The Cathedral and the Bazaar

I have been interested in the open source community for a very long time, so I’ve known about the book for a very long time. This summer I bought myself an e-reader and I finally found the time to read The Cathedral and the Bazaar (CatB).

About the book

The book is freely available in various digital formats. The language in the book is sometimes quite technical, but for someone with minor programming experience and some Unix/Linux-knowledge the book should be quite easy to read.

The main topic in the book is community-driven software development. In the book, the development of Linus Torvalds’ Linux kernel is used as an example of community-driven software development, while other projects (such as Emacs) were used as an example of projects that were open source, but the development were still restricted to the persons on the mailing lists.

Eric describes the two development styles as the Bazaar style: anarchic development where anyone can grab an interesting problem and propose a solution.

The Cathedral style of development is closed for the common people. Problems are assigned to developers in a hierarchical manner. While the end users may have access to the source code, they are not invited to contribute to development. Cathedral style development is common among businesses working on a product.

In the book, Erik describes how he observed Linus’s methods and used the same tricks when Eric took over the development of fetchmail.

Reflections

As I started this point: I’ve known about the book for a very long time. I’ve also been interested and somewhat involved in various open source project for a long time. The book didn’t bring any ground breaking revelations for me, but it gave me another perspective on open source development.

The book is written in the 90’s. I get the feeling that bazaar-style has become synonyme with open source today, but this probably wasn’t the case when the book was written. I think this somewhat historic perspective provides a valuable insight.

I also found Eric’s experiences while trying the bazaar rationale while developing fetchmail to be quite interesting, how he tried the methods he had learned from observing Torvalds.

Why do people contribute to open source?

Something I found especially interesting in the book is the philosophy behind why people want to contribute to open source. This is something I use to think about a lot.

The book doesn’t discuss this as much in-depth that I would like, but the book still brings some interesting aspects.

Personally, I like tackling difficult problems. I like to use my mind, and I like to feel intelligent. I believe that this is the main reason why I like to contribute. Contributing to open source is a way to show that you are intelligent, while not necessarily bragging.

Sure, there are lots of altruistic reasons for contributing to open source. But deep down, I believe lots of people (myself included) have a lot of egoistic motivation behind the altruistic contributions.

Conclusion

I would not recommend the book for grandma or anyone else non-technical. However, I would say that The Cathedral and the Bazaar can be viewed as general knowledge among ambitious programmers and people within the open source community, and should at least be on the to-read list of anyone within these two categories.

For me personally, the book did not any new valuable information, but for someone who has no experience of open source the book may be an important eye opener. In fact, I often recommend people doubting open source to read the book, and I will continue to do so even now that I myself has read it. ;)

I would give the book 6.5 merge requests of 10 possible.