The Cathedral and the Bazaar

The Cathedral and the Bazaar is an article written by Eric S. Raymond describing the analogy of closed source, Cathedral, and open source, bazaar, development. Eric uses his own personal experience of developing and maintaining an open source project called "fetchmail" to further illustrate his analogies.

I feel that this is an excellent article for those that are new to the open source concept and wish to join its community. It lists a lot of fundamental points to help reduce any cultural-shocks when experience new environments, especially those that have been used to the closed source model. Two points that I feel help identify the difference between closed source and open source and which also shows open source as a successful paradigm are:

"6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging."

"7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers."

The reason I chose these two points was because they revolve around the fact that the best success is to be non discriminating against any type of input. This approach will not alienate anyone that tries to contribute and as a result, you are rewarded with more innovative ideas that will help further improve your product. Also, I feel that frequent releasing will lead to better testing and a more stable product because when releasing in small increments, it is always easier to pinpoint where bugs arise as you only need to look at the newly added segments as compared to entire sections of code.

After reading the article, I better understand how the open source community interact with each other as well as why having an open source project would be so much more successful. Because the developers that contribute to open source projects are volunteering, I feel that they are more passionate about their offerings, otherwise they would not be contributing at all. They are also more relaxed and will most likely take more chances in radical ideas as this is a hobby and they would not lose much if it does not pan out. These factors help innovate project further past any closed source rivals.