and the author of a book of essays The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He is a member of the Merrill Lynch Technology Advisory Board and has hacked much widely used open source software. He has pursued undergraduate studies in philosophy and mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania but has never had a course in computer stuff.
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Raymond, E. The cathedral and the bazaar. Know Techn Pol 12, 23–49 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-999-1026-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12130-999-1026-0