The Cathedral and the Bazaar (abbreviated CatB) 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. Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957), often referred to as ESR, is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the present maintainer of the Jargon File (also known as The New Hackers Dictionary). Though the Jargon File established his original reputation within hacker... Software engineering (SE) is the practice of creating and maintaining software applications by applying technologies and practices from engineering, computer science, project management, application domains and other fields. ... The Linux kernel is a free software Unix-like operating system kernel that was begun by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and subsequently improved with the assistance of developers around the world. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... Fetchmail is a utility found on some Unix-like systems used to retrieve e-mail from a remote POP3, IMAP, ETRN or ODMR mail server to the users local system. ... The Linux Kongress is an annual two-day conference of Linux developers from around the world. ... May 27 is the 147th day (148th in leap years) of the year in the Gregorian calendar, with 218 days remaining. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1999 (MCMXCIX) was a common year starting on Friday, and was designated the International Year of Older Persons by the United Nations. ... A manifesto is a public declaration of principles and intentions, often political in nature. ... The open source movement is an offshoot of the free software movement that advocates open-source software as an alternative label for free software, primarily on pragmatic rather than philosophical grounds. ...

Cover of the paperback revised edition of the book including this and other essays by Raymond

The essay contrasts two different free software development models: Cathedral and the Bazaar book cover This work is copyrighted. ... Cathedral and the Bazaar book cover This work is copyrighted. ... This article is about Free Software as defined by the sociopolitical Free Software movement; for information on software distributed without charge, see freeware. ...

• 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. A cathedral is a Christian church building, specifically of a denomination with an episcopal hierarchy, such as the Anglican, Catholic and some Lutheran churches, which serves as the central church of a diocese, and thus as a bishops seat. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... A developer can be one of: A software developer, one who programs computers or designs the system to match the requirements of a systems analyst. ... This article is about the text editor. ... The GNU Compiler Collection (usually shortened to GCC) is a set of programming language compilers produced by the GNU Project. ... The Grand Timcheh of Qoms Bazaar. ... Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of Linux. ... Fetchmail is a utility found on some Unix-like systems used to retrieve e-mail from a remote POP3, IMAP, ETRN or ODMR mail server to the users local system. ... A computer bug is an error, flaw, mistake, failure, or fault in a computer program that prevents it from working as intended, or produces an incorrect result. ... Linuss law, named after Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, states that given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow. More formally: Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. ...

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. ^{[citation needed]} Netscape Communications Corporation was the publisher of the Netscape Navigator web browser as well as many other internet and intranet client and server software products. ... Open-sourcing is the act of releasing previously proprietary software under an open source/free software license. ... Netscape Communicator was a proprietary Internet suite produced by Netscape Communications Corporation. ... Mozilla logo Mozilla Firefox is a computer term that has had many different uses, though all of them have been related to Netscape Communications Corporation and its related application software. ...

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. Proprietary software is software that has restrictions on using and copying it, usually enforced by a proprietor. ... The Halloween documents is the name used outside Microsoft for a series of confidential memoranda on potential strategies related to Open source software and to Linux in particular. ...

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. Wikipedia (IPA: [] or []) is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia. ... Nupedia was a Web-based encyclopedia whose articles were written by experts and licensed as free content. ... 1913 advertisement for the 11th edition, with the slogan When in doubt — look it up in the Encyclopædia Britannica The Encyclopædia Britannica (properly spelled with æ, the ae-ligature) was first published in 1768–1771 as The Britannica was an important early English-language general encyclopedia and is still...

When O'Reilly published the book in 1999, it achieved another distinction by being the first complete and commercially distributed book published under an open source document license. Programming Perl is a classic OReilly book. ... Open Publication License or OPL is a license used for creating free and open publications created by the Open Content Project. ...

References

• Eric S. Raymond (1999). The Cathedral & the Bazaar. O'Reilly. hardcover ISBN 1565927249, October 1999; paperback ISBN 0596001088, January 2001. – includes "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", "Homesteading the Noosphere", "The Magic Cauldron", and "Revenge of the Hackers"

Homesteading the Noosphere, an essay written by Eric S. Raymond about the social workings of Open Source software development, follows up on his influential The Cathedral and the Bazaar. The essay concerns issues of project ownership and transfer, as well as investigating possible anthropological roots of the gift culture in...

External links

• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (original essay, for reading online)
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (PostScript version, for printing)
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O'Reilly Books page)
• Open Source Software Development as a Special Type of Academic Research (Critique of Vulgar Raymondism) (Nikolai Bezroukov, First Monday, vol 4 no 10, October 1999)
  • Response to Nikolai Bezroukov (Eric S. Raymond, October 1999)
• A Second Look at the Cathedral and the Bazaar (Nikolai Bezroukov, First Monday, vol 4 no 12, December 1999)
• Bad Linux Advocacy FAQ (FAQ that addresses Linux advocacy issues)