The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Open-source software development

The internet’s connective tissue is built with free and open-source software. Data centers run various Linux distributions. You can browse the web with Mozilla Firefox. It’s highly likely your company stores data in one of many open-source databases such as Postgres and MySQL. Maybe you have Lucene indexes served up in a distributed cluster by Solr. When you reflect on what you can download and use for free while also receiving continual updates from skilled engineers that contribute to a hobby, it’s quite staggering

Book: The Cathedral and the Bazaar

However, the watershed moment for this model was the development of the Linux operating system. The Cathedral and the BazaarEric S. Raymond. The Cathedral and The Bazaar. O’Reilly & Associates, Inc., Sebastopol, CA, 2001. is an expansion of an essay of the same name that drew attention due to the radical ideas it shared for its time. Before Linux, many open-source software projects were carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation.

The title of the book comes from the two different software-development models that it covers:

• In the cathedral model, software is free and open source, but it is developed by the aforementioned hermit wizards. In the book, the GCC compiler is given as an example. These projects have long release intervals and are controlled tightly by the development team.
• In the bazaar model the entire world contributes and opens their development to the public, despite the chaos. They operate under the tenet that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” There’s less to lose if occasional issues slip out. Linux is described as the

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