The Cathedral and the Bazaar

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>]

A friend sent this to me, it's strangely relevant to our recent
discussions :) 

http://www.ccil.org/~esr/writings/cathedral.html


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.