The Cathedral and the Bazaar

This is the book who had convinced the big guys on Netscape to officially join the free software movement by releasing the source code to Navigator 5.0. In The Cathedral & the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond anatomize his successful open source project, fetchmail, that was run as a deliberate test of some surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux. The book discuss these theories in terms of two fundamentally different development styles, the “cathedral” model of most of the commercial world versus the “bazaar” model of the Linux world, which both models derive from opposing assumptions about the nature of the software-debugging task. The Cathedral & the Bazaar is a must for anyone who cares about the future of the computer industry or the dynamics of the information economy. Already, billions of dollars have been made and lost based on the ideas in this book. Its conclusions will be studied, debated, and implemented for years to come. According to Bob Young, “This is Eric Raymond’s great contribution to the success of the open source revolution, to the adoption of Linux-based operating systems, and to the success of open source users and the companies that supply them.” The interest in open source software development has grown enormously in the past year. This revised and expanded paperback edition includes new material on open source developments in 1999 and 2000. Raymond’s clear and effective writing style accurately describing the benefits of open source software has been the key to its success.