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Cited by 2,915

The DOI matches its Crossref record.

The cathedral and the bazaar

Open access
Raymond, Eric·1999·Knowledge, Technology & Policy
DOI 10.1007/s12130-999-1026-0
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Abstract

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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Metadata

Authors
Raymond, E.
Venue
Knowledge, Technology & Policy
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
1999-09
Volume
12
Issue
3
Pages
23-49
ISSN
  • 0897-1986 (ISSN-L)
  • 1874-6314
DOI
10.1007/s12130-999-1026-0
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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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

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.