An explanation of The Cathedral vs. the Bazaar.

The following is an explanation of The Cathedral vs. the Bazaar.

The Cathedral vs. the Bazaar (or Cathedral and the Bazaar, abbreviated CatB), is an essay by Eric S. Raymond about methods of software engineering, based on his experiences developing the Linux kernel and managing the open source project, fetchmail. It contrasts the Cathedral and Bazaar models of software development.

The Cathedral method is where a small number of developers wok to develop a program in private. This process is not very efficient, however its advantage is that it allows a company to develop a product, market it, and make a profit, keeping their code proprietary. The profit motive encourages the development of limited use programs, which might otherwise never get written.

The Bazaar model is where a large number of programmers work together, publicly, to develop programs solely out of their own interest in doing so. The only way to do this is to use open source freeware. All of the programming is by necessity available to anyone, and none can be proprietary. The essay's argument is that "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Linus's Law). This simply means that the more programmers working on developing a certain program, the more efficient will be the development of the program.

One of the side effects of the Bazaar model is that it will almost certainly eliminate many private companies from the field, with the resulting economic effects. As Microsoft's "Halloween Document" illustrates, even the industry giant is worried about this. It will also greatly expand the library of free software, and make it impossibly for companies to charge excessive prices, or use monopolistic practices, for their software.

According to Eric Raymond there are 19 guidelines for creating open source software:
(Quoted from Eric S. Raymond (1999). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. O'Reilly. ISBN 1-56592-724-9. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/: )
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.
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.
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.
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.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents

The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (O'Reilly Linux) (Hardcover) by Donald Mitchell

http://www.ite.poly.edu/chapel_printable.htm

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

Eric S. Raymond (1999). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. O'Reilly. ISBN 1-56592-724-9. http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/