The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an essay by Eric S. Raymond on software engineering methods, based on his observations of the Linux kernel development process and his experiences managing an open source project, fetchmail. It was first presented by the author at the Linux Kongress on May 27, 1997 and was published as part of a book of the same name in 1999. It is commonly regarded as the manifesto of the open source movement.

Related Topics:
Eric S. Raymond - Software engineering - Linux kernel - Open source - Fetchmail - Linux Kongress - May 27 - 1997 - 1999 - Manifesto - Movement

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The essay contrasts two different free software development models:

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• The Cathedral model, in which source code is available with each software release, but code developed between releases is restricted to an exclusive group of developers. GNU Emacs and GCC are presented as examples.
• The Bazaar model, in which the code is developed over the Internet in view of the public. Raymond credits Linus Torvalds, leader of the Linux kernel project, as the inventor of this process. He also provides anecdotal accounts of his implementation of this model for the fetchmail project.

The essay's central thesis is Raymond's proposition that Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow (which he terms Linus's law): if the source code is available for public testing, scrutiny, and experimentation, then bugs will be discovered at a rapid rate. In contrast, Raymond claims that an inordinate amount of time and energy must be spent hunting for bugs in the Cathedral model, since the working version of the code is available only to a few developers.

Related Topics:
Bug - Linus's law

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The essay helped convince most existing open source and free software projects to adopt Bazaar-style open development models, fully or partially — including GNU Emacs and GCC, the original Cathedral examples. Most famously, it also provided the final push for Netscape to open the source of Netscape Communicator and start the Mozilla project.

Related Topics:
Netscape - Open the source - Netscape Communicator - Mozilla

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Related Topics:
GNU - Richard Stallman

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The Cathedral is also the typical development model for proprietary software — with the additional restriction in that case that source code is usually not provided even with releases — and a common usage of the phrase "the Cathedral and the Bazaar" is to contrast proprietary with open source (Raymond has used it this way himself, e.g. in the Halloween Documents). However, the original essay concerns itself only with free software, and does not address proprietary development in any way at all.

Related Topics:
Proprietary software - Halloween Documents

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The terminology has been extended to describe non-software projects. Wikipedia is a Bazaar-style project, while Nupedia and the Encyclopædia Britannica are Cathedral-style projects.

Related Topics:
Wikipedia - Nupedia - Encyclopædia Britannica

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When O'Reilly published the book in 1999, it achieved another distinction by being the first complete and commercially distributed book published under a Creative Commons license.

Related Topics:
O'Reilly - Creative Commons

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