The Cathedral and the Bazaar

Eric S. Raymond argues that open-source software can be developed effectively in a "bazaar" style, with open participation and frequent releases, rather than the "cathedral" style of centrally planned development, and he supports this with the history of his fetchmail project. He describes how he took over the popclient POP3 client from Carl Harris in June 1996, after building on fetchpop code by Seung-Hong Oh, and how a need for automatic reply-address rewriting drove the work. The article's central claim, stated as "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow," holds that open review makes bugs easy to find and fix.