The Cathedral and the Bazaar

From Dokeos

This page contains a very short summary of the Cathedral and the Bazaar, a book written by Eric S. Raymond. The complete Cathedral and Bazaar can be found at http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ . The original cathedral and bazaar text is about why open source development works so well, there are also some other essays about ownership and economic theories about open-source.

Linus Torvalds's style of development�release early and often, delegate everything you can,
be open to the point of promiscuity�came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building
here�rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing
agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who'd take submissions
from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a
succession of miracles. 
 
The fact that this bazaar style seemed to work, and work well, came as a distinct shock. 

1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch.

2. Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse).

3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. (Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month, Chapter 11)

4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you.

5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor.

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.

8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. I dub this: ``Linus's Law.

In Linus's Law, I think, lies the core difference underlying the cathedral-builder and
bazaar styles. In the cathedral-builder view of programming, bugs and development
problems are tricky, insidious, deep phenomena. It takes months of scrutiny by a
dedicated few to develop confidence that you've winkled them all out. Thus the long
release intervals, and the inevitable disappointment when long-awaited releases are
not perfect. 
 
In the bazaar view, on the other hand, you assume that bugs are generally shallow
phenomena�or, at least, that they turn shallow pretty quickly when exposed to a
thousand eager co-developers pounding on every single new release. Accordingly
you release often in order to get more corrections, and as a beneficial side effect
you have less to lose if an occasional botch gets out the door.

9. Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around.

10. If you treat your beta-testers as if they're your most valuable resource, they will respond by becoming your most valuable resource.

11. The next best thing to having good ideas is recognizing good ideas from your users. Sometimes the latter is better.

12. Often, the most striking and innovative solutions come from realizing that your concept of the problem was wrong.

13. ``Perfection (in design) is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but rather when there is nothing more to take away.

14. Any tool should be useful in the expected way, but a truly great tool lends itself to uses you never expected.

15. When writing gateway software of any kind, take pains to disturb the data stream as little as possible�and never throw away information unless the recipient forces you to!

16. When your language is nowhere near Turing-complete, syntactic sugar can be your friend.

17. A security system is only as secure as its secret. Beware of pseudo-secrets. ("Security by obscurity" doesn't work.)

18. To solve an interesting problem, start by finding a problem that is interesting to you.

19: Provided the development coordinator has a communications medium at least as good as the Internet, and knows how to lead without coercion, many heads are inevitably better than one. ...