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Kansas City Linux User Group

[Tux with a branding iron]

The Cathedral and the Bazaar

If you are interested in starting an Open Source project or just want to know why it works so well, then this is a must read. I've read it twice and enjoyed it both times although I am not a programmer. Raymond has a quick witted easy style to his writing that makes even technical material enjoyable. If you have read anything from the Jargon File you will be familiar with Eric S. Raymond.

Raymond examines the two styles of open source development. Cathedral style is used by projects like Emacs, NetBSD and many of the GNU tools. That style is indicated by a small core of developers or one developer that closely control source code. Although the code is open, patches and additional features are not normally accepted by those outside the core. Releases are infrequent and wait for very stable versions. Bazaar style is used by Linux, fetchmail and apache. This style is characterized by rapid development and release cycles. Users are incouraged to submit bug reports, feature requests and patches. In bazaar style, if a project stagnates or the developer loses interest, he is likely to hand off the project to a competent, dedicated co-developer.

Raymond uses his experience developing fetchmail and Linus Torvalds' Linux throughout as examples of the bazaar and its possibility of success. He draws on popular sources like Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month and others to back up his theories about open source development. My favorite quote from the book:

The bazaar method, by harnessing the full power of the egoless programming effect, strongly mitigates the effect of Brooks's Law. The principle behind Brooks's Law is not repealed, but given a large developer population and cheap communications its effects can be swamped by competing nonlinearities that are not otherwise visible. This resembles the relationship between Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the older system is still valid at low energies, but if you push mass and velocity high enough you get surprises like nuclear explosions or Linux.

So if you are interested in Open Source in practice or theory and how/why it works this is mandatory reading.