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The cathedral and the bazaar
Open accessAbstract
I anatomize a successful open-source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some 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, representing most of the commercial world, 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.
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Citations
Cited by
The sharing economy: Why people participate in collaborative consumption
Hamari, J., Sjöklint, M., & Ukkonen, A. (2016) · Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.23552 · Cited by 3,439
Some Simple Economics of Open Source
Lerner, J., & Tirole, J. (2002) · The Journal of Industrial Economics · doi:10.1111/1467-6451.00174 · Cited by 2,355
Open source software and the “private-collective” innovation model: Issues for organization science
Hippel, E. V., & Krogh, G. V. (2003) · Organization Science · doi:10.1287/orsc.14.2.209.14992 · Cited by 2,145
Two case studies of open source software development: Apache and Mozilla
Mockus, A., Fielding, R. T., & Herbsleb, J. D. (2002) · ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · doi:10.1145/567793.567795 · Cited by 1,685
Hertel, G., Niedner, S., & Herrmann, S. (2003) · Research Policy · doi:10.1016/s0048-7333(03)00047-7 · Cited by 1,262
Metadata
- Authors
- Raymond, E.
- Venue
- Knowledge, Technology & Policy
- Published
- 1999-09
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 23-49
- ISSN
- 0897-1986 (ISSN-L)
- 1874-6314
- OpenAlex
- W2041114254
- Cited by
- 2,915
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 206.82
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- diamond
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
