Cathedral and the Bazaar

A detailed Summary of Cathedral and the Bazaar


In his essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond says:

Perhaps in the end the open-source culture will triumph not because cooperation is morally right or software "hoarding" is morally wrong...but simply because the closed-source world cannot win an evolutionary arms race with open-source communities that can put orders of magnitude more skilled time into a problem.

Probably the best way to begin, is by giving a little background into the man who wrote this quote. While researching this paper, the following quote was found. It seems to describe Eric Raymond well.

Eric S. Raymond is a wandering anthropologist and troublemaking philosopher who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and has been wondering whether he should regret it ever since.

He has been involved with Internet and part of the hacker culture since the 1970's. Several of his projects are now carried by all of the major Linux distributions. This includes fetchmail, and his contribution to GNU emacs. Also, his essay, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is considered to be the catalyst that lead to Netscape opening up its browser's source code.

In some ways the first half of the opening quote is rather meaningless. It seems unfat


If the source is ugly (and as Ken Thompson pointed out, some parts of Linux are) additional bugs could be easily introduced by fixing an existing one. Rewriting, not fixing, is a more viable option here.

When you start community-building, what you need to be able to present is a plausible promise. Your program doesn't have to work particularly well. It can be crude, buggy, incomplete, and poorly documented. What it must not fail to do is convince potential co-developers that it can be evolved into something really neat in the foreseeable future.

This is more proof that large organizations are seeing the benefits if the OS movement. And, as more organization jump on board, others will follow, even if it's just for fear of being left behind. Of course, whether HP stands behind that statement and supports these ideals remains to be seen.

But the cathedral has its own set of problems. Companies may fail, cut off low-performing product lines or be acquired by companies that chop out competing products, which leaves customers in the lurch. I'm hoping that the hybrid model will give us the best of both worlds.

In a press release released by Netscape, Jim Barksdale, president and chief executive officer said:



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Approximate Word count 2188
Approximate Pages 9 250 words per page double spaced

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